Chasing the Bubble

A poster hanging in a coffee shop window on Smith Street promotes yet another Walt Whitman event. My friend Michael, a Whitman scholar, told me there is some kind of Whitman commemoration going on in Brooklyn every month.

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In terms of square miles, Brooklyn is New York’s second-largest borough, after Queens; in terms of population, it is first. If Brooklyn were a city, it would be the fourth most populous in the United States. If Brooklyn were a country, its chief exports would include artisanal pickles, eco-friendly yoga wear, Red Hook-made Saipua soap (responsible for every store smelling like clove geranium) and books written by men named Jonathan.

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Proteus Gowanus…in a former box factory, is the kind of place whose founder could get a MacArthur genius grant. Loosely speaking, it is a museum. Here are some of the things you will find in its labyrinthine rooms: an exhibit of neo-shaman art, ephemera having to do with morbid anatomy, a Reanimation Library that houses odd books (“Sex Lives of Animals Without Backbones,” “the Gun Digest of Exploded Fireworks Drawings”), and, every Thursday night, a meeting of the Fixers Collective, whose members will attempt to repair any broken thing you bring in…Proteus Gowanus has the best gift shop in the world. There are banned-book bracelets, orange glow-in-the-dark bicycle vests that say “UNINSURED,” and a CD of songs whose lyrics are taken from the journals of Lewis and Clark.

These excerpts are from “Borough Haul: Are you hip enough to shop in Brooklyn?” by Patricia Marx, a must read survey of the material world that is Brooklyn (The New Yorker, March 8, 2010.)

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Everyone says it was the art galleries and edgy performance places that were drawing the public. But I think it was the consumption spaces—the stores, bars, and cafes where you could look through plate-glass windows and see people living a kind of aspirational life, but in a low-key, affordable way. Brooklyn came to be understood as a place of creative consumption.

Sharon Zukin, author of Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (with a chapter called “How Brooklyn Became Cool.”

Brooklyn in 2010 has more like the ambience of Lower Manhattan (Soho, Tribeca, LES) that I found so intoxicating when I arrived in the early 1970s than any other place I know. Like a bubble under the tablecloth, the best stuff just keep moving around. But for right now, it has lodged itself southeast of Manhattan.