Feb. 23 issue - Manhattan is dead. Long live Brooklyn!
Any doubts about the ascendancy of New York's long-suffering younger sister have
just been dispelled on—of all places—the popular sitcom "Sex and the City."
Miranda, one of the Manhattan-centric characters on TV's most Manhattan-centric
show, has actually moved to that dread outer borough to the east.
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Yep. Sold her tiny Manhattan
pad and bought a whole brownstone—"over there." That Miranda is a fictional
character should in no way undercut the significance of this New York minute. In
America, all cultural revolutions—from Bill Cosby revealing the existence of an
educated black middle class to Ellen DeGeneres leaping from the closet—are
ushered in not by social commentators in prestigious journals but by TV
scriptwriters.
Miranda's move across the East River is just such a
watershed moment. The only question is, what took her so long? Brooklyn was
itself a thriving city when it merged with Manhattan in an ill-advised show of
civic unity in 1898. From then on, its independent spirit was subsumed by
Manhattan's swelling ego. Indeed, the goal of any ambitious Brooklynite—from
Barbra Streisand to the fictional Tony Manero of "Saturday Night Fever"—has long
been to move to Manhattan, find success and never go back.
I thought it a fair stereotype when I moved to Manhattan,
naturally, as an ambitious young reporter more than a decade ago. People who
lived in Brooklyn were mocked as "bridge and tunnel," a clueless crowd who
commuted into "the city" by day and returned to boring lives each night. Yet
even then, there were signs of Brooklyn's resurgence—and Manhattan's
comeuppance. Compared with Brooklyn, apartments were smaller and more expensive.
And Manhattan was getting so generic. The Gap and Starbucks opened in the once
edgy East Village! Hell's Kitchen changed its name to the more prosperous
Clinton! A Disney toy store opened in grungy Times Square! Manhattan was turning
into a shopping mall for tourists, rather than a real city. So one day I moved
to the only one left: Brooklyn.
I didn't know it at the time, but I was starting a trend.
According to Census figures, more people now move from Manhattan to Brooklyn
than vice versa—many of them New York's best and brightest. "Brooklyn is the
Left Bank of New York City," says Harvey Lichtenstein, former president of the
avant-garde Brooklyn Academy of Music. When Lichtenstein took over BAM in the
late 1960s, Manhattanites couldn't be bothered to stay on the subway for two
extra stops and take in a show. Now the innovative BAM is thriving because its
counterparts in Manhattan—Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Broadway—are serving up
the same old, same old.
Every day I hear of another small arts group that has
abandoned Manhattan because, with its high rents and out-of-touch millionaires,
it's no longer fertile ground for the arts. How could it be, if all the artists
are living in Brooklyn?
Clearly, I'm not the only Brooklynite who has no need for
soulless Gaphattan. After that "Sex and the City" episode, I logged on to the
show's official chat room to see if other people also thought it took Miranda
too long to realize what we've known all along. The unscientific results were
clear: Brooklyn rules! "And," added a woman identified only as "Murphykat,"
"Brooklyn guys are way cooler than Manhattan guys!"
Well, I knew that, too.
Kuntzman is Brooklyn bureau chief for the New York
Post.
