¯\_(ツ)_/¯: A Year in Absurd Brooklyn Stories
THIS IS NOT MY BEAUTIFUL HOUSE
New York Times food critic Ligaya Mishan was doing what any writer does: searching for the right word. In a review of the Houdini Kitchen Laboratory, Mishan sought to describe for her readers the “desolate” locale of the pizzeria, a liminal zone that’s not quite Bushwick, not yet Ridgewood. She got creative: “Welcome to Quooklyn,” she wrote. With that, ad-hoc real estate neologisms reached their nadir.
To be fair, Mishan did put the sentence in parentheses, perhaps indicating that the absurdity of the term was not lost on her. The developers of Colony 1209, a new luxury development, evinced even less self-awareness. Colony 1209 is located on Dekalb Avenue, in Bushwick, or what the building’s website calls “Brooklyn’s new frontier”—”bohemian Bushwick, a vibrant industrial setting reimagined through artful eyes.”
The rhetoric of Colony 1209’s sales pitch reimagines Bushwick as a blank space, mollifying concerns about gentrification and co-optation. Its literature reads more like a “Go West, Young Man” brochure, or a leaflet about life on the Moon. And what will intrepid financiers renters discover there? Amenities like an art gallery space, ping pong tables, lucite chairs, “graffiti,” wheat paper posters, and the welcoming company of “a group of like-minded settlers, mixing the customs of their original homeland with those of one of NYC’s most historic neighborhoods to create art, community, and a new lifestyle.”
Remember when Spike Lee said “you can’t just come in the neighborhood and start bogarting and say, like, you’re motherfuckin’ Columbus and kill off the Native Americans”? Yeah. That was this year, too. Completely related is the news, earlier this month, that Brooklyn is now the least affordable housing market in the country.
Happy holidays, everyone. Stay woke, try to avoid getting thwacked in the face by a rogue mistletoe drone, and gird yourself for 2015. Who even knows what we’ll be calling this place by this point next year?
Follow Phillip Pantuso on Twitter @phillippantuso.