Considered one of the city's most notorious industrial slums in the
1940s and 1950s, Brownstone Brooklyn by the 1980s had become a
post-industrial landscape of hip bars, yoga studios, and beautifully
renovated, wildly expensive townhouses. In The Invention of
Brownstone Brooklyn, Suleiman Osman offers a groundbreaking
history of this unexpected transformation. Challenging the
conventional wisdom that New York City's renaissance started in the
1990s, Osman locates the origins of gentrification in Brooklyn in the
cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Gentrification began as a
grassroots movement led by young and idealistic white college
graduates searching for "authenticity" and life outside the
burgeoning suburbs. Where postwar city leaders championed slum
clearance and modern architecture, "brownstoners" (as they
called themselves) fought for a new romantic urban ideal that
celebrated historic buildings, industrial lofts and traditional
ethnic neighborhoods as a refuge from an increasingly technocratic
society. Osman examines the emergence of a "slow-growth"
progressive coalition as brownstoners joined with poorer residents to
battle city planners and local machine politicians. But as
brownstoners migrated into poorer areas, race and class tensions
emerged, and by the 1980s, as newspapers parodied yuppies and
anti-gentrification activists marched through increasingly expensive
neighborhoods, brownstoners debated whether their search for
authenticity had been a success or failure