Manhattan’s Chinatown or the nearly vanished Little Italy). Brooklyn’s more recent immigrants—from the Caribbean, Middle East, and former Soviet Union—had brought cultural color to many of the borough’s streets with native restaurants, festivals, and specialty groceries. In this upscale Brooklyn area, however, the overriding heritage appeared to be that of my own Village neighborhood: Transplanted Yuppie-Hipster (“Yupster” was the current pop-sociological term, Young Urban Professional Hipster). In fact, the area had so many relocated writers, editors, academics, and lawyers, Mike Quinn once joked to me that he’d blinked one day and realized Manhattan’s Upper West Side had teleported half its residents to his borough.
The red light changed to green, and we moved forward. We were now crossing Seventh Avenue, the main shopping area for the North Slope (the northern end of Park Slope), which boasted the sort of bistros, restaurants, and boutiques typically seen in Manhattan’s trendier neighborhoods.
“We’re still close to the city,” I mentioned for Madame, “certainly less than thirty minutes from the Manhattan crossings.”
“Well, you know what they say these days about real estate,” Madame noted, “anything within a half-hour commute to Manhattan, is Manhattan. I have an acquaintance in Brooklyn Heights, near the promenade—she tells me her brownstone’s been valued as high as a Chelsea townhouse.”
Brownstone . . . my memory kicked in, and I suddenly knew why Union Street sounded so familiar. It was Mike Quinn’s old street address. I’d never visited him in Brooklyn, but one slow afternoon while I was doing schedules in my office, I took a break and regressed into teenage crush mode to find his home by satellite on the Web.
I knew he was melancholy over selling the place, which wasn’t here in Park Slope, but two neighborhoods over in Carroll Gardens. Since his wife wanted the divorce, and they jointly owned the property, he was stuck. Apparently, the building was worth so much now (easily five times the value of their original purchase price fifteen years before), he couldn’t afford to buy her out, but the good news was that he’d be getting a nice chunk of change from his share of the sale.
“Union is definitely a cross street,” I told Madame, thinking back to that Web satellite map I’d consulted. “I’m sure we’re heading West.”
“Toward the East River?”
“Yes.”
The black SUV was still rolling forward, right behind Ellie’s Town Car. And I followed them for a few more minutes. We were now leaving the restored brownstones of Park Slope and entering the far less upscale neighborhood of Gowanus.
Madame pursed her lips as she took in the blighted area of rundown clapboard row houses tucked between dead factories and a network of abandoned shipyard waterways.
“Are those canals?” she said, gawking down one of the channels of water as we crossed the narrow Union Street bridge.
“You’re kidding? You’ve never heard of the Gowanus canal debate?”
“Oh, yes, I’ve heard about that, but I didn’t realize they were actually canals . . .”
Gowanus, with its maze of narrow waterways, once served as a working extension of the nearby shipyard. When the ports shut down, the heavy industry left, and this neighborhood of factories and warehouses became an urban eyesore. Then artists started moving in, taking over and transforming the large spaces. A former soap factory, for instance, had been converted into a site for a community arts organization.
In more recent years, the area was “upzoned” to allow for the construction of residential buildings. Now two new towers were standing, overlooking the once stinky canals (which had since been cleaned up). A Whole Foods store was about to open, and major developers were buzzing about turning the entire area into a “Little Venice,” complete with the sort of Yupster restaurants and upscale rents we’d just left behind in the North Slope.
The debate right now was with residents who saw themselves being priced out of their homes. It was the same old song that had been sung so many times on Manhattan Island. Low rent immigrant and industrial areas, plagued with cracked sidewalks, graffiti, and crime, became havens for struggling artists who turned them trendy, making them gold mines for developers, who boosted rents, squeezing longtime residents and poor artists out.
“Uh-oh,” I mumbled.
“What?” Madame asked.
“This is the neighborhood where Matt’s renting a warehouse. Do you think Ellie’s on her way there for some reason?”
“For what reason?”
“I don’t know . . . Matt’s storing Ric’s decaffeinated green beans right now. They’re extremely valuable, and I have to tell you, at the moment, I don’t trust Ellie .