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Brooklyn Brought to You By...

After the Trolley Dodgers’ famous decampment for sunnier shores, the most famous bit of Brooklyn mythography is the one about the canny confidence man who tried to sell to a corn-fed rube the borough’s fabled bridge. These two bits of arcana form the dual basis of Brooklyn’s master narrative; we have been regally robbed, but we can still sell anything to anyone, pull the wool over any sucker’s eyes.

Lately, city fathers have been trying to right baseball’s grievous wrong by exercising this questionable virtue—to recapture both a sports team and Brooklyn’s vanished grandeur through the power of a the shrewd sales pitch. In seeking to replace the dreary railyards at Flatbush and Atlantic with a sparkling commercial nexus and basketball arena, supporters of Bruce Ratner’s real estate boondogle have trumpeted it along economic and aesthetic lines. But the real power of Ratner’s plans lie in their metaphysical mojo, their ability to change the way the rest of the nation thinks about Brooklyn.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has made no secret that he sees the Nets plan as a way to sell Brooklyn to the world. In a speech before the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce last year, he painted a sports team as the best form of advertising a city could buy. "People will look at the sports page every day, and they will see Brooklyn," he told the crowd of appreciative entrepreneurs. When Bloomberg and other city officials look at the ambitious blueprint for the Atlantic Yards, they don’t primarily see increased tax revenues, urban renewal, or the reestablishment of civic pride; they see a golden opportunity for free advertising, a chance to build a Brooklyn "brand."

 

The question remains just what sort of Brooklyn the Nets will be selling to the public. While efforts to create a brand for the borough are scattered and unorganized, some pieces of the finished product have emerged in past months. No longer a quaint mix of brownstones and low-rise ethnic enclaves, as captured in so many 70s sitcoms and Spike Lee movies, the new Brooklyn will be a glossy, user-friendly destination for shoppers, culture-lovers and fun-seekers. As the Conde Nast Traveler web site recently put it: "[T]he ‘new’ Brooklyn is all about food, style and class."

Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz has crowned himself the papal figure in the crusade to give the borough’s antiquated image a little modern razzmatazz. Besides pumping enthusiastically for the Atlantic Yards and any other large-scale development, the beep has also publicly mulled over choices for an official Brooklyn catch phrase, staged a star-studded movie premier at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, created a popular restaurant week, and founded a literature council.

But branding a sprawling, maddeningly heterogeneous collection of cultures, people and neighborhoods can prove nettlesome. Chief among the problems is the necessarily reductive nature of branding; in order to appeal to the most people, marketers must seek the lowest common denominator. And when the target market is a Middle America rife with vacation time and excess cash, quite a bit can be left out of the equation. Signs of this can be seen in Markowitz’s failed attempt to put a sign reading, "Leaving Brooklyn: Oy Vey!" over the Manhattan-bound lanes of the Williamsburg Bridge. The NYC Department of Transportation rejected the sign because it was "distracting," but it’s also likely that the sign was just too ethnic, confusing to the Caucasian crowds on holiday. Similar signs reading "Fuhgeddabhout It!", however, remain (perhaps the Jews just need their own version of the Sopranos).

Meanwhile, the Nets themselves may be a vehicle in the "blanding" of Brooklyn as well. The promotion-minded owner of the team recently sold a "presenting sponsorship" to tax accounting firm Jackson-Hewitt, as previously noted in this blog. Now the Garden State hoopsters will be known as the New Jersey Nets presented by Jackson-Hewitt. A representative of the team said that there has been no decision made regarding whether the sponsorship will move to Brooklyn if the Nets do as well, though he did say that it was "a multi-year deal." In other words, there’s a good chance that Brooklyn’s name will become a masthead for a whitebread corporation during basketball season.

And the titans of industry and commerce may be calling the shots when it comes to other aspects of the nascent Brooklyn brand. At a forum moderated by the urban planning group the Center For an Urban Future last week, Joan Bartolomeo, the president of the Brooklyn Economic Development Corporation, and a member of Markowitz’s recently formed Initiative for a Competitive Brooklyn, said that the group was in the process of forming "a very comprehensive task force" that would market the borough as a tourist hotspot and regional center. According to Barolomeo, most of the funding for such an agency would come from the private sector, "because there hasn’t been enough attention paid by the city [government]." How beholden would such an agency be to its sponsors? Will the advertised tourist attractions of Brooklyn be organic, multicultural touchstones, or sanitized, carefully controlled corporate pleasure domes? In the new global era, Brooklyn could be less about Spike Lee and more about Disney.

Increasingly, the many ethnic groups and working class residents that don’t fit the emerging Brooklyn brand are not only ignored, but pushed out. Part of the blame falls on a central component of the Brooklyn brand, the arts. While the influx of artists that made Williamsburg profitable was organic and unexpected, in Fort Greene the city is taking an active role, drawing up a Lincoln-Center-like cultural district around the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). This is not to say that the mayor and his ilk are sticking their heads in the sand entirely. At the unveiling of plans for a new Shakespearean theater in the district, Bloomberg happily noted that property values in the area had doubled in three years, while somberly adding that this trend "created problems of affordable housing." His solution? "We have to build lots more of it."

But as anyone who’s followed the Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning brouhaha knows, building even a small amount of affordable housing is more easily said than done. Forget the difficulties of convincing a developer to volunteer to make less money; do you think tourists will cotton to the prospect of walking by a dense, low-income housing development on the way to a nice dinner?
Nobody will buy that.