My Brooklyn, Not Yours
Brooklyn nostalgia has done more than sell hot dogs and baseball memorabilia.
Every time I go back to Brownsville it is as if I had never been away. From the moment I step off the train at Rockaway Avenue and smell the leak out of the men’s room, then the pickles from the stand just below the subway steps, an instant rage comes over me, mixed with dread and some unexpected tenderness.
So wrote literary critic Alfred Kazin at the start of A Walker in the City, his 1951 account of his return to his old neighborhood.
To the contemporary ear, the tenderness is not unexpected. From Kazin’s pickles to officially sanctioned nostalgia for the Dodgers and Coney Island; from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith’s chronicle of life among Williamsburg’s immigrants in the early twentieth century, to Crooklyn, Spike Lee’s love letter to 1970s Bed-Stuy, and Jonathan Lethem’s immensely popular The Fortress of Solitude, nostalgia has played an outsized role in the way Brooklyn has been depicted, thought about, written about, and talked about. Brooklyn nostalgia has long had a high kitsch factor, as Woody Allen acknowledged two generations ago in Annie Hall when he gave Alvy Singer a more-Brooklyn-than-Brooklyn upbringing: he didn’t just go to Coney Island every summer, he lived there, and he didn’t just live there, he lived under the Cyclone.
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