Brooktopia: A native's reflections (Pt. 1)

It’s sometimes hard to believe that this place is Brooklyn. Either Brooklyn you look at, there’s the “old” Brooklyn, known for it’s tough-and-rumble Irish, Italian, and Puerto Rican hoods, it’s stretched out vowels and softened th’s like a guy woikin’ at de docks. The Brooklyn of stoops, the Brooklyn of fire escape summers.
Then there’s the new Brooklyn. Hair salons replacing the last of the red-stripe pole barbers, of Yoga studios with pastel-bright signs out front. The Brownstones of Park Slope and the Warehouse art studios of Greenpoint, evocative of a SoHo movement 30’s years before. The Brooklyn of performance art houses, referred to sometimes (with more tongue in cheek then the back room an Eight-grade graduation dance) as Off-off-off-Broadway.
“The kids these days, all the kids come to Brooklyn!” That’s what I tell my tourists while forcing myself through the same rehearsed jokes and stories leading the bland masses of the world around Manhattan on a double-decker bus. The bohemian movement, it just kept heading further East. Chased by rents rising against them like a tidal wave, washing them from Grenwhich Village through the East Village, to the Lower East Side, it eventually had to wash them right over the river, and the steel piers and wooden walkways of the Williamsburg Bridge were all to inviting.
I keep referring myself to the old Tom Wolfe quote: Oly the dead know Brooklyn. Cause it’d take a guy a lifetime just to get around the fuckin’ place. But then, I guess nobody told that to all the bicyclists with the heavy-duty hardware chains wrapped around waist, huffing away down Flatbush avenue, feeling like they were just dropped headfirst into a gladiatorial death race, or gunning across easily navigable streets of Fifth Avenue. See, this is the Brooklyn of newbies. transplants, pilgrims. It’s the second question. Hey, what’s your name? Mhmm. Where’re you from? And when I tell folks I was born and raised here, I have to whether the raised eyebrow, and reconfirmation: Really? You’re a native?
Of course, I don’t smack of Old Brooklyn. No blunt accent, no curt and direct blue-collar-charm often accompanied by a snug fit T-shirt and heavy handed gesturing. Even the Jewish stereotypes to go hand in hand with the heritage don’t fit to suit. Well, maybe a little. As these letters hit the screen, I’m sitting on a wide wooden porch with a collection of trees and shrubs around me, in the uncharted strip of wild-life that connects my front and backyard. I look around and see three-story homes of triangular roofing and driveway space to stretch. The families come in every shade and structure the planet Earth has to offer. It’s my own personal Brooktopia, a subway-access countryside, with bodega-access a block and a half in any direction. Whenever I take a look at the chubby, pear-shaped map and pinpoint my home of 23 years, I can’t help but feel that we’re the Solar Plexus of this Boro, just a stone’s through away from the Life-pumping Prospect Heart. So why do I so often feel like an outsider? Safely buffered on any direction from the Brooklyn that the Times, Time Out, The L Magazine and a hundred-thousand zines and free-press keep ranting and raving about?
I accuse Park geography. Draw a line West from Park Circle, and one NorthEast from the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, and you get the dividing line, even the subway system seems to discourage the networking of North and South Brooklyn, needing to bypass through THE ISLAND just to get from one to the other, unless you’re willing to dare the Prospect Park Shuttle-shuffle. And the G train was conspicuously excluded from the great Atlantic/Pacific subway gathering, though it’s station just a few blocks away. Robert Moses’ unearthing of neighborhoods, welcoming in noise and exhaust fumes galore didn’t help either. I keep wondering what would have become of this mighty land if the great tri-boro Authority had been a cycling enthusiast.