Mid-Process

That’s the view from North 12th Street and Kent Avenue in Brooklyn, looking west to Manhattan. You can see the Empire State Building (middle) the Met Life tower (left) and 432 Park Avenue (right) sticking up out of the skyline across the river. The two foreground buildings and the tanks are remnants of the industry that was here not very long ago; the new park and the apartment house at the far right are the present and future of gentrification.

To see what’s coming, look south along Kent Avenue:

The brick building just past the park is a repurposed industrial building. Everything else you see is a new apartment house.

Of all the possible forms of gentrification, this is probably the least harmful. Kent Avenue was a purely industrial street and Wythe Avenue one block further inland was much the same. When I first started visiting that area for work, twenty years ago, there were already a lot of vacant or underused buildings. The assets that made this a prime area for industry in the nineteenth century – access to the docks, close proximity to the business district in Manhattan, easy commutes via trolley and elevated – were no longer assets, and the heavy industries had long ago moved away. One Kent Avenue building that I looked at in the 90s was a warehouse for unused tee shirts to be either shredded or shipped overseas as emergency clothing aid. So the loss to the US industrial base is small and there were no residents here to be displaced.

That said…diverse land uses are good for a city. The solution to every empty lot isn’t a condo tower, or rather it shouldn’t be one. We preserve old housing for new residential use, so maybe we should be preserving old factories for new industrial use. We live in a non-virtual world full of physical objects, and surely someone could think of something tangible to make in a factory.