Overview

"Considered one of the city's most notorious industrial slums in the 1940s and 1950s, Brownstone Brooklyn by the 1980s had become a post-industrial landscape of hip bars, yoga studios, and beautifully renovated, wildly expensive townhouses. In The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, Suleiman Osman offers a groundbreaking history of this unexpected transformation. Challenging the conventional wisdom that New York City's renaissance started in the 1990s, Osman locates the origins of gentrification in Brooklyn in the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Gentrification began as a grassroots movement led by young and idealistic white college graduates searching for ""authenticity"" and life outside the burgeoning suburbs. Where postwar city leaders championed slum clearance and modern architecture, ""brownstoners"" (as they called themselves) fought for a new romantic urban ideal that celebrated historic buildings, industrial lofts and traditional ethnic neighborhoods as a refuge from an increasingly technocratic society. Osman examines the emergence of a ""slow-growth"" progressive coalition as brownstoners joined with poorer residents to battle city planners and local machine politicians. But as brownstoners migrated into poorer areas, race and class tensions emerged, and by the 1980s, as newspapers parodied yuppies and anti-gentrification activists marched through increasingly expensive neighborhoods, brownstoners debated whether their search for authenticity had been a success or failure."

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9780195387315

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<br> [Osman] has written what may well be the most important current book on New York. <br>--New York Post<br><p><br> Insightful...An exceptionally well-researched book that will retain validity for years to come. -- Library Journal<p><br> [An] absorbing study. <br>--New Yorker<p><br> An impressive new book a rich and refreshingly ambivalent account of how a new urban ideal - one riddled with contradictions - emerged in Brooklyn between the end of World War II and the late 1970s.The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, is a first-rate work of history, especially for a debut effort by a young scholar. Osman impresses with sweeping ruminations on the meanings of modernism and what he dubs the literature of gentrification while also remaining grounded in nuts-and-bolts archival research. <br>--Bookforum<br><p><br> A brilliant study of an American 'pro urban ideal, ' which opened up just after World War II, when it seemed all America was rejecting cities and their values. Suleiman Osman

An expansive cultural history... leaves the reader deeply informed. Robert A. Beauregard, Times Literary Supplement

An expansive cultural history... leaves the reader deeply informed. Robert A. Beauregard, Times Literary Supplement [Osman] has told the story with great insight and drama through an eclectic and well-selected set of historical sources and a felicitous writerly prose. Robert Self, American Historical Review

Author Information

Suleiman Osman is Assistant Professor of American Studies at George Washington University. He grew up in Brooklyn's Park Slope and now lives in Washington, D.C.

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