Kay Hymowitz is the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and probably best known for her work on family and gender issues such as the book Manning Up. But she does a lot more than that, including some great writing on her home borough of Brooklyn.
The current issue of City Journal has a great piece by her called “Made in Brooklyn, Again” that is a look at the manufacturing renaissance ongoing at the former Brooklyn Navy Yard. Here’s an excerpt:
The Yard is now home to 330 small to medium-size manufacturing firms employing 7,000 workers—double the total of 15 years ago. Many of the companies are traditional or “analog” in their approach, but firms emerging out of the local north Brooklyn design, crafts, and tech scene—or the “maker movement,” as it’s sometimes known—come to the Yard every day looking for vacancies that don’t exist. Local officials have their fingers crossed that the Yard’s rise from its smokestack ashes will reverse decades of manufacturing decline and make a real impact on the persistent joblessness that troubles nearby, mostly minority, parts of Brooklyn. But in part for reasons related to that 5 Axis router—as well as to New York’s costly regulatory climate—they should be careful not to hope for too much.
There’s more where this came from. Last spring she wrote a piece about the largely Fujianese immigrant community in Sunset Park called “Brooklyn’s Chinese Pioneers.” Everybody first thinks of Flushing, Queens when they think about the Chinese in New York. But Sunset Park is home to an even bigger Chinese community. This one is poorer than Flushing’s, and made up of many people from Fujian, a linguistically diverse and largely non-Mandarin speaking province in China. An excerpt:
What started with a few hundred Fujianese pioneers a few decades ago is now New York City’s most populous Chinatown—considerably larger than Manhattan’s and bigger even than Flushing’s. Sunset Park bustles with Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants and stores selling dried shrimp and scallops and a staggering variety of gnarly ginseng roots, medicinal herbs, oils, and powders. One rarely sees a non-Asian face there. Though official city numbers are considerably lower, Paul Mak, president of the Brooklyn Chinese American Association, estimates that Sunset Park and adjoining sections of Bay Ridge and Borough Park are home to at least 150,000 Chinese.
For all their gumption, the Fujianese don’t entirely conform to the model-minority image. Take, for instance, the way they come to the United States. Long-term visas are nearly impossible to get, at least for those without family already here. Among New York immigrant groups, the Chinese apply for the most asylum visas, many based on trumped-up complaints. Other Fujianese turn to smugglers, or “snakeheads,” to create fake papers and guide them through a nightmare journey that often involves dangerous weeks in the airless holds of barely seaworthy ships, long stretches in safe houses in Thailand or Guatemala, or treks across the Mexican desert. The grueling adventures can cost them $50,000 or more. (Patrick Radden Keefe’s 2010 book, The Snakehead, offers a powerful depiction of the multibillion-dollar Chinatown-based smuggling business.) A large number of Fujianese who come to New York these days do so through Canada, using the passports of relatives; they rely on border guards not being adept at distinguishing Chinese faces. There’s no precise number of the undocumented Fujianese who’ve arrived in New York City since the early eighties, but estimates run as high as half a million. Kenneth Guest, an associate professor of anthropology at Baruch College, says that as many as half the Fujianese in the city are here illegally.
In 2013 Kay took a look at “Bed-Stuy’s (Unfinished) Revival.” She observes:
Of all the changes that I’ve witnessed in Brooklyn since settling there 30 years ago, none has surprised me more than the blossoming reputation of Bedford-Stuyvesant, now the fastest-growing neighborhood in New York’s fastest-growing borough. For decades, Bed-Stuy’s nickname, “Do or Die,” perfectly captured the spirit of the place: it was a neighborhood of entrenched black poverty, mean streets, meaner housing projects, and a homicide rate that had reporters using war metaphors. Nowadays, Bed-Stuy has become the latest destination for young professionals and creative-class whites on the prowl for brownstones, tree-lined streets, and express subway lines to Manhattan. Artisanal coffee, prenatal yoga classes, and Danny Meyer–inspired restaurants (one, called Do or Dine, serves foie-gras doughnuts) have followed close behind.
And in 2011 she took a checkpoint on the Brooklynization of Brooklyn in “How Brooklyn Got Its Groove Back.” An excerpt:
Unlike their predecessors, however, these grads are not only artsy; they’re tech-savvy and entrepreneurial. Don’t confuse them with the earlier artists and bohemians who daringly smoked pot at Brooklyn Heights parties. These are beneficiaries of a technology-fueled design economy, people who have been able to harness their creativity to digital media. In a 2005 report, the Center for an Urban Future estimated that 22,000 “creative freelancers”—writers, artists, architects, producers, and interior, industrial, and graphic designers—lived in Brooklyn, an increase of more than 33 percent since 2000. The Brooklyn Economic Development Corporation has dubbed the area from Red Hook to Greenpoint the “Creative Crescent.”
The new gentrifiers have also, surprisingly, re-created Brooklyn’s identity as an industrial center, locating commercial kitchens, artists’ lofts, and crafts studios in retrofitted factories in Sunset Park, Gowanus, and downtown Brooklyn. If they have to commute to work, they want to ride their bicycles, which is easier to do if you don’t have to cross the East River. (Brooklyn may be one of the only places in the world that occasionally offers valet bike parking.) Many have started their own boutique firms. In its report, the Center for an Urban Future also noted that “freelance businesses have been a faster growing part of the Brooklyn economy than employer-based businesses.”
from The Urbanophile
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