The birth of postmodern New York: Gentrification, postindustrialization and race in South Brooklyn, 1950--1980

Whether referred to as "gentrification," "urban revitalization," "embourgoisement," or "back-to-the-city movement," the influx of white collar professionals into low-income central city areas has been an important demographic trend which challenges a unidirectional narrative of postwar urban decline. While most historians have focused solely on the outward flows of white flight and suburbanization, white middle-class "brownstoners" (as they called themselves) from 1950-1980 poured enthusiastically into postwar South Brooklyn. Overlooked by scholars as a force in city politics, these college educated urbanites in the years after World War II directed public policy, developed a new language about race relations, and thoroughly shaped American discourse about cities. They articulated a new pro-urban ideology---a contrast to the "suburban ideal"---which celebrated historic architecture, diversity, close living, and envisioned the central city as a site of cultural consumption for an educated middle class. They organized new Reform Democratic parties and block associations, eventually ousting local machine politicians and clashing with longtime local residents. They fought against urban renewal, using their financial and political clout to promote neighborhood conservation. Whereas earlier middle class reformers fought to centralize city government in the hands of a scientific, impartial, city-manager, "brownstoners" championed the decentralization of municipal power, replacing the ideal of a regional, integrated city-system with a "diverse mosaic" of local participatory democracies. The social movements of the postwar period---with their cry for historic preservation, community planning boards, reform politics, 'participatory democracy', and 'democracy in the streets'---were urban movements, emerging from the interaction of a new urban white-collar class with the people, buildings, and institutions of the central city. The New Left, the counterculture, and the student movement all emerged on an "urban frontier"---an imagined middle landscape between the institutional space of the central business district and the untamed "wilderness" of the urban ghetto. Although both liberal and pro-urban, the new middle class often came into conflict with poorer residents. This dissertation describes the race and class tensions in gentrifying neighborhoods throughout the postwar period, exploring an aspect of postwar race relations previously overlooked by historians.