The Manhattanization of Brooklyn: A Walking Tour

Description

We will meet at Hungry Ghost Cafe, at 647 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, inside the BRIC Arts Media House
Walking and Talking begins at 11am
This is a walking tour to benefit The Marxist Education Project. Please contribute what you can.

Most New Yorkers have little idea how planned their city is. The upscaling of Brooklyn has been on planners’ drawing boards for decades, and over the last decade, their dreams have been coming true. High rises downtown and the gentrication of Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, and into Bed-Stuy. Doug Henwood leads a Bob Fitch-inspired walking tour hitting all the hotspots and explaining the strategy behind the transformation, and how it fits in with the scheming since the first regional plan of 1929.

Doug Henwood is editor of Left Business Observer, host of Behind the News, and author of Wall Street. He is working on a study of the American ruling class as a rotting social formation.

“The landscape of the city-the propinquity of skyscrapers and slums, of the very rich and the very poor-reflected the kind of hollowed-out society that a FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate)-dominated economy created. Neighborhoods that once housed factories and their workers were either emptied out or gentrified. If you were employed in the FIRE sector, you could do very nicely. If you were employed in one of the elite service industries—advertising, consulting, and the like—that populated those skyscrapers, you could do pretty nicely. Not as nicely as a bond trader or a dealmaker, for sure—but a lot better than the messengers, busboys, and bootblacks that did the scut work for the service aristocracy.”
—From Doug’s tribute to Bob Fitch