In the early years of Brooklyn’s gentrification, a 1977 New Yorker piece by Jervis Anderson captured the process in a freeze-frame. Those he interviewed were my neighbors.
L. J. Davis, the pamphlet’s author, bought a brownstone on Dean Street in 1965. A native of Idaho, Davis moved his young family to Brooklyn after completing a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, in a cohort that included the novelist Stephen Dixon and the poet Robert Pinsky. Davis wrote four novels—published between 1968 and 1974—comedies portraying confused young men drowning in the squalor and diversity of the city.
Davis bragged to Anderson about how he’d researched the first occupant of his house: “His name was Malachi Murray, and he was a stonemason. Murray lost the house in the financial crash of 1873.” Davis’s knack for history must have gratified the other brownstoners, whose zeal for marble mantelpieces and gas-fitted street lamps needed justification.
L. J. Davis’s elder son, Jeremy, was one of my best friends during my high-school years. I spent many days and nights in their home. Their family included L.J.’s wife, a younger son, and two adopted daughters, who were Black. In the opposing camp were the brownstoners who opened their parlors to one another in yearly house tours. Proud of what they’d accomplished, they regarded the decrease in street crime and the increase in trees and property values as obvious goods, and the hippies as political dreamers. I suspect that my mother, an outspoken radical, came into direct conflict with L.J. She died before I befriended him.
The moral calculus lent righteousness to the brownstoners’ preservationist stance. Yet a tone had crept in, that of an élitist cult. The brownstoners seemed oblivious to the intimations lurking in materials such as an announcement in the “Community Forum” column of, Boerum Hill’s new local paper, advertising an insurance company’s offering.
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