It Was Different When I Moved Here in 2019, He Adds
Brooklyn Man Describes Neighbourhood as “Undiscovered” Despite Three Vice Articles and a Netflix Documentary
Read more satire at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
NEW YORK — A 31-year-old graphic designer named Theo Crane has described his Bushwick neighbourhood as “undiscovered” and “kind of a secret” to a colleague visiting from Chicago, despite the neighbourhood’s appearance in three Vice documentaries, a 2022 Netflix series about New York street art, seventeen travel guides, and a New York Times trend piece published in 2017 under the headline “Brooklyn’s Next Frontier Is Already Here.”
Crane has lived in the neighbourhood since 2019. He considers himself a local.
The Recommendation
The exchange occurred at a rooftop gathering in Williamsburg, where Crane told his Chicago colleague, Priya Mehta, that if she wanted to “see the real Brooklyn,” she should avoid the “touristy parts” — which he defined as anywhere Priya had heard of — and come to Bushwick, where she could “get a sense of what it actually feels like to live here.”
Mehta said she was “very interested” and asked for specific recommendations. Crane recommended a gallery, a coffee shop, and a bar, all three of which appear on the first page of Yelp results for “Bushwick,” have a combined Instagram following of 340,000, and are frequently named in “Brooklyn’s Hidden Gems” listicles that have run in publications including Time Out New York since at least 2018.
The Undiscovered Question
The concept of “undiscovered” Brooklyn neighbourhoods exists in a peculiar temporal loop in which each wave of arrivals experiences their neighbourhood as genuinely new before the next wave arrives and has the same experience. Sociologists at Columbia University have documented the phenomenon as “sequential authenticity,” noting that the feeling of discovery is real even when the discovery is not.
Crane acknowledges, when pressed, that he did not discover Bushwick. He moved there because a friend told him about it. That friend also described it as “undiscovered.” That friend moved to Long Island City in 2021, which he initially described as “undiscovered.”
The Rent Data
According to the StreetEasy rental market data, the median one-bedroom rent in Bushwick is currently $2,650 per month. In 2015, it was $1,800. This trajectory is consistent with what happens to neighbourhoods after they are described as “undiscovered” in Vice documentaries and subsequently discovered by several thousand people who each independently believe they are among the first.
Crane pays $2,900 for his apartment. He considers this “reasonable given the neighbourhood’s energy,” an assessment he arrived at without knowing what the energy cost in 2015.
Mehta’s Response
Mehta said she would “definitely check it out.” She also found Bushwick on Google Maps, noted the Netflix documentary thumbnail, watched fourteen minutes of it on the train back to her hotel, and sent Crane a link to a New York Magazine piece titled “How Bushwick Became Brooklyn’s Art District” published in 2016. Crane thanked her and said the piece “didn’t really capture it.” The piece captured it quite well.
New York, undiscovered daily: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Brooklyn’s full discovery history at https://prat.uk/.
The Authenticity Gradient
New York City neighbourhoods exist in a permanent state of becoming. There is no stable, authentic version of any neighbourhood that predates change, because every neighbourhood’s character at any given moment is itself the product of previous waves of change that someone, at the time, was deploring as inauthentic. The Italian neighbourhood was once the Irish neighbourhood. The Puerto Rican neighbourhood was once the Italian neighbourhood. The artsy neighbourhood is the Puerto Rican neighbourhood at a different price point. None of this is unusual in a city that has been absorbing and transforming newcomers for two centuries. What is unusual is the speed with which newcomers now arrive having already been told, via media, that they are discovering something, and the sincerity with which they believe it.
Theo Crane is not cynical. He is not performing discovery for social reasons. He genuinely experiences Bushwick as his neighbourhood, as the place he knows and belongs to, which is real regardless of the Netflix documentary. The problem is not his feeling of connection — that is legitimate — but the framing of that connection as exclusive, as a form of local knowledge that predates the Vice articles, when in fact he arrived after them and because of them, in the sense that the media coverage drove up the neighbourhood’s profile, which drove up its desirability, which is part of why his rent is $2,650 a month. Bushwick is not undiscovered. It has been discovered approximately seventeen times. Crane’s discovery is the most recent. It will not be the last.
Further Observations
It is worth pausing to consider what this situation reveals about the broader landscape of public life in this part of the world. The gap between announcement and action, between framework and outcome, between what officials say at press conferences and what happens in the streets, is not a gap that emerges from malice or incompetence alone — though both play a role — but from a structural mismatch between the speed at which problems develop, the speed at which political credit is sought, and the speed at which institutional solutions can be implemented. Announcements are fast. Press conferences are fast. Reforms are slow, unglamorous, and require sustained attention across electoral cycles, which is precisely the kind of attention that political incentives do not reliably produce. The result is a particular kind of civic theatre in which the performance of action substitutes for action often enough that the distinction becomes blurred, and in which citizens develop a sophisticated dual consciousness: they know what is happening, they say what is appropriate to say, and they adapt their actual lives to the reality rather than the announcement. This is not cynicism. It is a form of intelligence developed under conditions where the alternative — taking every press conference at face value — would be functionally disabling.
What changes this, when it changes, is rarely the quality of the plan. It is the quality of the follow-through, which depends on political will, institutional capacity, funding continuity, and the kind of incremental, unsexy progress that does not generate press conferences but does, eventually, generate outcomes. The countries and cities that have transformed themselves — that have moved from announced frameworks to actual functioning systems — have done so through this mechanism: not better plans, but better execution of ordinary plans over long enough timelines that the compounding effect of sustained effort becomes visible. The framework is not the problem. What you do with it the morning after the press conference is the problem. Manila, like many cities, is still working this out.
Also: London Prat Mastodon — https://mastodon.london/ap/users/116495249171626617/statuses/116756224244909419
SOURCE: Santa Claus