And now, for something completely different

DONE!

So I e-mailed my eight-page take home final exam for urban political processes Tuesday afternoon, and with that, I am officially done for the year. I still have three more classes to take to earn a masters in urban studies, but for now, I'm taking a break for the summer.

Oh, and the thesis? Also, DONE. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I haven't actually submitted it to the GSAS yet, because they don't want it until I've fulfilled all my class credits, but I'm working to get that changed.

Quite frankly, I'm ready to push this sucker out the door to a publisher or turn it into a web site if no one will have it. Quite happy with it too, although I have a confession to make. It was only after I'd already uploaded all 155 pages of it to Google Drive with the intention of sharing it with the world that I realized I hadn't done a full spell check of the damn thing. Ha, yeah....

Anyway, I'm going to print it all out this week on special acid free paper, slap the forms with my advisor's signatures on the top, bind it all up in a regulation Fordham dissertation folder and start shopping it around. I've got interviews in there from 2010, so I'm damn well not gonna wait any longer!

As for the summer, I've got a lot of ideas for the blog that I've been sitting on while the aforementioned urban political processes kept me busy. This, by the way, was hands down one of the better classes I've taken, and I'm not ashamed to say I worked my ass off for it. So much so that I'm going to share my 22 page final paper with y'all, via the next four or five posts.

It's not graffiti related, because  I'd already written quite a bit about graffiti when I started the class, and I wanted to explore something different. It's public housing in my neighborhood, so if that's not your bag, you might want to bail. I hope you don't.

Cheers!
PV

P.S. Since I have no idea how to embed citations, I've simply linked to my sources whenever possible. If anyone knows of a better way to do this, I'm all ears.

Gowanus Houses and Wyckoff Gardens: Neighborhood Anchors

Introduction

Boerum Hill is a small neighborhood in Brooklyn, a mere eight by six blocks long, at .27 square miles. But unlike nearby neighborhoods like Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights, it is home to not one but two public housing complexes—the Gowanus Houses and the Wyckoff Gardens.

This paper will argue that these two developments, which were built at different times and in different styles, are representative of what Nicholas Bloom calls the New York City Housing Authority’s management of 2,600 buildings, including almost all extant high rise public housing in the United States, a “smashing success.”  In particular, I will show that in spite of occasional bad publicity, the developments have little negative impact on the Boerum Hill neighborhood.

The Neighborhood

Although the area of Brooklyn currently known as Boerum Hill was inhabited as long ago as the 1800’s by Dutch Farmers, in the 1950’s, it did not exist in its current form as an identifiable neighborhood, in contrast nearby Brooklyn Heights.

Bucckler's House

That change came about thanks to the efforts of Helen Buckler, a writer and publicist from Greenwich Village who in 1962 purchased for $18,000 a four-story brownstone building at 238 Dean Street. Although it was advertised as being in the “Borough Hall” section of Brooklyn, at the time the area was known as simply “North Gowanus,” taking its name, like the Gowanus Houses, from the 1.8 mile Gowanus Canal to the south.

Eager to find a name to replace the stigmatized North Gowanus, Buckler enlisted the help of the curator of the Long Island Historical Society. While examining 18th century maps of the area, they discovered Simon Boerum, a local farmer and politician who served as Clerk of Kings County from 1750 to 1775.

He was present at the March 1764 Assembly meeting where a resolution opposing British imposed sugar and stamp taxes was passed, and a relative, William Boerum, served in the Brooklyn Light Horse regiment during the Revolutionary War.

“The members of the new Boerum Hill Association (BHA) lobbied local newspapers and real estate brokers to use the name to attract new residents to the “reawakening” neighborhood. While some new arrivals took to calling the area Brooklyn Heights East, when an article about Boerum Hill appeared in the World-Telegram and Sun in 1964, the latter name stuck.”

The neighborhood has more than fully rebounded in the days since Buckler moved in; for perspective on housing prices, a four-story brick house one block away from Buckler’s house on Dean Street was put on the market in February 2013 for $4.2 million.

And yet, a few blocks away, there are the Gowanus Houses and the Wyckoff Gardens, looking tidy but tired.

Next: The history and design differences between the two developments...