Feature

Boom Borough

Two days later, the couple had bid on a huge three-bedroom in Prospect Heights, an emergent, tree-lined neighborhood across Prospect Park from Park Slope. She estimates they got twice the apartment for about half the price.

In Williamsburg, it's the East Village paradigm all over again. Rents for tenement apartments have shot from $600 toward $1,500 in the past five years. It's no secret who's bidding them up. "I was at a café on Berry Street a few weekends ago, and it was unreal," says one writer who lived out the eighties on Avenue B. "At every table, it was the exact same crowd I used to live with ten years ago. It's like they've all been transplanted out to Williamsburg."

Add these increases in the most "Manhattan" parts of the borough to the impressive gains made by the more "Brooklyn" neighborhoods beyond the Park -- Little Odessa in Brighton Beach, the burgeoning Hasidic enclave of Borough Park -- and you've got a genuine boom.

"Our applications were up 20 percent last year alone," says Mary Russotti, director of admissions for Saint Ann's in Brooklyn Heights and a twenty-year Park Slope resident. "There are more Manhattan types in Brooklyn now, more obvious money. Of course, there was always lots of money in Brooklyn Heights. But in Park Slope twenty years ago, very few people sent their children to private school. But I just admitted two new kids from my block alone."

Gentrification, of course, is never a seamless process, as the recent murder of Kansas-bred Amy Watkins in Prospect Heights may show. Traffic and density concerns are everywhere, nimbyism epidemic. This sudden tsunami of commercialism, moreover, seems obscene to the NPR types who tried to establish their own private Berkeleys in Brooklyn during the Nixon years. Besides, immigrant janitors in Williamsburg could do without the $1,500 rents.

Regardless, Brooklyn's creeping Manhattanization has its limits. There's still no Dean & DeLuca in Greenpoint, no Prada boutique alongside the Park Slope Food Co-op on Union Street. Joe Gurrera, for his part, has no plans to bring his bourgy Upper West Side fish market Citarella to the Nova-nibblers waiting patiently across the river. "It's nice out there," he says. "But that idea is probably ten years ahead of its time."

Then again, who needs them? Roam the streets of an emergent neighborhood like Carroll Gardens: The energy is undeniable. It's out on the burgeoning boutique row of Smith Street in Carroll Gardens where you find the funky bustle that characterized the West Village in the sixties.

"For the first time in 100 years, Brooklyn has become a meeting ground for the exchange of cultural goods," says Sharon Zukin, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College. "Young chefs who don't have much capital, who maybe can't dream of opening a restaurant in Manhattan, can still do it in Brooklyn, and they've already got the affluent customers there to make it work."

Bring back Pete Hamill and Spike Lee now, and we just might have a quorum.