Jamestown Properties, the Atlanta-based global behemoth responsible for One Times Square and Chelsea Market, takes a star turn as Robert Moses 2.0 in Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg’s Emergent City, an exhaustively lensed (over a decade in the making) fly-on-the-wall look at the myriad costs and maybe benefits of urban development with an Instagram sheen.
For rather than driving out the artists to make way for the traders and tech bros (so Giuliani/Bloomberg passé), the savvy capitalists behind Sunset Park’s Industry City – New York’s largest privately owned industrial property – are actually attempting to lure them in.
Or at least market the hyper hipster IC to the “creative class” – which uncomfortably includes indie filmmakers like Anderson (My Brooklyn) and Sterrenberg, whose arts collective and production cooperative Meerkat Media is based in the neighborhood. (As is Rooftop Films. Which earlier this year sent me a press release announcing, “ROOFTOP FILMS AND BROOKFIELD PROPERTIES’ DECADE-LONG PARTNERSHIP CONTINUES AS NONPROFIT FESTIVAL RETURNS FOR MORE FREE SUMMER PRESENTATIONS IN DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN.”)
Unfortunately for the business elite, the blue collar Latino and Chinese residents that have called Sunset Park home for generations would much prefer affordable housing to “innovation” (the latest euphemism for gentrification 2.0 it seems). And they’re determined to preserve their way of life.
Indeed, one Latina recounts a newcomer asking her to turn down her music on a Saturday because it was loud. Her very Brooklyn response? “It’s NYC.”
“Civility” is another word for marginalization as well. (In fact, being “apart from,” not a “part of,” the neighborhood is even the basis of a tone-deaf sales pitch – as an IC shill describes the property as an “oasis” among a working class community.)
And then there’s the city council, stuck struggling to placate its multilingual constituency while deciphering the lost-in-translation corporate speak. When one earnest member challenges Jamestown Properties on its plans for a mall, the developer’s rep immediately corrects him. It’s actually a “9,000 square foot retail space.” To which the frustrated official replies, “What is a 9,000 square foot retail space called then?” (Another very Brooklyn response.)
But despite being at loggerheads, the stakeholders do all share a common goal: progress. They just disagree about the best way to achieve it. And whose definition of development counts.
Then, in a twist as unforeseen as the pandemic itself, the systemic upheaval of 2020, and especially the George Floyd protests, unexpectedly allows for a somewhat happy ending to occur – with the marginalized actually having a formidable say in the emergence of their own neighborhood.
That said, with former Industry City CEO Andrew Kimball (appointed by the former Brooklyn Borough President/NYC’s first indicted mayor Eric Adams) still currently the President and CEO of the NYC Economic Development Corporation, how hopeful we should be about the future of Sunset Park – and all of Gotham – remains to be seen.
Emergent City launched exclusively on Ovid TV on February 20th.