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City Point’s new slogan begs the question: What does it mean to be ‘Brooklyn born?’

Photo by Tim Donnelly/Brokelyn.
Photo by Tim Donnelly/Brokelyn.

The problem of “transplants” is a major gripe for Brooklyn natives, or anyone who thinks they’ve lived here long enough to earn the chance to sneer at the latest batch of college graduates who just hatched in Bushwick. New York is big, too-crowded and complicated, and we feel defensive about who has earned the right to criticize it, explain it to outsiders or rep some provenance of “Brooklyn-ness” when out in the world.

City Point is one of the most anticipated developments in recent history in Brooklyn, and it’s full of both transplants and locals. The 675,000 square foot, five-story complex right off the Dekalb Avenue stop is one of the things that’s turning that part of Downtown Brooklyn into a destination, not just a collection of office buildings and parking garages. Earlier this month, the Century 21 opened on the ground floor; last week, the long-awaited Alamo Drafthouse finally opened its dine-in theaters and bar upstairs. A Trader Joe’s, Target and a food hall are coming soon.

Scoping it out last week, we noticed the above sign with what City Point has adopted as its slogan: “You don’t have to be born in Brooklyn to be Brooklyn born.” This motto seems risky, poised to trigger that kind of anti-transplant attitude that mocked Budweiser’s ham-handed attempt at local authenticity earlier this year. What made City Point go with this message? I called up Paul Travis, managing partner of Washington Square Partners, which is developing the site, to find out.

“Brooklyn is not one of those places in America where people have lived there forever, where if you come back 100 years later it’s the same family,” he said. “Brooklyn is a county, or city, you can call it, of immigrants. The idea that you can identify as a Brooklyner even if you weren’t born there is very strong.”

The search for authenticity is very real in New York City. A developer in the Bronx last year went overboard in their efforts to be “authentic” by throwing a party full of bullet-hole-riddled cars. “Brooklyn-ness,” for better but often worse, has become a brand, and as that brand stretches farther its meaning can become as muddled with other terms “all-natural” or “artisanal.”

What does it mean to be “Brooklyn-born” exactly? For people, the answer is obvious; for a building full of different businesses, it’s a patchwork definition.

Travis said the developers didn’t want a cookie cutter look akin to a shopping center you might find in Wichita, Kansas. They wanted to embrace a “Brooklyn” feel for City Point, which meant eschewing normal mall design and going with some offbeat elements, like reclaimed wood in one of its passages, concrete floors and transparent elevator doors that let you peek into the elevator shaft. One outside wall contains a three-story mural constructed in a partnership between Bushwick-based artist the Ladd Brothers and local elementary school students.

“I have no interest honestly in making this feel it’s a Manhattan shopping center or urban center. That’s not been our goal,” he said. “I think we’ve constantly challenged ourselves to make sure this is not sure your normal everyday retail center you can find anywhere.”

Travis said developers hired 70 percent of its construction employees locally, and is prioritizing hiring locally for the rest of its employees for the stores as well.

“If you walk in the doors today, and you look at the employees at the building, they are very clearly local employees,” Travis said. “If this project were to succeed, it had to be part of the neighborhood it was in and represent the broad diversity of Brooklyn.”

Of course, hiring locally isn’t that hard — it’s not like people are dying to commute from Pennsylvania to work in Downtown Brooklyn.

________

Another sign in the first-floor area of City Point.
Another sign in the first-floor area of City Point.

Branding firm Pentagram came up with the slogan; the firm has also worked on branding for Verizon, MasterCard, the Queens Museum and DC Entertainment. Update 4:30pm: It should be noted that some of the signs on City Point also call Downtown Brooklyn “DoBro:

Bro, no.
Bro, no.

Alamo Drafthouse is an Austin export that hired a local chef to craft its menu; Trader Joe’s was born in California and Target started in Minnesota, while Century 21 is a Bay Ridge native. Brooklyn gets its best representation in Dekalb Market Hall, the massive food court whose opening has been pushed back to early 2017. It will feature beloved local vendors such as Ample Hills, Fletcher’s BBQ, Hard Times Sundaes, Forcella and more. City Point brought in Brooklyn native and Foragers Market founder Anna Castellan to curate the hall.

The Ladd Brothers’ mural on the outside of the building, called Fabulous Phil, is a collaboration between the Bushwick artists and 1,200 kids from 16 Brooklyn schools. Travis recommends going by at night to see it. Here’s a video on the making of the project:

Hot take here but there is nothing wrong with being a “transplant” at its core, because everyone is a transplant somewhere in their lives at some point, unless you actually never moved out of your parents’ house and the concept of exploring any other city in this great, weird country of ours is somehow not of interest to you.

But we expect our transplants to Brooklyn to have a little bit of humbleness and humility when arriving, so as to earn the label of “Brooklynite.” Transplants are expected to keep their heads down and learn the lay of the land, not to show up and start bitching about bodega cats, or writing thinkpieces of “20 places to find the real Brooklyn.”

Washington Square Partners has local roots, though they’re based in Manhattan. Time will tell whether die-hard Brooklynites will accept the idea that “you don’t have to be born in Brooklyn to be Brooklyn born,” or whether the allure of Trader Joe’s dried mango and a Target slightly less chaotic than the one down the street at Atlantic Center will be enough to win crowds over.

As for Travis. He’s got a ways to go himself: he was born in the Bronx.

Follow Tim, who is definitely Brokelyn-born: @timdonnelly.

14 Comments

  1. Eric Silver

    Nothing against transplants, but you do have to be born in Brooklyn to be “Brooklyn Born”. And there have been families that have lived in Brooklyn for 100 years…they just maybe don’t pop up on the radar of a shopping center developer who has vaguely racist pull-quotes.

  2. Matty O

    Yes, in the simplest of ways to explain, you do have to be born in Brooklyn to be Brooklyn born. Try to explain the slogan as much as you want, it’s not going to make it true. My family has been in Brooklyn since the late 1800’s.
    Just to be clear. You are not “Brooklyn Born”.
    You will never be able to say that.

  3. Ron V

    That’s funny. I was born and raised in Brooklyn but I’m Detroit Born……

    You’re not Brooklyn born and you never will be. Just cut the shit. Be proud of where you’re from and your heritage. Unless you’re from Tulsa. Everyone hates Tulsa.

  4. Becca

    This is just absurd. Sure, you can call yourself a New Yorker or a Brooklynite once you’ve put in your time. But no, if you were not born here, you were not born here. I’ve lived in Brooklyn for my entire life, but was born in Pennsylvania and didn’t get to BK til I was about 48 hours old, and even I don’t consider myself Brooklyn-born, because I was. not. born. here.

  5. If your Mother didn’t pull your big, goofy, head outta her vagina on BROOKLYN terrain, you dummy, are not born IN Brooklyn & therefore NOT Brooklyn born. There is no way you can spin it, dream it, hope for it, manifest it, wish it, or WANNA-BE it into reality so just STOP it. You make yourselves sound & seem needy & pathetic. Be proud of where you actually come from and be excited about where you’re living now but never those twain shall meet.

  6. John S

    Ummmm….YES YOU DO……come here if you wish but you are not BROOKLYN BORN……I would never go to where you were born and raised and claim I was from there. I would say I am visiting or I live here now but I am from …… Just stop. When you go home for the Holiday’s ….you are GOING HOME FOR THE HOLIDAY’s.

  7. Ray D.

    I’m sorry but that slogan is the laziest wishy washy, bearded, flannel wearing fake ass Brooklyn thing I’ve ever heard. That is exactly what is wrong with you hipsters today, like everyone else has so eloquently said it I’ll say it again, unless you popped your head out of your mother’s snatch and got your first ass whooping in King’s County, Coney Island, Victory Memorial…..the list goes on , you AIN’T Brooklyn born. You only live here pal, get used to it…….

    • Eric Silver

      I mean, I don’t think THIS needs to be laid at the feet of hipsters. This is just some greedy, commodifying, developer bullshit. Oh, and RACIST. “You can tell just by looking around that we hire local people.” I think we all know what he’s implying there, unless employees are walking around with their addresses on their name tags.

  8. Clara-Lee Correa

    To be Brooklyn born you HAVE TO be born in Brooklyn. There are plenty of us born and raised here and to say that it’s not a place where people have been here forever is IGNORANT!!! I’m proud to be a native Brooklyn chick. And to even have the right to say you’re from Brooklyn you had to have earned it if you weren’t born here. This is the stupidest slogan I’ve ever heard. Be proud of where ever you were born. Stop trying to be a wannabe!!!

  9. Cary B

    I am split on this issue. I live in Dumbo and love the area, but I was born and are up in Gravesend and have lived in Bklyn almost all of my life (and have lived in about 10 different places in Brooklyn from Sheepshead Bay to Bensonhurst, Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, etc). To me, Dumbo is Bklyn but the real Bklyn are the working class neighborhoods where I grew up. But this is a moving target. I am actually 4th generation Brooklyn. My great-grandmother immigrated to Brooklyn around the time of the civil war and my mothers family lived in Williamsburg for almost 100 years, where she was raised. my mother, who is 90 now, hears about Williamsburg and says it was such a dump when she was a girl growing up there during the Depression. To a real Brooklynite like myself, I have memories of growing up at a different time in Bklyn, when you only wanted to escape it and there seemed nothing cool about it, but in retrospect it was a special place to grow up. The selling & marketing of Bklyn to me is still funny. When I was in my early 20’s and I would meet new friend who relocated here from other places, my question was always: ‘Why in the world would you want to come here?’

  10. Jamoke60

    In this nation you can say pretty much anything, but ‘saying it is SO’, does ‘not make it SO’. This example is nothing more than marketing desperation to claim some imagined level of ‘Brooklyn Relevancy’: a valuable commodity.
    This statement is semantically false – idiotic – on its face.
    You can talk about having a ‘Brooklyn attitude’, a ‘Brooklyn state-of-mind’, ‘Brooklyn creativity’ (already venturing into ‘fuzzy’ territory), but if you were ‘not born in Brooklyn’, you are ‘not Brooklyn born’.
    The best you can say about something like this is that it represents – almost better than anything else similarly confusing – some ridicuous, tortuous warping of semantics whereby people with actual COLLEGE DEGREES feel that if they SAY it is SO, it IS SO, reality be damned.
    No one is demanding that the under-35 crowd making Brooklyn their new home have experiended the hell that for many years – decades – made up the day-to-day existance of thousands, in places that now ruthless, cutthroat realtors and developers are marketing as ’boutique neighborhoods’.
    But there are plenty of people who remember those times, who lived through it, who paid their dues in years of crime and instability – none of which this current crowd has a damn clue about, and really don’t seem to care to know.
    This is a better test: in the current, evolving social mix, if you were born somewhere other than Brooklyn, and you are asked: ‘where are your FROM’, realize that you are being asked: ‘where were you born? where did you grow up?’
    If the answer is not Brooklyn, then don’t fucking say Brooklyn, because you would be full of shit, and just cementing the worst stereotype that people have of the new ‘make believe’ demographic.

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