PBS: Is Detroit the new Brooklyn?

**BrushStart** · July-12-11, 01:06 PM

Wait, I thought we were the Midwest TriBeCa..?

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know...rooklyn/10290/

I like all of the positive press, but it seems like nobody knows how to categorize Detroit other than by making comparisons to New York. Which, of course, we are nothing like, except perhaps in an existential "state of mind" kind of way.

**Detroitnerd** · July-12-11, 01:14 PM

No. God, I hope not. I moved away from Brooklyn to come HERE. That's all I need is a bunch of pretentious-ass trustifarians stinking up my block...

**Bham1982** · July-12-11, 01:20 PM

Last I checked, Brooklyn was the national mecca for religious Jews, Russians, West Indians, art school hipsters, and brownstoning yuppies.

So basically Detroit has nothing whatsover to do with Brooklyn.

**mwilbert** · July-12-11, 01:32 PM

I don't think that the places actually need to be similar, just as things that are "the new black" don't have to have anything to do with black. This analogy is in some kind of positioning, not in anything tangible.

**Lowell** · July-12-11, 02:25 PM

Old news in some ways. Quite a while back a large Bengali community fled Brooklyn and, like Detroitnerd, set up in Hamtramck's westside and surrounding Detroit neighborhoods.

The comparison of Brooklyn and Detroit is closer than Tribeca and Detroit. Tribeca is too achieved and pricey to compare. The Tribeca of the 1970's, when many of my generation of Detroit artists migrated to New York, was then the down-and-out frontier for artists in search of affordable studio space. At the time they were being priced out of the yuppified Greenwich Village and the then yuppifying SoHo. Soon the developers followed and Tribeca became chic-afied and out-priced. After that the new artist scene left Manhattan for Brooklyn where it has likewise gone through a succession of neighborhoods.