The New American City
Suleiman Osman on Brooklyn’s Post-World War II Gentrification
In Squaring Off, Zócalo invites authors into the public square to answer five questions about the essence of their books. For this round, we pose questions to George Washington University urban historian Suleiman Osman, author of The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York.
Osman’s history of “Brownstone Brooklyn” chronicles the transformation of blighted industrial neighborhoods into middle-class bastions of a mid-20th-century American Dream. He argues that the gentrification movement was one of the most important developments in modern urban history-changing cities on …
