Last Night in Brooklyn

The novel is set in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn. Historically, Fort Greene served as a significant center of Black culture, having become home to one of the largest free Black communities in the antebellum North by the 19th century. In the first half of the 20th century, the neighborhood’s proximity to the Brooklyn Academy of Music helped cultivate a bohemian atmosphere that drew a distinctly Black creative class. This would be bolstered later on by the emergence of institutions like the Brooklyn Moon Cafe, where poets including Saul Williams and Jessica Care Moore performed in the 1990s. The end of the century saw the rise of a creative generation that included filmmaker Spike Lee, whose 40 Acres & A Mule production offices anchored the neighborhood, and writers like Nelson George, who chronicled the scene’s emergence in the late 1980s and 1990s (George, Nelson. “VOICES; ‘I Feel Like a Native Son.’” The New York Times, 2005). 

In the novel, Alicia calls the neighborhood a “Buppy Bohemia” (28), referring to the term “Buppy” or “Black urban professional,” which emerged in the 1980s to describe a new generation of upwardly mobile African Americans who came of age after the civil rights movement, benefiting from expanded access to higher education and corporate careers while remaining culturally rooted in Black communities (“Buppies.” Encyclopedia of African American Society. Edited by Gerald D Jaynes, Vol. 2. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2005). The characters of Xochitl Gonzalez’s, which include copywriters, lawyers, photo editors, and aspiring artists, embody this creative class. They are educated and ambitious, frequenting local Black-owned businesses like the real-life restaurant Brooklyn Moon and creating a self-sustaining social and professional network. For them, Fort Greene is a place where “everyone [is] young and beautiful. And everything [is] potential” (9).

The early 2000s saw Fort Greene undergo rapid gentrification. Between 2000 and 2010, the Black population in Fort Greene and neighboring Clinton Hill reportedly decreased by over 30%, while the white population surged, a demographic reversal that mirrored broader patterns across brownstone Brooklyn (Roberts, Sam. “Striking Change in Bedford-Stuyvesant as the White Population Soars.” The New York Times, 2011). This demographic shift created the specific social dynamic captured in the novel. For instance, a central conflict in the novel is the characters’ opposition to a massive stadium development, a direct reference to the real-life Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park project that cemented the accusations of gentrification within Fort Greene. 

First announced in December 2003, the plan proposed building a basketball arena for the New Jersey Nets and 16 skyscrapers designed by architect Frank Gehry on a 22-acre site straddling Prospect Heights, Fort Greene, and Park Slope. The developer, Forest City Ratner, headed by Bruce Ratner, promoted the project with promises of 10,000 permanent jobs, 2,250 units of affordable housing, and eight acres of open space (Bagli, Charles V., & Berger, Joseph. “Nets Helped Clear Path for Builder in Brooklyn.” The New York Times, 2012). However, the project generated fierce community opposition over its scale and, most contentiously, its use of “eminent domain,” referring to the government’s power to seize private property for public use, which was expanded in scope following the Supreme Court’s 2005 Kelo v. City of New London decision permitting takings for economic development. Activist groups, most notably Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, argued the project was primarily for private gain and would displace residents and small businesses, filing multiple lawsuits challenging the environmental review and the state’s authority to condemn occupied buildings (Bagli, Charles V. “Ruling Lets Atlantic Yards Seize Land.” The New York Times, 2009). Critics also pointed to the project’s shifting timelines and diminished affordable-housing commitments. Beginning in 2014, journalist Norman Oder documented that many promised community benefits had been quietly abandoned or delayed by decades on a watchdog blog called Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report, which continues to post new updates on the development as of this writing.

Gonzalez depicts the personal cost of gentrification on the communities at the heart of Fort Greene. In the first chapter, Marcus’s landlord sells his building, which is slated to become a concessions stand for the “imaginary arena,” (16) forcing him out of his rent-stabilized apartment. The novel culminates in a farewell party for Freddy’s, a beloved local bar, mirroring the real, widely publicized struggle to save Freddy’s Bar & Backroom, whose owners and patrons chained themselves to the bar in protest before it was ultimately demolished in 2010 (Fahim, Kareem. “Freddy’s Bar, in Path of Atlantic Yards, to Close.” The New York Times, 2010). The novel’s characters see the fight as a struggle over “who gets to decide something is valuable and something else worthless” (2), capturing the real-world sentiment that the development erased an authentic community in favor of corporate interests.