In its’ short existence hip-hop music has found a way to captivate people of all cultures. Now Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn has bred a Bengali rapper named Brooklyn Shanti. Although he’s gained the respect of his hip-hop peers, his family has not been as open to the idea of him becoming a hip-hop superstar.

While prom is a rite of passage for many teens, the cost of the tradition can be too much for some families. But thanks to the  L.A.C.E. Leading Ladies prom dress giveaway some Brooklyn teens can afford to show up in style.

Read more at: The New York Times

After eight years of pursuing his passion and working for the MTA, Brooklyn-bred filmmaker Wilkie Cornelius, Jr. has finally realized his dream of making a movie. He premiered his first film Single Hills at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and hopes to turn it into his Hollywood debut.

There’s something innately seductive and cinematic about watching a video that slides from soft to razor sharp images in videos like Cohen’s. And aspiring filmmakers don’t need the operating budgets of the Kony 2012 team to create something that hundreds of thousands will watch.

A great eye and a DSLR can get the job done.

Cohen’s most recent video was posted March 26 and follows the work of watchmaker David Sokosh as he handcrafts timepieces in his workshop in the second episode in a series called “Made in Brooklyn.”

“I’ve been living in Brooklyn for seven years, and I just put a list together of people I thought would be interesting to profile, “ Cohen says, adding that he takes inspiration from blogs like Forgotten New York and Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York. “And it just became this homage to Brooklyn and how many cool people are here creating and making things,” he says.

While the idea of spending four-minutes in a little workshop might seem dull, Cohen finds the detail work of local specialist craftsmen like Sokosh fascinating. “Watching him break it down screw-by-screw and piece-by-piece, is really amazing,” Cohen says.

And people seem to agree.

His previous video, “The Violin Maker,” which featured luthier Sam Zygmuntowicz, racked up 100,000 views in 10 days and was picked up by Gizmodo and HuffPo, among others.

“I’ve wanted to make these kinds of profiles for a long time,” Cohen says. “And I think it’s kinda the future of what I do.”

While Cohen is an experienced photographer, these are his first video profiles. The “hyper detail shots” in his video pieces allow people to appreciate the skill involved in what his subjects are doing, Cohen says.

And using the top-notch Canon 5D Mark II doesn’t hurt either. Still, all his equipment together only totals around $3,000, he estimates.

“It’s not a starter kit, but it’s not the highest of the high end kit. It kinda fits right in the middle,” Cohen says. “I bought everything when I was starting off on my own…so I was definitely on a budget.”

With the meshing of HD video and high-end digital cameras, the Brooklynite says it was a natural transition for his business. The problem is, he’s not getting paid for these videos.

“We’re still kind of figuring that part out. If anyone has any ideas for me, I’d be happy to, you know, listen to ‘em. That’s for sure,” he laughs. Cohen relies on his commercial photography to pay the bills.

Cohen works with editor Michael Hurley to shoot and edit the pieces quickly. The piece is a hybrid of careful planning and “fly-on-the-wall” documentary-style shooting—The Violin Maker was shot in cinéma vérité style along with a quick 15-minute interview. Although the actual shooting is done in an afternoon, Cohen believes it important to establish a relationship and scout out the space before a shoot.

“It really helped to have all that information instead of going in and then shooting for hours and seeing what you get. So you already know what the narrative is going to be like,” Cohen says.

Lone artisans will continue to be what Cohen trains his lens on in his next video as well—he ‘s shot a profile with “a female metal smith jewelry maker” that should be posted in the next week or two.  Future episodes will feature a shoe maker, a bespoke atelier, and a perfumer.

“I feel like there’s a resurgence of interests in things made in America and even more so with New York,” Cohen explains of the Brooklyn-made products and producers he features. “There’s just that intimate connection I think people enjoy.”

Steven Thompson and his studio's color (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

I | Art, To Start

Locust Hill, South Carolina is not a town. The small community on the outskirts of Greenville has a population barely large enough to register on a Google map. There are two roads and one lake. There are houses, but not many of them. Steven Thompson spent his first 18 years along these winding narrow roads, where everybody knew everybody, and nothing seemed to change.

Then one day he opened his front door and walked out. Destination: Clemson University. There were massive libraries there – appropriate, for someone intent on majoring in literature. They had a football team – Thompson was a huge fan. But one month in, still fresh in his dorm, his journey began to slow. Feelings obscured. Anxiety set in. On his own for the first time, Thompson broke down.

“Everything just became so bizarre to me…things were fundamentally without understanding,” he says today, fiddling with the wheels of a toy skateboard in his cluttered Williamsburg studio. “I don’t think I’m an artist BECAUSE of the nervous breakdown, but it definitely helped.”

Indeed, it took Thompson five years (and a transfer to the College of Charleston) before he took his first studio art class – a one-month short course on printmaking. He spent those five years as a pendulum. Sometimes a recluse, sometimes gregarious. Always, though, with a deep, unabiding, and simply unexplainable internal pain.

Slowly, tentatively, Thompson applied oil paint to plexiglass for his first project. His inner dialogue, still turbulent years after his Clemson episode, began to calm. Each brush stroke brought Thompson closer to secret places in the deep recesses of his person. Each color sang to him. In art, he could get lost in discovery. Thompson took a deep breath.

“You could say ‘I’m going to walk out this door and go into the city. I plan to go to a bar. I hope to meet my friend.’ But when the day comes around, you never know,” he says. “You could walk out the door and get smacked down by a car, and you’re gone forever.”

“When I sit down to make a work of art, it’s kind of like I’m stepping out of my door. I don’t really know what is going to happen. I have an idea of where I want to go, but I don’t know exactly where I’m going to end up.”

20 years after his first class, and it’s others who discover Thompson. They see him at galleries in New York City. In Georgia. In North Carolina. And on a cold December day, a former exotic dancer from Austin, Texas will walk into Oslo Coffee Roasters in Brooklyn and discover Thompson herself.

Merget, Ben, and the bean machine (Alexander Abnos/The Brooklyn Ink)

II | Brooklyn’s Roaster

Downtown Williamsburg may be a brick-and-mortar neighborhood, but glass and metal are beginning to loom large. Their smooth, silvery surfaces provide the facade for many an upscale condo building popping up in the area, monuments to gentrification for a community in flux.

Things begin to change to the north and west of McCarren Park. Here, glass shards powder the streets, lined with nothing but warehouses. A faint rumble emerges from one building on the corner, with chipping grey paint and a creaking front door. Motorcycle logos plaster the outer wall, appearing faded in the afternoon sun. Inside, mountains of dead metal and tools lie scattershot throughout the concrete floors. The rumble loudens. It smells like morning. In a side room, a door slides open, and within a single step you find yourself at the epicenter of one of Brooklyn’s most successful independent coffeehouses.

“Coffee always changes. It’s never the same,” says J.D. Merget, the founder and owner of Oslo Coffee Roasters. He has to raise his voice to be heard above the din of the roaster, currently cooking beans from a far away land. “It has a life at each stage. It has a life when it comes to us, it has a life when it’s roasted, and it has a life when it’s been brewed. It’s constantly evolving…or devolving, as the case may be.”

One thing that hasn’t changed is the roaster itself. The model in Oslo’s partition of this warehouse was made in the early 1980s, but the design has not been fundamentally altered since the early 20th century. Encased in dark red metal, a giant barrel rhythmically revolves. The coffee beans inside tumble like laundry, visible only through a tiny porthole on the front of the machine. Temperature and timing are paramount here. Cook the beans one second too long, one degree too hot, and the taste will suffer. Merget periodically removes a small metal bar from the front of the machine. It contains a sample of the beans within. Placing it near his nose, he inhales deeply. Not quite time yet.

Merget tuned in to this process some time ago. Formerly head of quality control and roasting at Kobricks Coffee in New Jersey, he started Oslo in 2003 at the insistence of his wife Kathy. The rationale for their shops location – on Roebling and Metropolitan in Williasmburg – was simple. It was cheap. Soon they found other advantages.

“It used to be you couldn’t get me to cross the bridge and visit my friends in Williamsburg. Now you can’t get me to cross the opposite way and go to Manhattan,” he says. “That happened pretty quick. Once we opened the store it was just like ‘What were we doing? This is such a great neighborhood.’”

Merget takes a sip of a new brew. This time, from the tiny African country of Burundi. Placing his nose inside the small glass tester cup, he inhales a sweet, floral bouquet. Taking a sip, the sensation turns to tart grapefruits, a short pause, and a finish of burnt sugar and tobacco. He nods approvingly, sets the cup down, and waits. In five minutes, he says, this same cup of coffee will taste noticeably different.

“The neighborhood is constantly changing, too,” he says. “It’s not what it was 10 years ago. It went from a sleepy little town that swelled on the weekends with visitors to the hustle and bustle of New York City.”

What has always remained, though, are the residents and their stories. When he started Oslo, Merget worked behind the counter all day, six days a week. He met customers from all walks of life, all pursuing their passions just like him. He got to know them. What they do. How they think. Where they’re going, and where they’ve been.

“At some point,” he says, “Brooklyn became this machine that attracts more and more and more creative people.”

The time has come. In one fell swoop, Ben (Oslo’s roaster operator) opens the door to the machine’s barrel, allowing an avalanche of steaming hot coffee beans to land on the platform below. Through air holes on the surface of the sifter, steam is sucked out while mechanical arms stir and jostle wave after wave of beans.

Merget observes this and takes another sip of the now-lukewarm Burundi coffee. The grapefruit is still there, but less pronounced. The pause between start and finish extends at least twice as long as it did previously. The taste experience ends with a new, flowery finish. In short, it tastes like a completely different cup of coffee.

“Ultimately, [the community] is simple,” he says. “It’s like-minded people coming together because we have passions and Brooklyn has the facilities for us to do what we want to do.”

A lever is pulled, and the now-cooled beans fall through a trap door in the roaster and into a grey plastic trash can. Another machine will sift through the beans to remove any rocks or debris that could ruin the grinders. Within a day, they’ll be up for sale in brown paper bags.

Brown bags and business (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

III | Fashion and Function

The acid-washed denim vest needed some spicing up. That’s all Nayantara Banerjee knew. It needed flash. Pizazz. Style. Something feminine and eye-catching. Something fit for a Barbie doll. Because that’s exactly what the vest was.

“It was basically just a tube of fabric,” Banerjee says of the doll’s garment, the subject of the first sewing project she ever completed. Using a needle, thread, and advice from her mother, Banerjee added lime green lace trim to the collar and arm holes. She was six years old.

“I was not a prim and proper type of kid,” she says now, at 27. “My little brother, a little boy, thought I was disgusting.” She places special emphasis on “I,” as if her brother had no room to talk.

“He used to make me wash my hands before I played his Nintendo.”

So Banerjee’s hands turned to sewing instead. Her personal wardrobe expanded to include custom creations – constructed by herself, still with the help of her mother. Even with a bigger canvas, the Barbie doll aesthetic remained.

“I started getting really particular about what I wanted,” she says.” I wanted really girly things like huge full skirts and puffy sleeves.”

She wore them all with sneakers, to run around in.

Banerjee says this seated on a chair in the middle of her studio apartment in East Williamsburg. She sips at a cup of Oslo coffee. Banerjee glances around and apologizes for the haphazard look of her front room. “I used to live across the street…I only moved in here a month ago,” she says. There is nothing to apologize for. Her apartment is well-kept, outside of the pins, needles, thread spools, and scissors that smatter the surface of a wide wood table pressed against the wall.

But those things are to be expected in the home of a door-to-door seamstress.

“As friends started to be bridesmaids, they would ask me for alterations, then friends of friends started asking and I got requests for custom made things. Then one day on a whim I was just like ‘I’m gonna quit my job and see if I can make this work.”

Her job at the time involved posting instructional sewing videos and managing the web site of a fashion design start-up. Before that, with the ink still drying on her degree in fashion design (Syracuse), she worked for a company making women’s suits. In both jobs, marketing and trends directed the work. Banerjee’s mailbox became stuffed with magazines, their smooth pages dominated by advertisements and the smell of various perfume samples. Her Twitter feed became a tangled web of “what’s hot now” and “the next big thing.” It became too much to handle. Banerjee cancelled her subscriptions, and embarked on a simpler path.

“I get fed up with the branding and marketing of clothing sometimes,” she says. “We live in a world where people want something new, something more, and somebody’s going to give it to them. But a lot of times they’re just expressing that they want to look a certain way, not that they are a certain way.”

Today she trades under the title “The Williamsburg Seamster” – a play on the “scenester” title bestowed on so many of North Brooklyn’s more fashionable, event-attending types. When she started the business six years ago, Banerjee was a bartender, too. Now, she is the same as when she was six. She sews garments, and runs around.

“I don’t know that I could do it in another neighborhood,” she says. “There’s something about this North Brooklyn area. People are open with their homes, I offer a unique service…it just fits in with everything this neighborhood is about right now.”

Banerjee hasn’t left the design game completely. But now she plays it on her own terms. Just after quitting her job and before The Williamsburg Seamster matured, Banerjee began custom-making garments again. This time, for her friends. This time, it needed to be simple. Functional. The antithesis of everything the fashion and design industry was marketing towards.

Within a year, she nearly sold out her batch of customized aprons.

“They’re like giant pockets,” she says.

Banerjee and the tools of her trade (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

The Ehlers adjustment (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

IV | To Learn To Turn

At one point, Barb Ehlers greeted her clients in full rock climbing gear. Rugged boots, thick pants, and, sometimes, jackets with untold amounts of pockets. Ehlers, 5 foot 11 inches with fiery red hair and relentlessly focused expressions, had climbed Mount Everest on a whim. People paid her to get them in top shape now, and with no company dress code to follow, she would wear whatever she damn well pleased.

Today, in a studio on the 16th floor of a Manhattan high-rise, Ehlers dons a light blue tank top and black tights that cling to her slim, toned frame. Hair up, her expressions remain focused, even while laughing at the scene she finds herself in. She stands well over 6 feet now, the extra inches courtesy of a pair of black patent leather platform heels that lace up nearly to the top of her knees. It’s Wednesday night – time for her stripper class.

“I’ve been a jock all my life,” she says. “I know how to use my body. I know the muscles. But there’s this sexiness to using your body that I was never taught.  I can do push ups and pulls ups with a guy. I can dead-lift 205lbs, but to do a little sexy turn? That’s work for me!”

Ehlers, a personal trainer living in Williamsburg, takes this class each week with seven other women. Their instructor, Kimberly Smith, leads them through an array of moves that involve gyrating hips, slow leans forward, and dipping tooshes. Ehlers’ partner sits on a low-lying wicker chair while Ehlers uses the back of it to lift her body up with her arms. Carefully, Ehlers places her knees across her partners lap and shifts the weight from hand to hand. The goal here is to bob enticingly over the subject, lift up with the arms, extend legs, place toes on the ground, and slide the torso down slowly. Very slowly. And very, very close.

This is a bicycle, into a James Brown, into a full body slide.

“It’s just like a mountain climber!” Smith says as she demonstrates for the class.

“Yeah, I know,” says Ehlers. “That’s what I’m good at!”

Born in Bremen, Germany, Ehlers came up in a family where even her grandmother biked from place to place. Time passed by with roughhousing sessions from her sister. Eating took place at regular intervals, in controlled amounts. Breakfast. Big lunch. Something small in the evening.

At six, she moved to Queens. The transition was easy, but the kids seemed…different.

“It was like ‘Why aren’t you rolling around in the mud? Why aren’t you riding your bike around like a race car?’,” she says. “I felt tomboyish. There’s more of a gender difference here than there was there.”

There’s an atmosphere difference as well. In Queens, the Ehlers lived close by JFK airport, where the roar of passing jets (and their resulting pollutants) imbued the air. Just after moving to a new country, Barb developed a severe case of asthma.

“It hit me like a truck,” she says. “I couldn’t play, and I loved playing. I loved being outside, and I couldn’t do it. It takes your childhood life away.”

Soon, regularly scheduled pills went along with her regularly scheduled meals. A new character – an inhaler – added itself to the cast in her pockets. By 12, Ehlers had enough. She would breathe when she damn well pleased. She became a vegetarian, and her mother enrolled her in a karate class. At the beginning, she couldn’t make it through without reaching for her inhaler.

“I just couldn’t breathe,” she says. “Every time I got active, it got worse.”

Her sensei, an imposing man named Lee Ireland, would have none of it. Even as Barb gasped for air on his mat, the message rang firm.

“Breathe it out,” he commanded steadily, regularly.

“Just breathe it out.”

She did. Ehlers has not touched an inhaler since.

“A good teacher can show you a vision of yourself that you didn’t know was possible,” she says. “That’s something that I try to do with my clients, too, as a personal trainer. It’s the gift that [Ireland] gave me.”

Today, Ehlers trains so much, so vigorously, and in so many different ways that she needs to have clothes adjusted twice a year to account for her constantly changing body shape. TRX training, for example, has taken in her abdomen a couple inches. This is good. But now her little black dress poofs out at the sides. This is not good.

So at 10 a.m. the morning after her stripper class, Nayantara Banerjee pays a visit to Ehlers’ cozy one bedroom apartment in one of the last-remaining old style walk-ups by McCarren. Standing in front of a mirror in her living room, Ehlers lifts her arms up over her head as Banerjee carefully marks her body’s outline with safety pins.

A series of dead weights lie neatly on the floor next to the mirror, ordered according to size.

Kimberly Smith at work (photo by Halston Bruce / courtesy StripXpertease) and Thompson's work at rest (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

V | The Cycle

The man carried stacks of money. Each stack contained one hundred dollars. All in ones. He sat in a low-lying chair in dim light, throwing bills on the strip club’s stage for whichever dancers he liked the most. Swigging vodka, the man leaned back in his seat. It creaked under his considerable girth. He liked Kimberly Smith. So when she came around to collect her tip, he told her a few things.

Smith looked at the man with wide brown eyes. She smiled with disarming grace. Then she walked away toward the manager of the club, demanding that the man be thrown out immediately. The manager remembered the stacks of money, and where his customer was currently spending it. He declined. The man would stay right where he was.

“Every single night there’s so much – you’re groped, you’re touched, you’re talked dirty to – there’s too much happening in one night to remember one situation,” Smith says, struggling to recall exactly what it was the man said that drove her to quit after 10 years of being a stripper. “That’s when I felt like I should move on. Nobody was on my side.”

Smith went home early, and angry. Sleep evaded her. At 3 a.m., she called the club, and told them to find a new dancer. Five years later, with StripXpertease, she teaches women from all walks of life the moves she learned.

There is an important caveat, though. Nobody is ever, in any way, encouraged to strip professionally.

“I get calls all the time from people saying ‘I want to be a stripper’ and my response is ‘Well, we can’t help you,’” she says. “I’m turning away money, but I just can’t justify helping some naive girl get into that industry, and then lord knows what happens to her. I don’t want that on my conscience.”

She knows all too well the cyclical, absorbing nature of the profession. Smith was in 6th grade in Austin when her drug-abusing mother moved them into a halfway house. Both of their housemates worked as strippers. One was still using. Both frequently strutted the hallways fully topless, as if it was the most normal, natural thing in the world. After all, they were just breasts.

“Looking back, it was bizarre to be living in that situation,” Smith says, emphasizing that she suffered no abuse or wrongdoing during her stay there. “I mean, they were strippers. It just wasn’t an ideal situation for a child to be in.”

But even as the women around her toiled in search of a better life, Smith couldn’t help but admire them a bit. These women were confident. They were in control. They had amazing bodies and exuded potent sexuality. In the comfort of the gaze of others, they could be the stars of their own intimate stage. For Smith, who long aspired to be an actress, these were significant qualities.

At the age of 18, she got a job as a dancer at a local club. Her 10-year journey through the seedy underbelly of strip clubs began.

“Girls are constantly getting evicted, getting their phones turned off, not being able to pay their bills, and they’re in this constant cycle,” she says. “That’s why girls dance to really sad music or really hard music. They’re angry. It’s just a horrible job. You’re getting paid to rub your crotch, your butt, your boobs on his penis. Nobody really wants to do that.”

Smith’s StripXpertease lesson plan simply removes money from the equation. Women, she says, want to know how to move, feel, be sexier. Victoria’s Secret rakes in countless millions based on that very concept. So do make-up companies. And hair salons. Buy this bra. Apply this mascara. Take on this expensive style. Even pole dancing classes, popularized by actress Sheila Kelley, market themselves as a physical fitness regime. There are tangible, physical results.

Smith’s aim is entirely mental. In the eyes of many, this makes it all the more dangerous. StripXpertease has been kicked out of multiple studios and received negative press, while pole dancing flourishes (despite the fact that most women do not have a pole in their homes). A YouTube video of Smith performing a routine with annotations explaining how she was moving and why was taken down by site administrators. Meanwhile the exact same video, without annotations, remained live.

“Apparently it’s more offensive to teach people how to do this nasty stuff than just doing the nasty stuff,” she says.

The solution would seem to be to open her own studio, but it’s easier said than done. The two main ingredients – money and time – are in short supply for Smith at the moment. In Williamsburg, though, she has a liberal, open neighborhood more likely to accept her enterprise with open arms.

“When I first moved out here I didn’t like it at all,” she says. “It’s like…everyone’s white. Everyone has a decent amount of money. Everyone’s ‘cool.’ It just seemed so pretentious. I said ‘If I’m going to live in the white suburbs, I’m going to go back to Texas where it doesn’t snow.’”

“It’s grown on me, though. I like the small, mom and pop feel here. I think a studio would do really great.”

Smith lives with her boyfriend in an apartment just off the hustle and bustle of Bedford Avenue. On a cold December day, she walks through the light drizzle into Oslo Coffee Roasters. The barista greets everyone who enters, including Smith, with a pleasant, familiar “hello.” Several pieces of art hang on the walls of the cafe, including one large web of wood and plastic suspended across from the front counter.

Smith’s eyes squint as she examines the sculpture. At first, it looks like little more than a series of translucent plastic bags suspended by planks. She inches closer.

“Oh!” She exclaims. It has become clear that inside the plastics are countless small woodcut figures, with intricate swooping patterns drawn in pen on top of them. Smith’s eyes settle back into their wide gaze. Her raised cheeks begin to relax with understanding.

“That’s a lot of work right there,” she says. “That’s so cool.”

There is a pause.

“What’s the artist’s name?”

Danielle Leder, co-founder and owner of Jacques Magazine, adjusts the makeup on a model at a video shoot. (Jonathan Tayler / The Brooklyn Ink)

The speck bothered Danielle Leder. It had to go.

It was nothing more than a small piece of dead skin, or perhaps a stray bit of dust, but against her model’s bright red lips, the mote could not stay. That was all the more apparent on the screen of the expensive high-definition video camera that Leder had acquired for the video shoot. The small brownish spot stood out amidst the sea of red lipstick and pale white skin.

Her crew of four had tried what they could to get the speck off without having to remove or smudge the model’s makeup. Finally, Leder got up, took her model’s hand and led her to the back of the studio, to the lit mirrors and swivel chairs that served as a dressing room.

“Come on,” said the 25-year-old Leder. “I want to get it right.”

So off came the lipstick, and with it, the offending speck. And back went the model—also named Danielle—onto the array of tarp and sheets that functioned as a backdrop. She wore a sleeveless white turtleneck and white underwear with white socks adorned with lace frills. A bobbed black wig covered her platinum blonde hair. Her lips were immaculate, and her skin untouched. The mark gone, she was ready for her closeup once more. She would spend the next three hours covered in blue paint.

This was the first video shoot for the re-launched Jacques Magazine, and Danielle Leder had to get it right. She had to produce content to show that the magazine still existed. She had to create something that didn’t stray from Jacques’ well-established aesthetic. And she would do it without the magazine’s co-founder and her husband, 38-year-old Jonathan Leder, who at that moment was somewhere near Tampa shooting a movie about a stripper running from a serial killer. He was in Florida while his wife was in New York because they were in the process of separating. Over the course of the year, their marriage had disintegrated, just as the magazine’s momentum had slowed to a crawl.

Jonathan departed New York on October 20. He left behind his wife, his two young children, and Jacques, the softcore erotica magazine that he started with Danielle. Jacques, the analog answer to a world of digital porn, the callback to an era of skin magazines long gone, a small circulation print magazine with one advertiser and dreams of being something far bigger.

“It’s my name, it’s my investment,” Danielle said. “But even though they were my ideas, it’s Jonathan’s work. When people see the next issue, they will know it’s my work.”

***

Two years ago, Danielle Leder almost died. While giving birth to her son, Jack, she hemorrhaged three times and spent three days in intensive care. When she eventually went home, it was up to Jonathan to take care of his wife and newborn son.

“As time went on, he really wasn’t working, nothing substantial,” Danielle said. “I kind of just said, let’s make a magazine. I can’t do anything, I’m here on the couch, let’s just start a magazine.”

It was an idea the two had bounced around before. Both had a magazine background—Jonathan as a photographer, Danielle as a former fashion model for the likes of the French version of Vogue. The two even met on a photo shoot. The timing for their new venture wasn’t ideal with the recession deepening, but the couple didn’t feel as if that were an obstacle.

“After the meltdown, part of the reason we started the magazine was that it was the best time to start something,” Jonathan said. “If you start a magazine when everyone is running for cover, it’s a nice story for people to tell and believe in.”

“We felt the only place we could go is up,” Danielle said.

Despite no experience in design or print journalism, Danielle did the mockup, and after a false start on the name—they wanted to call it Ritz, only to have the Ritz Carlton threaten to sue—they settled on Jacques, the French version of their son’s name.

The size of the operation—just Danielle and Jonathan initially—wasn’t the only thing setting Jacques apart. There was also the content: soft-core nudity. Beyond that, there was also the format. Jonathan shot on film, and the couple styled the magazine on vintage Playboy and the long-departed adult magazines of the 1970s.

“I don’t think there’s a lot of quality magazines out there, period,” Jonathan said. “The plastic wrap stuff is pretty disgusting. The quality of photography is bad. You’ll see some cute girls, for sure, but is it totally Photoshopped? Is it shot with digital cameras and terrible lighting? Today, it’s the lowest common denominator with everything.”

Why start an erotica magazine at a time when porn magazines were rapidly losing money? Both Jonathan and Danielle expressed a desire to showcase an aesthetic they felt was missing from mainstream adult magazines.

“Our girls are much different than what Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler are offering,” Danielle said. “Those girls that they’re showcasing, I could easily hop on my computer and get millions and millions of pictures that are those girls. I would like to think our girls are different. They’re curvy and not airbrushed. I feel like this is filling a gap that does not exist right now.”

The Leders started their magazine in Williamsburg and tried to recruit women in the neighborhood to pose. The inaugural issue was “awful,” in Danielle’s mind, riddled with spelling errors and printing problems. But subsequent releases improved on quality, and the magazine started gaining notice. Major chain bookstores had begun adding Jacques to their newsstands. A deal was struck with PowerHouse Books to put together a calendar for a 2011 release.

Then things began to fall apart.

***

It’s October 19, and Jonathan Leder is in upstate New York, but he’s headed down to Florida the next day to continue work on his movie. For most of the year, the Leders had been cycling between Florida and New York, and Jonathan spent most of that time filming and reworking the script.

“The magazine is kind of nice where it is,” he said. “I’d like to see it do a little bit more and if someone wants to help take it to the next level, I’m cool with that, but personally, I have other projects rather than just pumping out a magazine.”

Those other projects left the magazine neglected. Issue no. 7, which was completed at the end of 2010, was delivered months late to subscribers. The calendar deal fell apart. Work on the eighth issue, which was supposed to take place during the movie filming, stalled as well.

At the same time, the Leders’ marriage began to unravel. They fought frequently on their trips to and from Florida and during the filming, and money became an issue as well.

“If we did not have two kids, I would have quietly packed my bags and left,” Danielle said. “I deserve better than this.”

That October night, things came to a head as Danielle and Jonathan got into another fight over his plans to return to Florida to continue work on the movie. The next day, Jonathan packed his bags and told Danielle he was leaving for Florida.

“I told him, if you go, it won’t be good, because I can’t trust you and we obviously have problems we need to work on,” Danielle said. “He just looked at me and got in the car and left.”

Jonathan hasn’t been back to New York since.

***

Jacques seemed like a venture doomed to failure.

The magazine was not profitable. Jonathan claimed they were breaking even, but that Jacques wasn’t bringing much back in terms of money. Advertising was a major issue; American Apparel was the only company to buy space. The website was rarely updated. Distribution was an issue, Jonathan said, and he was unsure if he wanted the magazine in stores like Barnes & Noble or the now-defunct Borders. “The truth is, those places are really mainstream, and they don’t even sell that well to begin with,” Leder said.

Beyond that, Jacques was attempting to recreate an aesthetic that died years ago in an industry that is collapsing in a medium that is declining. Jacques was trying to sell nudity in a day and age when anyone with a functioning internet connection and a working computer can pull up millions of photos of a naked woman in roughly three seconds at no cost to them, and for that privilege, the magazine charged $9 an issue.

Despite all this, Jonathan believed that the magazine could be a bigger success. He just didn’t know if he was the one who could do it. I think if we had someone working on the magazine full time and really wanted to bust their ass, there’s a huge market for this,” Jonathan said. “The problem is that we’re not magazine publishers. We’ll see what happens when our new editor comes in. He seems really gung ho on taking it to the next level.”

That new editor was a familiar face to the Leders: Noah Wunsch, who had joined the magazine as a writer two years ago and worked his way up to an editor position. He is 22 years old, tall and rail thin, and he believed that there was room in an increasingly digital world for a print magazine with an aesthetic seemingly a generation out of date.

“The magazine is niche, but we don’t have to have a niche clientele,” he said. “This appeals to a broad audience.”

The plans were there in Wunsch’s mind: More advertisers, better distribution, publicity events, a new website, better written content. It would be an attempt to be the early version of Playboy with a more modern spin.

“That’s where we want to be, getting people to say without snickering, ‘I read it for the articles,’” Wunsch said. “It’s not implausible that could happen.”

In October, a couple of days after Wunsch told me about his plans for the magazine, he was no longer editor-at-large for Jacques. The new sole owner, Danielle Leder, had let him go.

***

Jonathan Tayler / The Brooklyn Ink

When Danielle talks about the future of Jacques, her eyes get bright and her voice jumps. This is her magazine, all the way through now. No one will take it from her. Not Jonathan, not Noah, not anyone. Her readers will see that Jacques was not just Jonathan Leder and his film photographs. There are her ideas, expansions and improvements. This is why Danielle and her crew stood in Fast Ashley’s Studios in Williamsburg, everyone clustered into a small space near the front, trying to get the path of blue paint trickling down the model’s arms and back and chest just right.

The first video shoot for the new Jacques started at 10:00 a.m. At 1 p.m., the crew had yet to begin shooting. They were still gathering supplies and setting up the camera acquired specially for the day. Thai food had been ordered and now sat mostly finished on a table toward the back. Everyone had eaten except the model, Danielle, who turned down offers of spring rolls and fried rice.

“When I eat, I get really tired,” she said.

Danielle Leder wouldn’t have it, though.

“Eat for me,” she said. “You can’t be on a shoot and not eat.”

Danielle demurred again.

“It’ll make me happy,” Leder said, and that settled it. The model took a bit of food.

Wearing khaki pants and a plaid shirt, Danielle Leder is, as expected for a former model, tall and thin. She wears round glasses over her green eyes and is frequently on the move. Danielle hopes to have Jacques up and running again by February of 2012, and to do so, she wants to release some short video commercials for the magazine and new website. Today’s video concept is simple: Danielle the model, mostly clothed, will have blue paint poured on her and then writhe around in it. At some point, there will likely be a voiceover. The idea is basic, but the execution is a far cry from the first efforts that the Leders shot for the inaugural issue of Jacques.

“We used to shoot commercials in our apartment,” Danielle said. “We’d put the kids to sleep, push furniture out of the way, get cheap lights and get a model to pose.”

For the next couple of hours, Danielle will give orders, demonstrate multiple poses, fix makeup and hair, change the music playing in the background (going between Michael Jackson and the soundtrack to Dirty Dancing), adjust the camera angle, pour paint on her model, order wardrobe changes (a pair of silver heels in particular), make sure that paint doesn’t get tracked onto the bare floor (something at which she isn’t entirely successful), and about a dozen other things. She will argue a few times with Kyle Walling, a friend from Tampa who is now part of the Jacques staff, about angles and placement and just how much paint to use.

In the past, Jonathan did the shooting for Jacques while Danielle worked behind the scenes, often helping the models with placement and posing, as well as makeup, hair and wardrobe. But she feels that her influence went beyond what she did on set. On Jonathan’s website, filled with photos taken for Jacques and other publications, Danielle clicks through a seemingly endless gallery of women posing half-nude in dark hotel rooms or in the middle of suburban lawns or stretched out in the backseats of retro cars. In every image, Danielle finds a piece of herself.

“That’s my skirt, my garter belt, my bra,” she said, pausing on each photo. “That’s our house, that’s our neighbor’s house. That’s the hotel we liked upstate. I styled this one and did makeup.”

Personal stories abound in the photos. Places they lived and stayed, the strip club at which she worked before modeling, the life she led that became the inspiration for hundreds of images.

“People don’t realize how much of me is in Jonathan Leder,” she said, eyes fixed on the screen, taking in every girl splayed out on a couch or pressed against a window with a vacant look on her face or her underwear bunched around her ankles. And then Danielle returns to the shoot, seating herself in the corner as the second round of paint pouring begins, eyes once again fixed.

***

The porn magazine in the digital age is a dying breed. The soft focus and grainy photos that grace the pages of Jacques have long been replaced in the adult industry by glossy sheets and online photo sets. Even the venerable Playboy has seen its circulation numbers and advertising revenue dwindle.

“That whole genre of magazines has seen its heyday way back in the 1980s,” said Dr. Samir Husni, the director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi School of Journalism and an expert on the magazine industry. “It used to be that the number one category from 1986 to the mid-1990s was sex. We had more new sex magazines started in that category than any other.”

These days, companies like Playboy and Penthouse are struggling to compete with the Internet. After all, when you can get the same product for no money and in no time at all, why pay for the paper product? And yet that is precisely why Husni believes that Jacques can make it in the industry.

“When you have a magazine like Jacques, which takes a step backward, they have a better chance of surviving,” he said. “They go after that artistic appeal, which differentiates them from a magazine like Hustler or Penthouse. It gives them that collector’s feel. Nudity is an art, and as long as they stay within the artistic appeal, they will have a future.”

Yet for other reasons, Jacques’ future is unclear. Legal ownership of the magazine is disputed between Danielle and Jonathan, each of whom claims sole possession. There have been threats of lawsuits, but they have so far remained just that.

“There won’t be a Jacques,” Jonathan said. “She can’t continue without me. She never had anything to do with it. She can’t do it. She’s not capable.”

“He can make all his threats,” Danielle said. “He can sue me. They’re empty. I’m moving on with my magazine. Let him cling onto the old as much as he can. Without the magazine, he’s nothing.”

For now, Jacques still exists. Danielle’s plan is to get a new website up and functioning soon, as well as rent an office somewhere in Manhattan. If that can all come together, there’s a chance that Jacques could become something bigger.

“It is up to me now to move forward with this magazine and prove that we are a magazine that is here and we are going to stay,” Danielle said. “To make profit would be great. Is it my main goal? No. It’s a way for me to be creative.”

In Florida, Jonathan Leder also plots his next move. He’s continuing to work on his movie, and is debating whether to start a new magazine with Wunsch, one that continues what Jacques was and maybe even takes it somewhere new. He’ll head to Los Angeles when the movie is done with and try to make that magazine a reality.

“I’m not holding my breath on it becoming the next Playboy in terms of profit,” he said. “It’s just something I love to do.”

Why keep going with Jacques? The profit may be there, but it will take time to realize it. There are personal incentives, beliefs and ideals, but those won’t undo the adult industry’s move into the digital world or make distribution any cheaper or convince people to take a chance on a niche of a niche. It’s not quite a dream; it’s a reality with no easy answers.

“I’m not going to lie,” Danielle said. “If I cannot have this magazine to focus on, I’d be sitting in the corner crying. So I decided I’m going to take a really awful situation and turn it into a good one, take the magazine back and give my subscribers issues that they need. I just hope that they can still be supportive and bear with me on this transition.

“I’m sure most people don’t care,” she added. “They just want to look at naked people.”

Irene LoRe and her partner Pat Kelly opened Aunt Suzie’s in 1987. There were just a few restaurants in the area at the time. Crime was a part of life for those who lived in nearby brownstones. Aunt Suzie’s was a warm light at the end of a dark street.

The restaurant menu has been largely unchanged and still serves the classic Italian fare that LoRe’s mother (Aunt Suzie to nearly everyone in her life) liked to make. Meals here often include a heaping plate of pasta, large pours of wine and a giant slice of cake to finish things off. It’s comfort food before that was a trend.

When LoRe decided to open a restaurant in Park Slope she saw the crime and “drug dealers holding court on every corner.” But she also saw beautiful brownstones and “a very strong core of middle-class working people who wanted,” she said, “to see things change.

It was not easy in the early days. “The drug dealers were using the public telephones as their offices,” said LoRe. There was a particular drug dealer using the phones on the corner of 5^th Avenue and Carroll Street, right near the restaurant. LoRe marched down to Leopoldi’s Hardware and purchased hedge clippers. She paid her busboys $5 for every phone cord they clipped. The plan worked, at least for the dealer holding court at the restaurant’s corner. “We put him out of business,” said LoRe.

“A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street. A deserted city street is apt to be unsafe,” wrote Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. “Stores, bars, and restaurants, as the chief examples, work in several different and complex ways to abet sidewalk safety.” she wrote “small businessmen are typically strong proponents of peace and order themselves.”

In the mid-80s “the neighborhood was ready for a restaurant,” she said, sitting in her restaurant, which is decorated for the last time for the winter holiday season.  She’s interrupted often to help plan a holiday party for current and past employees, and to speak to nearly every customer who walks in.

Those customers have lots of dining options these days. “Now we’re on to 100 (restaurants). People have discovered what we discovered 25 years ago,” LoRe said. The heavyset woman laughs wearily at this.

LoRe looks out for many of those new restaurants as the director of the 5^th Avenue Business Improvement District, a position that she will continue after closing Aunt Suzie’s. LoRe hasn’t welcomed all of the area’s additions, though. She’s fought adding bike lanes and allowing food trucks to park in the area.

She has other complaints too. There’s the city’s increasing bureaucracy— “a government who has become ferociously active.” The fines for restaurants are enough to stifle a small business, she said. “It’s time to retire.” The bureaucracy, the recession, the new restaurants and the fact that she’ll be turning 70 soon all play a role in that decision.

It’s a brave new Brooklyn, and LoRe and all the people her restaurant has touched are trying to navigate it.

There are employees like Tiffany Bricker, who has worked at Aunt Suzie’s as a waitress for seven years, and is now struggling to find a new job. “There are less jobs and more people looking,” she said. There is also more competition. There aren’t many people who are fulltime servers, like her, she said. The wait staffs in local restaurants, she added, are now “people who are professionals who had to get the job.”

Like Leopoldi’s hardware, LoRe got much of her more traditional restaurant supplies from local vendors.  Brooklyn Beer is on tap. The coffee comes from D’Amico Foods, a small family-owned business that’s been in Carroll Gardens since 1948. The meat comes from A. Stein Meat Products, which has been around for 60 years.  Aunt Suzie’s pasta comes from Queen Ann Ravioli and Macaroni, pasta producers in Bensonhurst since 1972. The owner, George Switzer, often volunteered to make deliveries to Aunt Suzie’s himself when things were busy at work. The restaurant was among many small businesses he used to work with. The restaurants he sees doing well now are part of big companies. “It seems you have to partner up to survive,” he said.

Switzer can “count on one hand the amount of small restaurants” that he works with now. Soon the count will be one fewer.

A view of the Brooklyn Bridge from Brooklyn, on April 19, 1939 (Credit: Associated Press)

In the beginning there was Walt Whitman’s “Brooklyn Ferry.” Then came Henry Miller’s Williamsburg. The Brooklyn Bridge was Hart Crane’s, the Brooklyn accent Thomas Wolfe’s.   Truman Capote and Paula Fox wrote their version of the Heights. Jonathan Lethem and L.J. Davis tapped onto 1970s brownstone Brooklyn. Paul Auster owned Park Slope.

Brooklyn isn’t only a place where writers live. It’s a place writers write about.  It has been so for over 150 years. Some say there’s nothing special about that: writers write about many different locations. New York, like many great cities, has been the setting of countless novels, plays, and poems. Yet Brooklyn stands out. The New York Public Library catalogue lists 328 novels labelled “Brooklyn Fiction,” barely less than “Manhattan Fiction” (386 books). Its collection includes only 91 “Bronx Fiction” novels, 50 “Queens Fiction” books, and a mere 12 works of “Staten Island Fiction.”

Though there isn’t a school of Brooklyn literature, there is a “Brooklyn writer” brand. From Miller to Hubert Selby to Pete Hamill, the authors who have lived or live there have contributed to the creation of a Brooklyn writer myth. “Brooklyn is a home for novelists,” says Eric Simonoff, a literary agent from the borough. “For some reason, it’s become a gravitation pole.” So much so, in fact that it stimulates as much fascination from the outside world as it does skepticism from the so-called Brooklyn authors. The title of  Colson Whitehead’s essay, “I Write in Brooklyn. Get Over It,” feels self-explanatory.

There is no shortage of Manhattan writers: in fact, they are the ones who come to mind at the thought of “New York literature.” Manhattan is a symbol of the City’s promise: new beginnings, success, the American Dream. It is the apotheosis of the American city as Theodore Dreiser pictured it in “Sister Carrie,” a novel about a young country girl making her way up the social ladder in the big city.

The Bronx, on the other hand, has long been known for inspiring Ogden Nosh’s two-liner poem “The Bronx? No thonx!” Though it has been the setting of some praised pieces of literature -Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of Vanities”, Don De Lillo’s “Underworld”- it hasn’t been a recurrent theme in fiction. Brooklyn’s literary tradition is something all its own, both separate from New York/Manhattan fiction, and more established than any writing devoted to the other boroughs.

***

Why Brooklyn, then? What is it about the borough that has turned it into a character of fiction? It’s a loaded question: the idea of a muse, like that of inspiration, tends to make authors cringe. “There’s no right pen, no right place,” says Joshua Henkin, the head of the creative writing program at Brooklyn College and author of the novel “Matrimony.” “I’m very suspicious of inspiration: if I didn’t live in Brooklyn, I’d still be writing.”  Still, Henkin’s upcoming novel happens to be partly set in Brooklyn. The only reason for that, he says, is that he has settled there. He’s also written about the Upper West Side (where he grew up), and about California (where he used to live and teach.) Authors are supposed write about what they know, period.

The argument, however, goes only so far. At a recent talk at Columbia University, the British novelist Zadie Smith, whose mother is Jamaican, said that it would be “really boring” if she could only write about half-Jamaican half-British girls raised in London. The same logic applies to a novel’s setting. It would be really boring if authors could roam no further than the places they have lived. Or rather, it would be really boring if they set their works in places where they live, just because they live there. Place isn’t always a pretext for a story, it sometimes is the story. The Brooklyn Bridge, for instance, has become an unofficial poetry landmark  — a place that, like it or not, inspires. It only took a three-month-stay in New York for Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovski to devote some famous verses to the span:

“As a crazed believer enters a church,
retreats into a monastery cell, austere and plain
so I, in graying evening haze
humbly set foot on Brooklyn Bridge.

…

it stretches on cables of string
to the feet of the stars.

I stare
as an eskimo gapes at a train,
I seize on it
as a tick fastens to an ear.
Brooklyn Bridge—
yes….
That’s quite a thing!»

Hart Crane did live in Brooklyn, in a flat overlooking the East River (he said it was “the finest view in all America”) where he composed a long poem to “The Bridge”… But Jack Kerouac was a Manhattan resident, and wrote the “Brooklyn Bridge Blues” while living in Florida. Even Colson Whitehead, who says there’s nothing special about writing in Brooklyn, devoted a passage of his “Colossus of New York” to those “various anchors” that “hold the island together so that it won’t drift away.” The bridge is a first exit to Brooklyn, a sign of the separation from the City, away from its magnitude..

Nor does the bridge stand alone among inspirational Brooklyn icons. Hubert Selby (“Requiem For a Dream”), and Maggie Estep (”Flamethrower”) have imagined stories in Coney Island. The long-gone Dodgers were captured by Mariane Moore’s verses and remembered by Pete Hamill (“Snow in August”).

There are, of course, autobiographical elements in some of the most powerful stories about the borough.  Jonathan Lethem’s “Fortress of Solitude” evoked his childhood in Boerum Hill of the 1970s: Dylan, the main character, is one of three “white kids… in public school” (his mother “believes in public school”) who get regularly “yoked” by the other children from the projects on Wyckoff street. It is a cathartic novel – a rememberance of the foundational period of his life. Paula Fox, who moved to the same neighborhood in 1967, uses her novel “Desperate Characters” to capture the lives of a terrified white childless couple living a little too far from Brooklyn Heights, and a little too close to crime and poverty.

Taken together, the novels speak to what is perhaps the key, beyond nostalgia and iconic settings, to the Brooklyn literary tradition: the tension that comes when two million people of varying ethnicities, races, and classes live close together in an urban landscape that is forever in flux. This is where Brooklyn has provided such rich material time and again.

Evan Hughes, the author of a detailed history of  “Literary Brooklyn,” believes the borough’s urbanism has played a role in establishing it as a place for fiction. Brooklyn, he explains, is the ideal city as envisioned and described by Jane Jacobs, the great writer, thinker whose seminal work “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” helped refine how Americans think of cities, how they should look and how they can work.

Her harsh – and at the time, heretical — criticism of “rationalist” planners like Robert Moses led her to establish what she called “four generators of diversity” essential for sustaining a neighborhood’s vibrancy: “mixed uses” (a place that is both commercial and residential), short blocks, buildings of various ages and states of repair, and population density. Hughes says Brooklyn has stayed true to those four criteria. The different levels of income of its residents, the different ethnicities present in the borough, the “human scale” of its buildings has allowed a “miniaturization” of the world.

By contrast, Manhattan is all in length: smaller and crammed, pointing upwards to the sky. It isn’t a place where you take the time to look up, or at the people around you. The island’s density means anonymity. Although Brooklyn is the most populous borough of New York, it looks human scale. Its population spreads across a seemingly endless expanse of three story homes, and apartments on top of small shops. There is more air between the houses, and between the people, too. Brooklyn conveys a sense of neighborhood lacking in Manhattan. People know each other, and each other’s stories. “In Brooklyn,” Hughes says, “you can write about your neighbor.”

Paula Fox’s experience of Brooklyn when she first arrived in Boerum Hill is reflected in a review of L.J. Davis’s “A Meaningful Life:”  

“I discovered something in the passing weeks and months, the singularity, the charm of the borough; its tree-lined streets and gardens, its distinctive neighborhoods that sometimes changed by the block, and then changed in a different way when the old working-class or slum populations moved out and new ones (from all over the US and Europe too) moved in; young people, house-mad, scraping paint off marble fireplaces and mahogany banisters, overjoyed to leave asphalt Manhattan for what was, most importantly for some, a true dwelling, as true as a dwelling can be in a country, in a world, that shifts and slides as if on sand.”

A century earlier, the borough’s diversity was already part of its appeal for Walt Whitman, “the grandfather of literary Brooklyn” according to Hughes. During Whitman’s lifetime, Brooklyn evolved from a rural environment to the third biggest city in the country. It was the home of the “everyman,” a place where you could feel closer to ordinary people. And indeed “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” shows Whitman’s fascination and longing to belong in this micro-society on the other side of the East River:

“I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many
generations hence,

I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is.
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd…”

Aside those crowds, the “Brooklyn microcosm” also works as a narrative backdrop because of the abstraction it allows. The Brooklyn Paul Auster describes, for instance, is often an excuse for a plot focused on introspection and character psychology rather than geography or social issues. As Hughes points out, Auster is open about this – in his novel “Ghosts” he writes: “the address is unimportant. But let’s say Brooklyn Heights for the sake of the argument.”  Likewise, “Sunset Park” takes place in a foreclosed house facing Green-Wood cemetery but is really a story about missed opportunities: it does not have to be set in Sunset Park, it just happens to be. Some details are “Brooklyn-branded” like the “Hospital for Broken Things,” a shop where one of the characters fixes manual typewriters and old radios. It is hipster enough to be a real place, somewhere east of Prospect Park – it works in Brooklyn, but it could be somewhere else. What the borough really brings to the novel is universality: because the story happens in Brooklyn, it could happen anywhere.

In that sense, Brooklyn stands for the prototypical American metropolis. While Manhattan’s gigantism confines its evocative power to the confines of the island, the images Brooklyn brings to mind are transferrable. What happens in Brooklyn doesn’t have to stay in Brooklyn; it could take place in Chicago, Boston, or Philadelphia.  A home to the “everyman,” it also represents “everycity,” though it is only a part of one. And as a symbol, it gains from being Manhattan’s second best — a way into one of the cities that, for generations, has served as a magnet for the ambitious, the creative and the artistic.

***

Still, Hughes says he was expecting more current fiction dedicated to the borough when he started researching “Literary Brooklyn.” Some young authors – Haley Tanner (“Vaclav and Lena”), Kate Christensen (“The Astral”)– have recently published novels set here, but Hughes says the volume of Brooklyn literature is decreasing. Part of this may be linked to the fact that in some areas of the borough, the “tension” between people from different ethnicities and levels of income is dissipating. The Jane Jacobs ideal of small buildings inhabited by people from contrasting backgrounds becomes harder to fulfil as the Brooklyn real estate grows more expensive. The borough becomes static as it turns into a place for owners, not renters. When people settle, the tension goes away.

The cultural tradition of the borough, albeit a significant factor of Brooklyn romanticism, can also be overwhelming for aspiring writers. As the Brooklyn-born author Sara Gran put it in a “New York Times” essay sarcastically titled “Call It Booklyn,”

“Most writers get to approach middle age knowing that as they get old and dull and run out of interesting things to write about, at least they can return for inspiration to the halcyon days of childhood. But everyone else has already written about my halcyon days, because everyone has already written about Brooklyn.”

It is hard to create new things when it looks like everybody has arrived – or that the excitement and tension and uncertainty of the new is over. “I’m not seeing young writers discuss Brooklyn as a muse,” says Chad Bunning, the manager BookCourt, a bookstore in Cobble Hill. For him, Brooklyn serves other purposes. It’s necessary to be removed from a place or a situation to write about it.  “There’s something about this place that allows writer’s perspective, and great writing takes perspective,” he adds. Brooklyn, if nothing else, seems to be a good place for writers formulate their thoughts. Partly because its cultural community is emblematic, and partly because it is a comfortable place to live in.

“You can’t untangle Brooklyn from the past 100 years,” says Eric Simonoff, the literary agent. With Brooklyn comes history, culture, and yes, an uncanny amount of writers. There is nothing about the air of the borough that pushes authors to write, but it is rare to have such a concentration of people sharing the same occupation.

“A writer of fiction has a marginalized place in society,” Evan Hughes says. “It’s nice to have a little tribe. There aren’t so many places in the world where that community happens.” The act of writing itself – sitting and putting the words down- does not change because of place: it is draining, it can feel foolish, it doesn’t always pay the bills and it does invite friends and relatives to ask about a real job — wherever it takes place. But Brooklyn offers writers the possibility of feeling less self-conscious, and maybe a little less irrelevant, together. And perhaps that is all inspiration stands for.

As writers (and bankers) fill the borough, a new -richer, hipper- Brooklyn appears. It has a new dynamic: in many parts, it is not the working-class borough it used to be, but it remains a place of creation. A place, away from Manhattan, where art, be it lucrative or not, is still an appeal for many. That alone positions the borough a bridge and a world apart from Wall Street — there is tension still.  But capturing the change may take time. Living in a vibrant cultural community may not feel all that special, Hughes says, but in retrospect the nostalgia may kick in. A few years from now, Brooklyn may well be a new generation’s moveable feast.