PEREGRINE GERETY
Close to the geographic heart of the borough, Midwood is in many ways the quintessential Brooklyn neighborhood. Leafy and pleasant residential streets run from north to south, with a mix of housing types ranging from single-family homes and brownstones to larger apartment buildings. These residential streets are intersected by east-west running commercial avenues. This closely interwoven matrix of housing and business ensures that residents need only walk a short distance to meet all of their day to day needs. Midwood’s walkability is further enhanced by the presence of the Q Train, which stops at Avenue J and Avenue M. The block circled in red represents a typical shopping street.
The poor quality of Google Earth’s rendering of the block demonstrates a fundamental truth about neighborhoods like Midwood: they are often overlooked. With the notable exception of DiFara Pizza (home of the best pizza in all of Brooklyn, and therefore the best pizza in the entire world), you will not find Midwood restaurants written up in foodie magazines, nor will you find aspiring musicians playing at Midwood venues. The neighborhood is neither wealthy nor trendy; it is a middle-income, everyday neighborhood that shows no signs of gentrification. But Midwood is strong, and in studying its composition, we can find many patterns that could serve us well as we plan and design resilient cities for the future. Medium height, high density, mixed use blocks like the one pictured above allow for a very high quality of life relative to resource use.
Heavy pedestrian traffic dominates and defines this mixed use block on Avenue M, helping the businesses in its shop fronts to thrive. These businesses (from left to right) include a bank, a nail salon, a cafe and juice bar, a beauty center, a children’s clothing store, and a pharmacy. Upper floors above the shop fronts provide space for both offices and housing. A girls’ yeshiva occupies the large building on the southeast corner of the block along 13th Street. The west side of the block (along 12th Street) consists entirely of housing. Several single family homes with basement apartments below face diagonally out onto the northwest corner of the block, while further to the south on 12th street there is a collection of small, three story apartment buildings. All building fronts are flush (or nearly flush) with the sidewalk, opening up the center of the block to a quiet, courtyard-like space with a number of trees and private gardens.
Despite the strength and resilience engendered by its form, Midwood, like the rest of Brooklyn, lies under the threat of climate change. In the autumn of 2012, Hurricane Sandy struck New York with the deadliest, most destructive flooding in the city’s history. Sea levels nine feet above normal flooded deep inland and literally flattened a number of coastal neighborhoods. In the ensuing decade, widespread flooding has become increasingly common. As with every other facet of climate change, flooding in Brooklyn carries with it both an element of inevitability and an element of uncertainty: inevitability that flooding will increase, and uncertainty about how much time the city and its residents will have to adapt to rising sea levels. The lowest lying areas of Brooklyn (such as Coney Island and Brighton Beach) will almost certainly be lost to the sea by the end of the century, but for more central neighborhoods like Midwood, everything depends on speed: the speed at which we achieve carbon neutrality, the speed at which we adapt our infrastructure, and the speed at which sea levels rise. All we can say for certain is that the Brooklyn that our great-grandchildren know will be wholly different from the Brooklyn that we know.
Perhaps the most troubling question regarding climate change and the future of Brooklyn is not what happens this century, but instead what happens after 2100, when our climate models end. Even if we achieve drastic reductions in carbon emissions within the next decade, we are now locked in to several more centuries of sea level rise. The last time the Earth was as warm as it is today, sea levels were eight meters higher than they are now. With temperatures continuing to rise, it’s reasonable to expect that future sea levels will eventually surpass even this, perhaps submerging nearly all of Brooklyn, even central neighborhoods like Midwood. It’s difficult to think about Midwood’s long term future in the light of climate change and maintain hope, so these images are a challenge to hopelessness. In them, the block on Avenue M has been transformed to welcome the rising water. The bottom floors of the buildings have been replaced by arches and vaults to allow water to rise, fall, and flow freely without interrupting the lives of the inhabitants. The residents have planted mangrove forests (visible in the background) and vines along building surfaces. In the third image, we see that Midwood’s population has not been displaced; they have adapted and continue to thrive in the transformed neighborhood. They ride amphibious buses, take gondola taxis, paddle, and play in the streets that have become canals.