Brooklyn Calling: From the Beastie Boys to Bill de Blasio

Last night, as I left Bill de Blasio’s victory party at the Park Slope Armory, the sound of the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” was streaming through the loudspeakers, which seemed fitting. When I first moved to New York, almost thirty years ago, the white-boy rappers were setting out to put their home borough on the rock-music map. (At the World, in Alphabet City, I was lucky enough to see some of their early gigs.) And now, another Brooklynite, not a native but not exactly a blow-in, either, has won the biggest landslide by a non-incumbent since the five boroughs were united, in 1898.

Much can be said, and has been said, about de Blasio’s remarkable rise to City Hall. But the Brooklyn angle still bears inspection. In many ways, de Blasio embodies the transformation of a borough that was long considered a poor relation to Manhattan, a place many Brooklynites still refer to as “the City.” For a while now, it’s been clear that much of New York’s cultural and artistic energy has moved across the East River, vacating Manhattan—or the lower two-thirds of it—to its fate as an urban theme park and empty nesters’ retreat. Meanwhile, the home of Rhea Perlman, Vic Damone, and Mike Tyson has become an international brand name, a signifier of all things cool and urban. (“Trés Brooklyn,” the French say.) It has Jay Z, the Nets, and enough artisanal restaurants to feed an army of hipsters with Civil War beards. And now Brooklynites are setting the city’s political agenda.

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