Emergent City, directed by Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg, was on at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema from April 25 through May 18, 2025.
When filmmakers Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg first took their cameras to the Sunset Park waterfront in the fall of 2017, the sixteen-building complex known as Industry City was already on track for a real estate glow-up. An investment group anchored by Jamestown Properties—the same developer that in 2011 bought Chelsea Market for $790 million, successfully filed for a rezoning of the area, and seven years later sold the property to Google for $2.4 billion—had decided to cash in on Brooklyn’s popularity. The consortium had gotten a deal on the buildings by buying them from the city right after Hurricane Sandy. Out of warehouses and manufacturing facilities, it fashioned “spaces” for “creatives” that feel like an uncanny simulation of a real place, disconnected from the rest of the city even though the views are right there, and so is the water. After awarding the first leases to artists and l…