Everybody Must Get ’Stoned

CLAD WITH FAÇADES of Triassic-Jurassic sandstone rock, pink upon quarrying and deepened by exposure into mantling shades of umber, russet, and wenge, the serried ranks of brownstone Brooklyn have for more than a century been a prize contested by various strivers: upwardly mobile European emigrants, Black people from the West Indies or Harlem or the South, the “brownstoner” yuppies who fled Manhattan beginning in the 1960s, millennials of means. They are a fortress from modernity that must be preserved. A cry of protest against the ugliness of the gray five-over-one. Renting an apartment in one requires StreetEasy overpayment, extortionate broker’s fees, or, miraculously, eagle-eyed scouting from a blurry Craigslist photo—a myth to be talk-shouted at bars, droned dutifully on Hinge dates. But the achievement of renting an apartment in a brownstone converted into a multiunit dwelling will always be a little ambiguous. This is because, in its stolid, bourgeois repose, the brownstone telegraphs to the careful observer that there’s only ever one way to hack it in America:…