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 Americ…
Everybody Must Get ’Stoned
