Unfulfillment Centers

When I tell people I live in Red Hook, they invariably mention Sunny’s, Pioneer Works, the Lobster Pound. Yet for all these manifestations of piecemeal gentrification, it took a pandemic to precipitate the neighborhood’s most dramatic metamorphosis, from an odd corner of Brooklyn into a last-mile distribution hub, consisting of three Amazon megawarehouses. As of October—Superstorm Sandy’s tenth anniversary—only one of these was fully operational, teeming with Black and brown gig-economy workers loading their SUVs with groceries and provisions earmarked for the doorsteps of better-off Brooklynites. It’s an insidious epilogue—not just to Sandy, but also to Amazon’s headline-making HQ2 saga, in which political backlash drove the corporation to cancel plans for a massive office campus in Long Island City. Looking back on the scandal with post-Covid hindsight, things appear to have worked out to Amazon’s benefit: Like other tech giants, it’s scaling back its offices, and like other retailers, it’s beefing up its infrastructure. Indeed, the other two “fulfillment centers” …