Brooklyn's beauty is based in its broad evolution, like much of New York City. From borough to borough, from distinctive enclave to distinctive enclave, New York City manages to absorb the cultures, languages and customs of its inhabitants, whether that pertains to a colony of native New Yorkers or a pack of West Indian, Mexican Irish, German, Scandinavian and Italian immigrants. The ever-changing neighborhood dynamics exemplified the area's fortitude... until recent times... until the prices of luxury condos, high-end meals and dainty alcoholic beverages equaled or exceeded the cost of the same in Manhattan.

"Brooklyn Is Now Officially Over: The Ascendance of Brooklyn, the Lifestyle, Above All Else," an article published in The New York Observer, passionately responded to a The New York Times article, which happily described an artists' commune in Ditmas Park that housed a group of "idealistic twentysomethings willing to forgo the solitude and serenity of a studio apartment for the stimulation of living with other like-minded individuals."

The Observer writer called BS on that depiction, and instead offered that the "artists" were producing "branded content for corporate sponsors." BKLYN1834, a new media company, claiming to sell the "borough's image beyond its border" is one of those corporate sponsors. The media company, true to corporate America's practice, applied the trend of co-opting radical, revolutionary, cool, and anti-establishment ideals and images, and employing them to sell everything from cell phones, to t-shirts, to cars.

Brooklyn's longstanding brand, one that's fueled by history drawn from music, literature, legends and film; one that's busy with graffiti, art, large cuts of pizza, bagels and the colorful activity of its inhabitants, has been taken hostage. BKLYN1834 illustrates the influx of wealthy "artistic" residents, who draw in bourgeois luxury goods, high-cost cafés and bars, and dog parks, as mentioned in Spike Lee's lively spiel about the gentrification in Brooklyn. Talented artists have been replaced by parasitic clones, who feed off of brave ideas, authenticity and the concept of a certain lifestyle. The difference between the two, as stated in the Observer article, is the same difference between "a lifestyle that sells art and art that sells a lifestyle."

The Brooklyfication of Brooklyn, it's metamorphose into the temple of consumption, has led to a transformation marked by a downturn in diversity -- something that the borough is best known for. White residents increased 30 percent over the last ten years, in the zip codes encompassing Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, and parts of Bed-Stuy and Williamsburg within ten short years. The borough is now the second most expensive city to live in the U.S, second only to Manhattan, while the borough's poor have only become poorer.
The qualities that made Brooklyn an alluring brand are now things of myths and bedtime stories; the reality is much more contrived and expensive, and quite a bit paler.