On Facebook, Neighborhoods as They Once Were

Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

OLD STOMPING GROUNDS Philip Anthony Franco, second from left, founder of a Facebook page on old Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and other members.

By JED LIPINSKI

Published: September 30, 2011

WHEN she and her husband moved out in 1980, Kathy LaPolla DeStefano was not at all happy with Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

“The neighborhood was starting to go down the toilet, honestly,” Ms. DeStefano, 56, an elementary school teacher, said over the telephone from her home in Coconut Creek, Fla. “There was a lot of drugs and crime. It was an unsafe place to raise a family.”
But lately she can hardly stop reminiscing about the Williamsburg of her youth, back when Pete’s Candy Store and Union Pool, now barrooms, were selling candy and pool supplies. The reason? She discovered a Facebook page, created expressly for Williamsburg natives, called “The Neighborhood: Who Says You Can’t Go Home?”
“I’ll be up commenting on people’s posts until 3 in the morning,” Ms. DeStefano said. “I’m like, ‘Kathy, you have to stop this!’ ”
New York City neighborhoods have always been in nonstop flux, but many are now being frozen in time on Facebook, where current and former residents have banded together to post photographs, documents and other memorabilia of their neighborhoods as they used to be. These virtual sections of the city have drawn thousands of contributors, particularly in parts of Brooklyn like Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Flatbush and Carroll Gardens, where zoning laws, gentrification and shifting demographics have rapidly transformed the streets.
Facebook, of course, is already famous for bringing together former classmates and friends. These pages, however, are being used not only to share memories, but also to vent about change. “The point about the old New York City neighborhoods is that they provided real social cohesion,” said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University. “People shared responsibilities for watching each others’ children, or for keeping an eye on the property. And though new trends in urbanism try to recapture those old communal feelings, you can never recreate what emerged organically.”
Except, perhaps, online. Take Flatbush, where a neighborhood page was begun in February 2010, titled “I Loved Being a Kid in Flatbush, Brooklyn During the 70s and 80s!!!!” It drew more than 10,000 members in its first eight months, before a flood of requests to swap memories from earlier decades prompted the creation of a new page, simply called “I Loved Being a Kid in Flatbush.”
“Our mission was to give people an oasis in this world we live in now, which can be so stressful, and return them to a world where we loved living,” said Luisa Brandofino Lisciandrello, who founded the site with her boyfriend, Joe McGinn. Both 46 and natives of Flatbush, they now oversee the page’s third incarnation, “Flatbush Phantums,” from their apartment in Park Slope.
In addition to uploading pictures of Flatbush’s bygone pizza joints and movie houses, they post “Blasts From the Past” like Supremes songs and “Starsky & Hutch” episodes, evoking the feel of the old days. They raffle off local goods; this summer, a cheesecake from Junior’s restaurant on Flatbush Avenue went to a former resident living in Pennsylvania.
Some contributors have even formed nonvirtual friendships. At a reunion last year organized by the site’s founders, a bond formed among five middle-aged women who grew up in Flatbush but had never met. They are now known as the Fabulous Flatbush Five. “I gave them that name,” said Mr. McGinn, laughing. “They’re inseparable. When somebody from the page dies, they all show up at the funeral together.”
Though nostalgia typically stems from pleasant memories, the occasional unpleasantness of growing up in Brooklyn has its own bonding potential. This is clear in “Old School Carroll Gardens,” a Facebook page created in 2009 for the area’s “original inhabitants.” (After the page attracted a number of viral advertisements, its creators started a new page, “I Lived in Carroll Gardens When We Still Called it Red Hook.”)
When the Gowanus Canal was declared a Superfund site in March, one member recalled how the summer heat brought out “the sweet smell of the canal!” Another remembered crossing a bridge over the canal 40 years ago and seeing the “neon green water.”
“Didn’t Telly Savalas jump into that during a filming of ‘Kojak’? ” she asked.
“I don’t remember that, Susan, but maybe that’s why he’s dead!!” another replied.
Other pages seem to have been formed in solidarity against a wave of new residents. “For all the true Greenpointers born and raised,” reads the description of “Greenpoint Natives,” a page established in March 2010 that now has 1,563 members. “Too many blogs and pages out there for the ‘new’ Greenpointers,” it explains.
Amid eulogies for departed businesses, including Truntz’s butcher shop and the Socrates restaurant, commenters protest the changes brought about by “hipsters,” “yuppies” and real estate developers since a rezoning in 2005 that has revitalized the once-derelict north Brooklyn waterfront and quickened gentrification. “These people are killing the old neighborhood!” one member wrote last year. Another evinced the hope that locals would weather this latest phase and “somehow turn it around to the old neighborhood it once was.”
The recent influx of newcomers to Williamsburg was what motivated Philip Anthony Franco to start “The Neighborhood: Who Says You Can’t Go Home?” in September 2009.
Mr. Franco, 37, had moved to Middle Village, Queens, shortly after his wedding six years earlier, because “the houses were getting too expensive.”
He returned to Williamsburg regularly to visit his mother, but became increasingly perturbed by the area’s new residents. “I was driving down Graham Avenue and one of the new persons walked right in front of my car, lost in his iPod,” he said. “My first post was a rant complaining about the so-called hipsters.”
Since then, the page has attracted more than 2,220 members and 5,500 posts, which amount to a kind of random, vibrant history of Williamsburg over 40 years, punctuated by hundreds of exclamation points and “lols.”
“It’s like we’re all sitting around on lawn chairs on the sidewalk in summertime, laughing and telling stories,” said Maria George, 47, a former resident now living in Ridgewood, Queens.
Though some contributors still live in Williamsburg, most have left, because of the rise in crime during the 1970s or the rise in rents since the late ’90s. Many say they would move back, if only they could afford it.
Patrick Drexler, 51, who left Williamsburg for New Jersey after he and his wife divorced in 2001, said he longed to live again near Lorimer Street, where his grandfather made his home after emigrating from Germany in 1892. Mr. Drexler recently asked his ex-wife, who still lives there, what kind of place he could get for about $1,200 a month.
“She told me: ‘What are you, crazy? You couldn’t get a parking place for that now,’ ” he said.

New York Times