The Starbucks Is Not the Problem
Williamsburg’s Starbucks (image: NY Eater)
Outer-borough hackles have been raised in the past several weeks over a familiar player in the ongoing War on Gentrification—Starbucks. Much has been made of two new Brooklyn locations: one in Williamsburg, which opened this week, and one in Crown Heights, set to open this fall in the first floor of a brand-new apartment building. In Brooklyn, Starbucks is the Angel of Death of the Hip, casting its long shadow across neighborhoods of Authentic Cool, corporatizing everything it touches. In reality, Starbucks may be a buzzard at worst, arriving long after the fight.
The refrain on gentrification in Brooklyn hardly changes: Everything was better a year (or two) ago, and (more felt than said) gentrification is everyone who moved in after they did. It’s a hypocritical stance, but familiar. It’s also a relative stance—one- and two-year residents of Crown Heights may throw up their hands over a Starbucks at Franklin and Eastern Parkway even as they happily reserve a table at Barboncino or Mayfield.
Not that there’s anything wrong with an oyster happy hour, necessarily, but let’s remember which came first. A Starbucks is not an outpost, a base camp for a higher climb. If anything, a Starbucks is a high-water mark for a certain degree of change in a neighborhood, from industrial hinterland to nouveau bohemia, or from working-class enclave to middle-class playground.
What Starbucks outrage represents is resistance to a certain kind of neighborhood change: “chainification,” the neon, strip-mall, late-stage iteration of what’s been happening this whole time, but a little more visually obvious. And so Billburg is become the LES. But in all fairness, at this point in the evolution of New York’s culinary culture (read: artisanal snootiness), a Starbucks is a Dunkin‘ Donuts with wifi and better seating. In a world where everything costs $4, and a new, more labor-intensive brew method is invented every other week, Starbucks is the opiate of the masses.
Coffee epicures have long made the case that a Blue Bottle (or a Café Grumpy, or a Gimme! Coffee, or a Momofuku Milk Bar, all of which are chains in their own right) is preferable to a Starbucks or a Dunkin‘ Donuts solely on the level of Craft (the patron saint of artisanal food), and they aren’t wrong. I’d rather spend $4 on Blue Bottle coffee than Starbucks coffee, just on the basis of taste, but the fact remains that there was $4 coffee to be had in Williamsburg and in Franklin-Avenue Crown Heights long before the Starbucks came. Put another way: If you come, they will build it.
It’s tidy to think of Starbucks as a final straw, but it’d be more honest to call it a final brick—a final brick in a brand-new, high-rise, luxury building, on the first floor of which is a chain coffee retailer.
Follow John Sherman on Twitter @_john_sherman.
