The effect is startling, particularly when passersby glimpse the cool creaminess of the refurbished interior, their eyes slowly focusing on a telltale lump of brown leather. It’s a bag, maybe the perfect bag, gleaming behind a broad, pretty expanse of prohibitive storefront glass.

But the door’s open. Magic. It’s a boutique. A Brooklyn boutique!

Gentrifiers are hyper-attuned to wavelets of gentrification. Grouchy Brooklynites declare, with characteristic condescending toughness, a neighborhood completely transformed after the first five white people invade. But most still obsess over the changes that occur after their own momentous arrival. It’s a preoccupation even now, decades into Brooklyn’s massive absorption of Manhattan émigrés (the trendily tired and poor), who keep scrambling over the bridge, battered futons and pregnancy tests in tow.

So certain bourgeois-ification milestones— the first rehabbed Italianate brownstone, the first French restaurant, the first house to go for a million—inspire endless gossip, pride and, increasingly, a good deal of panic. These days, locals wring hands over even grander things: the first Hollywood celebrity, the first brownstone to go for four million, the first time you spy a red tour bus racing down DeKalb Avenue, loudspeaker blaring God knows what sights to see.

STUART & WRIGHT IS FORT GREENE'S first truly expensive (by Manhattan standards) clothing store, even though the neighborhood has been well invaded by rich people for the last six to 10 years. When a store is hawking $658 boots (Loeffler Randall, brown leather embossed to look like anaconda), something has changed on the street.

Stuart & Wright faces Moe’s, the popular bar. Just down the street is B.A.M., and Frank’s, and what was once the quick and cheap Cambodian Cuisine before it abandoned Brooklyn for a safe spot on the Upper East Side. On a recent Thursday evening, well-dressed people of various colors and only beautiful shapes spilled out onto the sidewalk in front of Stuart & Wright, celebrating its opening, cups carefully filled with clear alcohols: vodka, gin, white wine. A few cases of red had been canceled at the last minute, but the clothes—periodically caressed by the guests like a mother would her child—were still left out on display and vulnerable to drunks.

“I can’t believe this party is happening in Fort Greene,” said one of the owners, Alec Stuart, standing outside with the smokers. He’s slight, wears thick-rimmed glasses and recalls a cuter version of the cute, young Woody Allen. His partner, Celeste Wright, dressed in a black-and-white-striped dress and enviable heels, her black curls boinging about her head, was inside greeting the large crowd of friends, well-wishers and fashion types. Two women, not together, wore black stockings in exaggerated fishnet under white cotton dresses. Men wore hoodies and hairstyles. Later, Mr. Stuart said that the partygoers, a merry bunch, came from as far as Atlanta, Philadelphia and Manhattan. A WWD reporter was rumored to be in the mix.

Together, the owners accurately represent the population—Fort Greene evangelists would also say spirit—of this neighborhood, where detail-oriented hipsters and blasé sophisticates enjoy almost remarkable (and aesthetically pleasing) racial diversity and economic homogeneity. (Except, perhaps, when the bad kids smoke weed on the corner and the Fort Greene moms’ listserve erupts in e-mails of despair.)

The proprietors exhibit a pointedly friendly attitude—as they explained, they live in the neighborhood, they like the neighborhood, they want neighbors to feel comfortable in their obviously upmarket space. “No doorbells or anything like that,” said Ms. Wright. Many of the labels are Brooklyn-based, too. Elsewhere, though, in Brooklyn boutiques with dramatically simple names (Bird, Butter, Diane T.) undoubtedly meant for hushed tones, the shopgirls palpably strive for Manhattan’s special brand of haute-consumerist frigidity. What a relief for Fort Greene that they got Stuart & Wright.

“Welcome to the neighborhood,” said a female customer in red fashion-sneakers and straightened hair to Mr. Stuart. “We’re happy to have you,” the customer also said, breezing through the store.

“A.P.C.—they have this in Soho,” said another shopper, appropriately disheveled, a baby slung around her neck. A.P.C. is a store on Prince Street. An A.P.C. winter cap at Stuart & Wright costs $84. An A.P.C. scoop-neck sweater costs $209. “And now it’s here,” replied her male friend/husband with ho-hum satisfaction, leading her out the door.

RELIEF IS ONE REACTION to a boutique. The other might be anger. And somewhere in between lies pure anxiety: For a certain type of Brooklyn renter, $200 black-and-white flannel dresses (Samantha Pleet, the I Woke Up With a Lumberjack), $410 forest green silk-chiffon café dresses with puckered sleeves (Lyell) and $378 wedges (Loeffler Randall again—so pretty!) are merely a reminder that the party is over.

Women who live in Brooklyn chose “creative fields” over law or Wall Street. The boutiques make them regret that decision, even though they tailor themselves to the tastes of those who made it. From the lushly lit storefronts of Smith Street, Seventh Avenue and now Lafayette, the message is: Even freelance graphic designers deserve Diane von Furstenberg.

Ms. Wright’s retail philosophy suggests that most Brooklyn shoppers will select two or four items a season that they’ll splurge on. She’s probably right. But many of those doing the splurging on just one item—say, that $550 Lyell navy peacoat—likely can’t afford it. They just tell themselves that living in Brooklyn, an ostensibly money-saving venture, entitles them to some pat-on-the-back spending, a reward for having relocated to this special place.

“I heard 80 percent of the customers live on South Portland Street,” said a long-time Fort Greene resident with frustration. Her claim was confirmed only jokingly by Ms. Wright, who acknowledged that it sometimes seems that way. South Portland Street stretches from Fort Greene Park to Flatbush Avenue, a wonderland of trees and quiet and multimillion-dollar brownstones with ground-floor rentals that can cost as much as $2,500 a month and whose owners require prospective tenants to make more than $100,000. People who own on South Portland can afford the $800 Olivia bag by Gryson, with its braided handles and large front pockets made out of “slightly distressed” calfskin worked into the shape of large cannolis. Those shelling out all of their salaries for rent—and now, anaconda boots—are lost in the sort of deep denial and self-deception only possible when engaged in en masse.

Speaking of the masses: What’s so great about shopping in Brooklyn is that you won’t look like everyone in Manhattan—just everyone in Brooklyn. (No vintage-store rummagers here!)

Not far away from Stuart and Wright, the Boerum/Cobble Hill shopping circuit wends its way down Atlantic Avenue and over to Smith and Court streets. For years now, Butter and Diane T. have served as the area’s major shopping destinations. Bird, on Smith Street, recently opened to a stunning crowd of anxious women who’d frequented the Bird on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope and were grateful to have their very own Bird branch just minutes from their stoop.

On a sale day at these places, happily, Brooklynites find themselves surrounded by people like themselves—young people without savings, without down payments, but with some really awesome $200 Theory black pants, marked down just a tad. On those rare occasions (holidays, really), the closet fashionistas—women who can’t afford expensive clothes, know only vaguely the difference between See by Chloé and Isabel Marant, yet work in industries where they’re subjected daily to cruelly trendy rich chicks—bare their teeth and wield their credit cards. (They could cut you with those things.) Otherwise, they’d have to wait until Mom or Dad pops in for a pity visit.

“Bird’s a great place to meet women,” said a male friend at a house party in Prospect Heights where fig tart was served.

THE WOMEN ENDURE MORE THAN male attention in their quest for expensive-looking pants. In a neighborhood so small, shop owners can deduce immediately—maybe after you’ve visited once or twice or three times—whether or not you’re a buyer. At least in Manhattan, you have anonymity on your side. But in Brooklyn, as the real-estate agents say, you sure are treated like a familiar face.

“They have this great black dress,” said a friend on the way into Bird in Park Slope. “But it’s like $600 or something. They never used to have dresses that expensive.”

In the store, the black dress was on the mannequin—short-sleeved eyelet, fitted to the knees, flesh revealed in all the right places, the sort of “teaspoon of skin” sexiness that fundamentally conservative women wear to feel bold and kicky. It was made by Mayle, said the clerk, a label based on Elizabeth Street. Instead, Elizabeth Street came to me.

The Park Slope Bird is friendlier than the Smith Street Bird, but they say hello. The women at Diane T., on Court Street, a hodgepodge of Marc Jacobs and Diane von Furstenberg and other things you can get at Bloomingdale’s, won’t even assist you in the dressing rooms once you’re classified a promiscuous browser with shallow pockets. There are exceptions: the owner of Dear Fieldbinder on Smith Street exudes sweetness; ditto the overworked, admirably all-business duo at the shoe store Soula, and the complimentary ladies at Sir, on Atlantic.

And then there’s Butter. Butter, a seven-year-old Atlantic Avenue shop with frosted glass, a doorbell and, now, an outlet store down the street, is the most intimidating of all. Step inside and hold on tight. One death stare from a Butter employee can make you feel like a servant with chocolate-smeared fingers fumbling in the Queen’s closet. It is worth noting that Times critical shopper Alex Kuczynski wrote that the owners, Eva and Robin Weiss, “could not have been nicer.” According to the first Ms. Weiss, the most popular labels are Dries Van Noten, Rick Owens and Kristensen. Rogan is the top-selling denim. Many of the dark clothes hang formlessly, drapily, like funeral shrouds. When you put them on, they suddenly take shape, and it feels like a favor.

The evening I spoke with Eva by phone (she was about to take off to Milan), she said that three celebrities had been in the store that very day, but she wouldn’t disclose their names (“I want to respect them”). She disagreed that the store was daunting.

“We’re the same people we always were. We treat everybody the same,” she said. “It’s a nice store—my background is in design, and I want my store to look perfect. But I’m still the same person. I’m still wearing the same jeans I was wearing two years ago.

“I want the store to be fun,” she continued. “Some of my customers say, ‘Oh, I feel so underdressed’—but they’re kidding, you know?”

A shopgirl’s scorn is a shopgirl’s scorn; that’s what high fashion is for. But that scorn might also reflect the shopper’s shame of aspiring without means, of the folly of believing that consumption in Brooklyn is somehow different from the rank materialism of Manhattan. The excitement that surrounds the arrival of a new Brooklyn boutique masks a lazy entitlement particular to the expensively educated but professionally romantic: Thank you for bringing the rewards to my doorstep; maybe someday I’ll afford them. Then these rich people with no cash continue to rent and have brunch and shop.

“I live in Ditmas Park,” Ole Sondresen, the architect who fixed up Stuart & Wright, had told me at the party. I said he should prepare for an onslaught of new neighbors fleeing brownstone Brooklyn for cheap housing. He looked at me, raised eyebrows telegraphing the message: There, too, it’s already too late.

The effect is startling, particularly when passersby glimpse the cool creaminess of the refurbished interior, their eyes slowly focusing on a telltale lump of brown leather. It’s a bag, maybe the perfect bag, gleaming behind a broad, pretty expanse of prohibitive storefront glass.

But the door’s open. Magic. It’s a boutique. A Brooklyn boutique!

Gentrifiers are hyper-attuned to wavelets of gentrification. Grouchy Brooklynites declare, with characteristic condescending toughness, a neighborhood completely transformed after the first five white people invade. But most still obsess over the changes that occur after their own momentous arrival. It’s a preoccupation even now, decades into Brooklyn’s massive absorption of Manhattan émigrés (the trendily tired and poor), who keep scrambling over the bridge, battered futons and pregnancy tests in tow.

So certain bourgeois-ification milestones— the first rehabbed Italianate brownstone, the first French restaurant, the first house to go for a million—inspire endless gossip, pride and, increasingly, a good deal of panic. These days, locals wring hands over even grander things: the first Hollywood celebrity, the first brownstone to go for four million, the first time you spy a red tour bus racing down DeKalb Avenue, loudspeaker blaring God knows what sights to see.

STUART & WRIGHT IS FORT GREENE'S first truly expensive (by Manhattan standards) clothing store, even though the neighborhood has been well invaded by rich people for the last six to 10 years. When a store is hawking $658 boots (Loeffler Randall, brown leather embossed to look like anaconda), something has changed on the street.

Stuart & Wright faces Moe’s, the popular bar. Just down the street is B.A.M., and Frank’s, and what was once the quick and cheap Cambodian Cuisine before it abandoned Brooklyn for a safe spot on the Upper East Side. On a recent Thursday evening, well-dressed people of various colors and only beautiful shapes spilled out onto the sidewalk in front of Stuart & Wright, celebrating its opening, cups carefully filled with clear alcohols: vodka, gin, white wine. A few cases of red had been canceled at the last minute, but the clothes—periodically caressed by the guests like a mother would her child—were still left out on display and vulnerable to drunks.

“I can’t believe this party is happening in Fort Greene,” said one of the owners, Alec Stuart, standing outside with the smokers. He’s slight, wears thick-rimmed glasses and recalls a cuter version of the cute, young Woody Allen. His partner, Celeste Wright, dressed in a black-and-white-striped dress and enviable heels, her black curls boinging about her head, was inside greeting the large crowd of friends, well-wishers and fashion types. Two women, not together, wore black stockings in exaggerated fishnet under white cotton dresses. Men wore hoodies and hairstyles. Later, Mr. Stuart said that the partygoers, a merry bunch, came from as far as Atlanta, Philadelphia and Manhattan. A WWD reporter was rumored to be in the mix.

Together, the owners accurately represent the population—Fort Greene evangelists would also say spirit—of this neighborhood, where detail-oriented hipsters and blasé sophisticates enjoy almost remarkable (and aesthetically pleasing) racial diversity and economic homogeneity. (Except, perhaps, when the bad kids smoke weed on the corner and the Fort Greene moms’ listserve erupts in e-mails of despair.)

The proprietors exhibit a pointedly friendly attitude—as they explained, they live in the neighborhood, they like the neighborhood, they want neighbors to feel comfortable in their obviously upmarket space. “No doorbells or anything like that,” said Ms. Wright. Many of the labels are Brooklyn-based, too. Elsewhere, though, in Brooklyn boutiques with dramatically simple names (Bird, Butter, Diane T.) undoubtedly meant for hushed tones, the shopgirls palpably strive for Manhattan’s special brand of haute-consumerist frigidity. What a relief for Fort Greene that they got Stuart & Wright.

“Welcome to the neighborhood,” said a female customer in red fashion-sneakers and straightened hair to Mr. Stuart. “We’re happy to have you,” the customer also said, breezing through the store.

“A.P.C.—they have this in Soho,” said another shopper, appropriately disheveled, a baby slung around her neck. A.P.C. is a store on Prince Street. An A.P.C. winter cap at Stuart & Wright costs $84. An A.P.C. scoop-neck sweater costs $209. “And now it’s here,” replied her male friend/husband with ho-hum satisfaction, leading her out the door.

RELIEF IS ONE REACTION to a boutique. The other might be anger. And somewhere in between lies pure anxiety: For a certain type of Brooklyn renter, $200 black-and-white flannel dresses (Samantha Pleet, the I Woke Up With a Lumberjack), $410 forest green silk-chiffon café dresses with puckered sleeves (Lyell) and $378 wedges (Loeffler Randall again—so pretty!) are merely a reminder that the party is over.

Women who live in Brooklyn chose “creative fields” over law or Wall Street. The boutiques make them regret that decision, even though they tailor themselves to the tastes of those who made it. From the lushly lit storefronts of Smith Street, Seventh Avenue and now Lafayette, the message is: Even freelance graphic designers deserve Diane von Furstenberg.

Ms. Wright’s retail philosophy suggests that most Brooklyn shoppers will select two or four items a season that they’ll splurge on. She’s probably right. But many of those doing the splurging on just one item—say, that $550 Lyell navy peacoat—likely can’t afford it. They just tell themselves that living in Brooklyn, an ostensibly money-saving venture, entitles them to some pat-on-the-back spending, a reward for having relocated to this special place.

“I heard 80 percent of the customers live on South Portland Street,” said a long-time Fort Greene resident with frustration. Her claim was confirmed only jokingly by Ms. Wright, who acknowledged that it sometimes seems that way. South Portland Street stretches from Fort Greene Park to Flatbush Avenue, a wonderland of trees and quiet and multimillion-dollar brownstones with ground-floor rentals that can cost as much as $2,500 a month and whose owners require prospective tenants to make more than $100,000. People who own on South Portland can afford the $800 Olivia bag by Gryson, with its braided handles and large front pockets made out of “slightly distressed” calfskin worked into the shape of large cannolis. Those shelling out all of their salaries for rent—and now, anaconda boots—are lost in the sort of deep denial and self-deception only possible when engaged in en masse.

Speaking of the masses: What’s so great about shopping in Brooklyn is that you won’t look like everyone in Manhattan—just everyone in Brooklyn. (No vintage-store rummagers here!)

Not far away from Stuart and Wright, the Boerum/Cobble Hill shopping circuit wends its way down Atlantic Avenue and over to Smith and Court streets. For years now, Butter and Diane T. have served as the area’s major shopping destinations. Bird, on Smith Street, recently opened to a stunning crowd of anxious women who’d frequented the Bird on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope and were grateful to have their very own Bird branch just minutes from their stoop.

On a sale day at these places, happily, Brooklynites find themselves surrounded by people like themselves—young people without savings, without down payments, but with some really awesome $200 Theory black pants, marked down just a tad. On those rare occasions (holidays, really), the closet fashionistas—women who can’t afford expensive clothes, know only vaguely the difference between See by Chloé and Isabel Marant, yet work in industries where they’re subjected daily to cruelly trendy rich chicks—bare their teeth and wield their credit cards. (They could cut you with those things.) Otherwise, they’d have to wait until Mom or Dad pops in for a pity visit.

“Bird’s a great place to meet women,” said a male friend at a house party in Prospect Heights where fig tart was served.

THE WOMEN ENDURE MORE THAN male attention in their quest for expensive-looking pants. In a neighborhood so small, shop owners can deduce immediately—maybe after you’ve visited once or twice or three times—whether or not you’re a buyer. At least in Manhattan, you have anonymity on your side. But in Brooklyn, as the real-estate agents say, you sure are treated like a familiar face.

“They have this great black dress,” said a friend on the way into Bird in Park Slope. “But it’s like $600 or something. They never used to have dresses that expensive.”

In the store, the black dress was on the mannequin—short-sleeved eyelet, fitted to the knees, flesh revealed in all the right places, the sort of “teaspoon of skin” sexiness that fundamentally conservative women wear to feel bold and kicky. It was made by Mayle, said the clerk, a label based on Elizabeth Street. Instead, Elizabeth Street came to me.

The Park Slope Bird is friendlier than the Smith Street Bird, but they say hello. The women at Diane T., on Court Street, a hodgepodge of Marc Jacobs and Diane von Furstenberg and other things you can get at Bloomingdale’s, won’t even assist you in the dressing rooms once you’re classified a promiscuous browser with shallow pockets. There are exceptions: the owner of Dear Fieldbinder on Smith Street exudes sweetness; ditto the overworked, admirably all-business duo at the shoe store Soula, and the complimentary ladies at Sir, on Atlantic.

And then there’s Butter. Butter, a seven-year-old Atlantic Avenue shop with frosted glass, a doorbell and, now, an outlet store down the street, is the most intimidating of all. Step inside and hold on tight. One death stare from a Butter employee can make you feel like a servant with chocolate-smeared fingers fumbling in the Queen’s closet. It is worth noting that Times critical shopper Alex Kuczynski wrote that the owners, Eva and Robin Weiss, “could not have been nicer.” According to the first Ms. Weiss, the most popular labels are Dries Van Noten, Rick Owens and Kristensen. Rogan is the top-selling denim. Many of the dark clothes hang formlessly, drapily, like funeral shrouds. When you put them on, they suddenly take shape, and it feels like a favor.

The evening I spoke with Eva by phone (she was about to take off to Milan), she said that three celebrities had been in the store that very day, but she wouldn’t disclose their names (“I want to respect them”). She disagreed that the store was daunting.

“We’re the same people we always were. We treat everybody the same,” she said. “It’s a nice store—my background is in design, and I want my store to look perfect. But I’m still the same person. I’m still wearing the same jeans I was wearing two years ago.

“I want the store to be fun,” she continued. “Some of my customers say, ‘Oh, I feel so underdressed’—but they’re kidding, you know?”

A shopgirl’s scorn is a shopgirl’s scorn; that’s what high fashion is for. But that scorn might also reflect the shopper’s shame of aspiring without means, of the folly of believing that consumption in Brooklyn is somehow different from the rank materialism of Manhattan. The excitement that surrounds the arrival of a new Brooklyn boutique masks a lazy entitlement particular to the expensively educated but professionally romantic: Thank you for bringing the rewards to my doorstep; maybe someday I’ll afford them. Then these rich people with no cash continue to rent and have brunch and shop.

“I live in Ditmas Park,” Ole Sondresen, the architect who fixed up Stuart & Wright, had told me at the party. I said he should prepare for an onslaught of new neighbors fleeing brownstone Brooklyn for cheap housing. He looked at me, raised eyebrows telegraphing the message: There, too, it’s already too late.

Moments later, the thin man’s girlfriend was beside him, just checking in, just saying hi, just seeing what he was up to. He pointed to his purchase, tentatively, which was being carefully sliced and packaged behind the counter.

“A quarter of a pound of Portugal Serpa,” he told her, in a whisper, as if not to disturb this bit of cross-cultural commerce. She nodded, or said “good”—whatever, she was satisfied—and left him to his further responsibilities, perhaps somewhere in “Ham, I Am” Land, home of the preposterously un-Italian Iowa Organic Prosciutto and the cheerfully pornographic Cherry Wood-Smoked Bone-In Iowa Ham, or toward the giant round fish station, mobbed all around by a heaving, panting mass of Brooklynites. DeLillo’s supermarkets were dignified in comparison.

Even a couple months after it opened in May, the pious whispers can still be heard on the F train, recounting visits to the Fairway like pilgrims bearing witness: “Have you been to the new Fairway yet?” As though the Cathedral of Notre Dame had just been erected in their backyards.

A visit to Fairway on a weekend day in Brooklyn these days is a redundant proposition. A weekend day is Fairway day. And in the religious calendar that has formed among the Brooklyn faithful, for whom a certain connoisseurship of groceries serves as a stand-in for the contemplative life, Fairway Day is a holy day of obligation.

There are gourmet Belgian beer battles and nuzzling around the nectarines, fighting in front of the Israeli salad and whining before the baby carrots. There are loving couples to envy and squabbling couples to not; nuclear families wielding torn-out recipes. That person smeared in free samples you glimpsed in the nightmarish Make Your Own Granola station will probably pop up again in the Totally Environmentally Apocalyptic Plastic Packaged Dried Fruits, Nuts and Candy aisle. Shoppers eye each other—coveting either their bounty or their light load or something else.

Never was there such a garish incubator of aspirational thoughts as the destination grocery store (and this is perhaps Brooklyn’s first real one), and a day spent there is a window on your neighbors’ domestic lives, how they might behave in their own kitchen.

It’s stressful. So there’s a lot of communication, and even more reading. Fair-Maidens and Fair-Lads will spend hours taking cues and studying up on, say, chocolates—sorting the Toffifee (Germany) from the Valrhona (France), the Hachez (Germany) from the Scharffenberger (German-American), and all of it, hopefully, from the unfortunate Plantations (Ecuador). The honey, too, presents a bevy of international options for mostly unilingual folks: Ours Brun, Miel de Fleurs, Waben Quell, Marco Polo. “Provencale Honey” read one section heading, and a yuppie-ish, Duke lacrosse type, grabbing at the elegant jars with meaty hands, actually seemed to know what this meant.

He’d better, because in the family-friendly Fairway, he probably had someone to answer to.

Men, it seemed, entered Fairway at their peril, engaging in what must be endless checkpoints of tiny relationship tests. Over here was a tattooed, CBGB T-shirt-wearing and shaved-head dad, overcome—hypnotized, really—by the gourmet beer department. His wife chattered on, exasperated, with their two kids, trying to distract them while Pa loitered. “I’ll check this out for a buck 69,” he said in an “oh yeah” voice to no one in particular, cockily placing the St. Peter’s Cream Stout into their cart. CBGB then examined the Hitachino, a nest beer white ale and Japanese Belgian-Style Winner of Medals in Beer Competitions in the U.S. and the U.K. “Are you happy?” said the kid. “Yes, and why?” said the mom. “Because you love me,” said the kid. Dad then picked up some Magic Hat, something with “fruity apricot notes” for $9.49, and just about tore himself away until, “Ohhhh, wait a second—goodness!”—it was the Grand Cru of the Emperor, another Belgian ale in a swanky big bottle.

Over there, a madras-wearing man, pleased with himself for locating two boxes of cookies, danced down the aisle toward his pregnant ladyfriend’s cart, where she, horrified and no longer chirping orders, held a magazine clipping in midair. A hipster couple, still carrying only the two avocados I’d seen them with 20 minutes ago, paused nearby. “See this?” the messy-haired tall man said to his pretty blue-wearing girlfriend softly, and gently touched something Ziploc-related. “Mmm-hmm,” she murmured, and pushed him on, like a mental patient.

“Do you like this?” asked another young husband. He was holding a value pack of toilet paper. His wife looked at him blankly. “What do you mean, do I like it?” she said. He looked at the Charmin, then at her. “It’s so … big.”

She walked away, past where a man and a woman, both slender-in-black and back-to-back and posed like Degas’ bronze tiny dancer, gazed upon the racks as if at a stuffy art opening. She pondering the aluminum foil, he musing on toilet paper. Angel Soft, Scott, Charmin—Aloft!

What was all the fuss? Their objets d’art weren’t even something respectably promiscuous like ravioli, or at all as terrifying as the spice rack—where later I’d overheard a neurotic thirtysomething sputter at an employee trapped on a ladder next to him: “Basil! Basil! Basil!”

“Yes, I will follow all your rules,” said a small father to his 3-year-old son, effectively obliterating all disciplinary work no doubt implemented by his wife, which is what she gets for sending them off alone to do the grocery shopping.

“You making hamburgers or dogs?” yelled Woman to Man.

“Frogs?” Man yelled back.

It was the couple in Vitamins, engaged in a frantic search for melatonin, that seemed sanest.

THE RED HOOK FAIRWAY IS ANOTHER SIGN that the brownstone-ish Brooklyn of now is the Upper West Side of the 1970’s/80’s. The two neighborhoods in their respective heydays have much in common: media intellectuals, burgeoning careerdom, the terror of the firstborn, Woody Allen by way of Meghan Daum wood floors. And now a big, glorious supermarket with lots and lots of ridiculously named stuff.

But, presumably, even during that dismal decade, the Upper West Side’s Fairway had something that the three-month-old Red Hook Fairway, by now in the throes of its own giddy weekend routine, mostly does not: single people.

Not just the romantically uncoupled, but the solo, the alone. And, in fact, despite their similarities, if a dim-witted New Jersey teen happened upon both Fairways on the same Sunday, she’d think the two boroughs were two different planets. One’s shades of the New York she’d imagined, populated by the self-sufficient and self-absorbed, the other reminiscent of the suburb she grew up in: home to the reliant and reliable, with a few Manhattany traits—the extraordinary luxury of neuroses, the curse of aspirations—thrown in.

Uptown, Fairway looks a bit like you’d expect from a New York supermarket. Schlumpy-dressed people, most of them alone, battle their way through the poorly lit, low-ceilinged aisles, forlorn baskets holding the half-dozen eggs and slender cartons of orange juice they’ll easily cart home to small apartments that are no doubt just blocks, maybe one subway stop, away. Just like stopping off at the deli to pick up a few things—but yummier things, perhaps cheaper things—where your Lebanese deli man couldn’t give a shit what you’re buying. Anonymity still reigns, and so it’s an unspoken rule, like omertà, that buying only a six-pack of Stella and a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Oatmeal Cookie Dough, maybe some butter, isn’t to be viewed as pathetic.

Not so in Red Hook. To get to this slowly flowering desert of a neighborhood—it looks a bit like comeback/dying cities such as Wilmington, N.C.—Brooklynites must trek to the end of the earth. The neighborhood doesn’t even have a subway stop, and so everyone drives, packs up their partner, their baby, their mom (lots of twentysomethings’ moms at Fairway), and loads them all into the four-door for a protracted Fairway Day, during which they buy as much crap as humanly possible.

Supermarkets have always served as little fishbowls of American society—society at it’s most intense and vulnerable and unnerving. So it’s a wonder what sort of mythology Brooklynites will create about this New York.

It won’t be the New York of Annie Hall, or Breakfast at Tiffany’s (American Psycho would be virtually unrecognizable).

Considering how much of the media, and the literary world, lives out here, it’s likely this Brooklyn will be the one dimwitted New Jersey kids hear about from now on: this New York of families, of domesticity and dependence.

Not the other one, the New York of aloneness and no strings attached.

This is the other thing to know about the new Fairwayified outer borough—everyone drives, and if you don’t, no tamarind paste for you.

“How did you get here?” my friends Caleb and Peter asked when I ran into them outside of the Brooklyn Fairway on a recent Sunday.

“I walked,” I said, sweating in what felt like an equatorial sun, even though I’d just left the ungodly, inhuman cold of the store. “Yeah.”

“Wow,” they said, concerned and sweet. “Well, if you want to wait, we could give you a ride. We have our car.”

They were on their way in, and they knew I was on my way out, and yet it didn’t seem odd that I might want to wait around while they shopped in order to grab that precious ride back to Fort Greene. It’s really far. But I thanked them and explained I was taking the 61 bus and miserably made my way out of the parking lot, a war zone of RAV4’s and other people’s children.

Public transportation can get you to Fairway. The 61 bus, the F train of Brooklyn buses, winds a lovely path from Williamsburg, through Clinton Hill and Fort Greene, into downtown Brooklyn and Boerum Hill and Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens right up to a couple blocks from the Fairway in Red Hook. But no one else got off there, and no one with Fairway bags got on to take it home either, because most everyone on the 61 bus gets off at the projects.

Which seem worlds away from this Brooklyn. At least, further than Serpa, Extramadura or wherever it is in Belgium that beer is made Grand Cru.

“He’s an institution,” said one. “He’s a matchmaker!” said another. And: “He’s insane!”

“I swore I wouldn’t speak to you tonight,” Mr. Gerovitz told me, with his characteristic acidity. He dressed natty-casual in a blazer and jeans, his delicate-framed glasses perched atop his head—Mr. Gerovitz has one of those blank-slate poker faces instantly transformed by a grin. The broker implied that the evening was supposed to be about pleasure, not business. Allan M. Gerovitz—the Man Who Owns Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, some say—was trying to throw himself a party.

Most New Yorkers regard real-estate brokers as gutter scum; Brooklynites revere Mr. Gerovitz with a bizarre, often fearful obsessiveness. For over 20 years, Mr. Gerovitz has been the one-man co-op board for a string of random, pretty and pricy floor-throughs that have one big thing in common: They’re all inhabited by people deemed “good” by Mr. Gerovitz in buildings owned by landlords deemed “good” by him, too.

A neighborhood of Good People! Even with so many lawyers, so many media people, so many jewelry makers! It is Mr. Gerovitz who has overseen the change of neighborhoods into Manhattanized paradises for the bespectacled.

“It’s like stepping into another dimension. You think there must be some place where all the decent apartments are hiding,” said the novelist Susan Choi, who showed up at the party later. “When we worked with Allan, we thought, ‘Oh, this is where they are!’”

It works like this, or once upon a time it did: You decide to move to Brooklyn. Someone says, “Go see Allan.” Their confidence impresses you, and you think, “Yay!” And then come the more difficult instructions: “But be very nice, and say I referred you and— Jesus Christ!—be on time. He’ll only help you if he likes you.”

You will be offended in advance and return to your comfortable despair. (What indignity—to be rejected by someone you desperately want to give money to!) Then they’ll say again, “But, really, go see Allan.”

And perhaps you too shall rent 700 square feet near the subway. After a bit of ritual suffering, that is. (I know. He found me my first place.)

Mr. Gerovitz had divided his party into two shifts: landlords and renters. “You don’t often see a flamboyant guy like him hanging out with Italian guys, but there they are,” a former client said. At the party, men in floral button-downs and shorts and ladies in print dresses and pumps milled around, basking in their “I Own Property” confidence. A table of presents was packed—wine, cards, pretty gift baggies, some from as far as Martha’s Vineyard. A large blue hand-painted banner declared, “It’s About Us!” Signed: “AMG.”

The invitation had also declared “It’s About Us!” (The front read “The Party You’ve Requested.”) “Us!” apparently referred to all of Prudential Douglas Elliman, the enormous real-estate firm that bought mom-and-pop Marilyn A. Donahue Real Estate, Mr. Gerovitz’s longtime home, a few years ago.

But celebrating Allan, who endured quite a few changes during the corporate transition (technology, seminars, suits), seemed to be the point. At such a party, Mr. Gerovitz could show his new co-workers the result of two decades of work. And he could show the neighborhood that his man-of-the-street image hadn’t gone the way of Corcoran.

“He’s more like a matchmaker,” said Elizabeth Betteil, who’s lived on Henry Street for seven years. She and her husband admitted they’d rather charge under-market rates, as Allan suggests, than work with any other broker. “We told him we wanted a single female; he came back with a man with a child. He’s found us perfect tenants. Allan’s the reason I work in the industry.”

Laura James, a fund-raiser who’s owned in Carroll Gardens since the 80s, also invoked Cupid. “He’s the only broker I give an exclusive to; I love all my tenants,” she said. “Julianna Margulies was a tenant of mine.”

At some point in the evening, a younger and more boisterous group of people had gathered together, talking loudly, throwing their heads back, gesticulating in exaggeratedly joyful ways, every now and then pretending to dance. These were the Douglas Elliman brokers. Marilyn Donahue, Mr. Gerovitz’s old boss, dutifully led me to their new boss, Dottie Herman, the C.E.O. of Elliman. She was tan and blond, and dressed in a white blazer and white heels; a zebra-ish print skirt swung somewhere in between.

“Tell her how many rentals you do!” someone said to Mr. Gerovitz. “One hundred and fifty a year!”

“The cell phone! He has a cell phone!” Ms. Herman said of Mr. Gerovitz, who someone had dragged over.

“I never used a cell phone before. I hate cell phones,” he said.

“One hundred and fifty apartments?” I said.

“One hundred and twenty, 150,” he said.

“What’s normal?”

“Thirty,” another guy said.

“Is this true?”

“He’s an icon. An icon!” Ms. Herman said. “In rentals.”

Real-estate brokers are chatty and tiring, so I sat down next to three middle-aged native Brooklynites. They were not going to the French bistro Bar Tabac. “I’m hungry, you hungry?” “I’m hungry.” “We’ll go to the dinah.” “The appetizas didn’t quite do it!” “You got a big appetite!” “Where will we go?” “The dinah! I said, the dinah across the street!”

A young lawyer named Rachel Zublatt showed up. Before finding her and her boyfriend Andrew their apartment on Baltic between Court and Smith, Mr. Gerovitz said to her: “I think you’re a strong couple—you’re a little too loud and he balances that.” Andrew, standing nearby, pretended to choke to death.

“We canceled a trip to Napa to take this apartment,” Ms. Zublatt said gravely.

A FEW DAYS LATER IN HIS OFFICE, Mr. Gerovitz was only too happy to dwell on his customers’ satisfaction. And, as if it has been staged, a woman eventually shuffled in bearing gifts: She’d painted him a small watercolor. “See, this is why I needed a new apartment. I do these on my floor,” she said.

“Look at this! Look at this! Right in front of the reporter!” he exclaimed, grinning broadly. Mr. Gerovitz happily pointed out his new gray-blue Theory blazer, found after three and a half hours at Bloomingdale’s, and sipped on a Dr. Pepper. He merely smiled when asked his age. At one point, he put his bare feet on the desk. Books were lined up: The Tipping Point, Change the Way You See Everything, Ken Blanchard’s Raving Fans, Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi. When I had first stepped into Mr. Gerovitz’s office, as a client, some years ago, the desk had been decorated with thank-you letters. They were gone.

“A couple of years ago, I threw about 100 letters out,” he said, citing depression. But Mr. Gerovitz eventually revealed two binders stuffed with thank-you letters; he encourages clients to write in. One was from Ms. Choi, printed on New Yorker letterhead and titled “Annals of Apartment Hunting.” Another was from the novelist Rick Moody (“P.S. Book collectors pay money for my signature, so save this letter.”)

Mr. Gerovitz laid out his philosophy. He gives weight to referrals and repeaters. He demands that clients see no other brokers. When people come to see him, they must pass “sit-down time,” in which he figures out why they’re moving and what their needs are: And the couple counseling? “I don’t want to see one person dragged into an apartment that won’t be good for them,” he said. Lastly: “The most important thing,” he said, “is that people don’t overspend so they can save money and buy eventually.”

As for landlords, he’s stopped working with them if they aren’t up to snuff. If they reject someone with a baby, “I read them the riot act,” he said. Once, he told a landlord to spend more time with her noisemaking child. “It’s nice that everybody doesn’t feel they have to gouge,” he said. “It’s going to be pretty boring around here if everybody pays over $2,000 in rent—that’s not the kind of neighborhood I want to live in.

“I like to like the customer. And if somebody is like this”—he turned his nose up with his pointer finger—“it doesn’t work for me,” he said, and acknowledged his own blue-collar roots. He’s from Bloomfield, Conn.

But what about the yelling?

“Yeah,” he said, matter-of-factly. “It’s fair, as long as you’re tough on everyone. I want to believe your story, to learn what I’m hearing is real. So I push a little bit.”

THE INITIAL VISIT TO MR. GEROVITZ'S involves a combination of demands, suspicion and odd insults. And some people—frightened, angry—never go back.

“There’s something Machiavellian about what he does,” said one former client, who added that the broker “worked a fucking miracle” for him. “It’s 60-40: his own craziness and the Machiavellian thing. His way of testing your reliability is to press you, and it isn’t pleasant …. A lot of kids who come and want to live in Brooklyn, and they think they know everything about the world because they read Gawker, and they want a real-estate broker to be a certain way—his method goes against that grain.”

In my case, Mr. Gerovitz took note of my height (I’m tall). One meeting, he didn’t like my hat; the next, it was my skirt that disappointed him. A friend recalled the time the broker called him a “pig” in Yiddish—merely for wondering if there were any places in the neighborhood closer to his partner’s work.

But rarely is the thick-skinned Allanite disappointed with their apartment. Mr. Gerovitz is typically insightful enough to land a client a dwelling on the first try, often in mere hours and—most surprisingly in this post-gentrification depression era—for a relatively decent price. (“Suzy,” he said to me like a game-show host, “I think I have the apartment for you.”)

The referrals help. Ms. Choi hired Mr. Gerovitz on novelist Francisco Goldman’s word; Mr. Goldman, by e-mail from Mexico, expressed guilt for having not visited Mr. Gerovitz in a while. (Mr. Gerovitz is good at eliciting guilt.) Of Brooklyn, it’s tough to say which came first, the writers or Mr. Gerovitz.

But it’s true that he likes “creative types.” Mr. Gerovitz particularly loves New York Times Magazine editor Alex Star, who used Mr. Gerovitz twice, and recommended Mr. Gerovitz to New Yorker writer Alex Ross.

Mr. Ross, in turn, said that during his introductory interview with Mr. Gerovitz, he met Ted Koppel, who’d come into the office with his son. “It’s the closest I came to being a guest on Nightline,” Mr. Ross said. He recalled a bit of dialogue from the day: “Mr. Koppel, this is Alex Ross. He writes for New York magazine,” said Mr. Gerovitz. “Indeed!” said Mr. Koppel. “Uh, actually, The New Yorker,” said Mr. Ross. “Well, I won’t hold that against you,” said Mr. Koppel.

Urban legend has it that another magazine writer was thrown out of Mr. Gerovitz’s car. A couple of people suggested it was Mr. Ross (it was not). Instead, this unfortunate writer, who requested anonymity, clarified that “it was not quite that dramatic,” but that after seeing three apartments and finding them sub-par, Mr. Gerovitz did in fact say, “That’s it! You’re hopeless! Get out of my car!”

New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor endured a sort of rental bake-off with other potential clients, in which the landlord got to choose who they liked better—as they anxiously stood around in the landlord’s living room. On another occasion, back in the slightly sketchier late 90’s, Ms. Kantor, just out of college, had brought her mother along on the hunt. Ms. Kantor hesitated before jumping at an apartment that Mr. Gerovitz had shown them. “Your daughter is a princess!” Mr. Gerovitz said. “If my daughter were a princess,” Kantor mère replied, “she wouldn’t be looking in this neighborhood.”

Sadly, Ms. Kantor didn’t make it to the party, though she expressed affection for Mr. Gerovitz. Two journalism types who did show up for the late-night festivities were New York magazine editor Jared Hohlt (who also said it might have been the ubiquitous Mr. Ross who recommended him, but he’s not sure) and reporter Felipe Ossa.

“When he met me and my boyfriend, Allan declared that I was the ‘dry white wine of the relationship,’” Mr. Hohlt said later by e-mail, “which wasn’t exactly flattering but wasn’t entirely inaccurate, either.”

Mr. Gerovitz was right about my hat, too. Perhaps that’s why he did not invite me to the party, but word travels fast in his weird sub-community. That night, across the room, I spotted the woman who rents to my friends, the ones who told me to go through Mr. Gerovitz. And standing outside the restaurant later, the music having faded from Motown to the Killers, I ran into someone I’d sent along to him: Mina Mishrikey, a 28-year-old sales trader.

Inside, Mr. Mishrikey introduced me to two lawyers he’d just met: Vivian Huelgo, 33, and Emilia Sicilia, 32. “We totally love Allan,” Ms. Huelgo said. “We developed a relationship—we even asked him about single men.”

I mentioned this to Mr. Gerovitz later. “Well, you can say: I’m looking too,” he said. “I’m ready.”

“He’s an institution,” said one. “He’s a matchmaker!” said another. And: “He’s insane!”

“I swore I wouldn’t speak to you tonight,” Mr. Gerovitz told me, with his characteristic acidity. He dressed natty-casual in a blazer and jeans, his delicate-framed glasses perched atop his head—Mr. Gerovitz has one of those blank-slate poker faces instantly transformed by a grin. The broker implied that the evening was supposed to be about pleasure, not business. Allan M. Gerovitz—the Man Who Owns Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, some say—was trying to throw himself a party.

Most New Yorkers regard real-estate brokers as gutter scum; Brooklynites revere Mr. Gerovitz with a bizarre, often fearful obsessiveness. For over 20 years, Mr. Gerovitz has been the one-man co-op board for a string of random, pretty and pricy floor-throughs that have one big thing in common: They’re all inhabited by people deemed “good” by Mr. Gerovitz in buildings owned by landlords deemed “good” by him, too.

A neighborhood of Good People! Even with so many lawyers, so many media people, so many jewelry makers! It is Mr. Gerovitz who has overseen the change of neighborhoods into Manhattanized paradises for the bespectacled.

“It’s like stepping into another dimension. You think there must be some place where all the decent apartments are hiding,” said the novelist Susan Choi, who showed up at the party later. “When we worked with Allan, we thought, ‘Oh, this is where they are!’”

It works like this, or once upon a time it did: You decide to move to Brooklyn. Someone says, “Go see Allan.” Their confidence impresses you, and you think, “Yay!” And then come the more difficult instructions: “But be very nice, and say I referred you and—Jesus Christ!—be on time. He’ll only help you if he likes you.”

You will be offended in advance and return to your comfortable despair. (What indignity—to be rejected by someone you desperately want to give money to!) Then they’ll say again, “But, really, go see Allan.”

And perhaps you too shall rent 700 square feet near the subway. After a bit of ritual suffering, that is. (I know. He found me my first place.)

Mr. Gerovitz had divided his party into two shifts: landlords and renters. “You don’t often see a flamboyant guy like him hanging out with Italian guys, but there they are,” a former client said. At the party, men in floral button-downs and shorts and ladies in print dresses and pumps milled around, basking in their “I Own Property” confidence. A table of presents was packed—wine, cards, pretty gift baggies, some from as far as Martha’s Vineyard. A large blue hand-painted banner declared, “It’s About Us!” Signed: “AMG.”

The invitation had also declared “It’s About Us!” (The front read “The Party You’ve Requested.”) “Us!” apparently referred to all of Prudential Douglas Elliman, the enormous real-estate firm that bought mom-and-pop Marilyn A. Donahue Real Estate, Mr. Gerovitz’s longtime home, a few years ago.

But celebrating Allan, who endured quite a few changes during the corporate transition (technology, seminars, suits), seemed to be the point. At such a party, Mr. Gerovitz could show his new co-workers the result of two decades of work. And he could show the neighborhood that his man-of-the-street image hadn’t gone the way of Corcoran.

“He’s more like a matchmaker,” said Elizabeth Betteil, who’s lived on Henry Street for seven years. She and her husband admitted they’d rather charge under-market rates, as Allan suggests, than work with any other broker. “We told him we wanted a single female; he came back with a man with a child. He’s found us perfect tenants. Allan’s the reason I work in the industry.”

Laura James, a fund-raiser who’s owned in Carroll Gardens since the 80s, also invoked Cupid. “He’s the only broker I give an exclusive to; I love all my tenants,” she said. “Julianna Margulies was a tenant of mine.”

At some point in the evening, a younger and more boisterous group of people had gathered together, talking loudly, throwing their heads back, gesticulating in exaggeratedly joyful ways, every now and then pretending to dance. These were the Douglas Elliman brokers. Marilyn Donahue, Mr. Gerovitz’s old boss, dutifully led me to their new boss, Dottie Herman, the C.E.O. of Elliman. She was tan and blond, and dressed in a white blazer and white heels; a zebra-ish print skirt swung somewhere in between.

“Tell her how many rentals you do!” someone said to Mr. Gerovitz. “One hundred and fifty a year!”

“The cell phone! He has a cell phone!” Ms. Herman said of Mr. Gerovitz, who someone had dragged over.

“I never used a cell phone before. I hate cell phones,” he said.

“One hundred and fifty apartments?” I said.

“One hundred and twenty, 150,” he said.

“What’s normal?”

“Thirty,” another guy said.

“Is this true?”

“He’s an icon. An icon!” Ms. Herman said. “In rentals.”

Real-estate brokers are chatty and tiring, so I sat down next to three middle-aged native Brooklynites. They were not going to the French bistro Bar Tabac. “I’m hungry, you hungry?” “I’m hungry.” “We’ll go to the dinah.” “The appetizas didn’t quite do it!” “You got a big appetite!” “Where will we go?” “The dinah! I said, the dinah across the street!”

A young lawyer named Rachel Zublatt showed up. Before finding her and her boyfriend Andrew their apartment on Baltic between Court and Smith, Mr. Gerovitz said to her: “I think you’re a strong couple—you’re a little too loud and he balances that.” Andrew, standing nearby, pretended to choke to death.

“We canceled a trip to Napa to take this apartment,” Ms. Zublatt said gravely.

A FEW DAYS LATER IN HIS OFFICE, Mr. Gerovitz was only too happy to dwell on his customers’ satisfaction. And, as if it has been staged, a woman eventually shuffled in bearing gifts: She’d painted him a small watercolor. “See, this is why I needed a new apartment. I do these on my floor,” she said.

“Look at this! Look at this! Right in front of the reporter!” he exclaimed, grinning broadly. Mr. Gerovitz happily pointed out his new gray-blue Theory blazer, found after three and a half hours at Bloomingdale’s, and sipped on a Dr. Pepper. He merely smiled when asked his age. At one point, he put his bare feet on the desk. Books were lined up: The Tipping Point, Change the Way You See Everything, Ken Blanchard’s Raving Fans, Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi. When I had first stepped into Mr. Gerovitz’s office, as a client, some years ago, the desk had been decorated with thank-you letters. They were gone.

“A couple of years ago, I threw about 100 letters out,” he said, citing depression. But Mr. Gerovitz eventually revealed two binders stuffed with thank-you letters; he encourages clients to write in. One was from Ms. Choi, printed on New Yorker letterhead and titled “Annals of Apartment Hunting.” Another was from the novelist Rick Moody (“P.S. Book collectors pay money for my signature, so save this letter.”)

Mr. Gerovitz laid out his philosophy. He gives weight to referrals and repeaters. He demands that clients see no other brokers. When people come to see him, they must pass “sit-down time,” in which he figures out why they’re moving and what their needs are: And the couple counseling? “I don’t want to see one person dragged into an apartment that won’t be good for them,” he said. Lastly: “The most important thing,” he said, “is that people don’t overspend so they can save money and buy eventually.”

As for landlords, he’s stopped working with them if they aren’t up to snuff. If they reject someone with a baby, “I read them the riot act,” he said. Once, he told a landlord to spend more time with her noisemaking child. “It’s nice that everybody doesn’t feel they have to gouge,” he said. “It’s going to be pretty boring around here if everybody pays over $2,000 in rent—that’s not the kind of neighborhood I want to live in.

“I like to like the customer. And if somebody is like this”—he turned his nose up with his pointer finger—“it doesn’t work for me,” he said, and acknowledged his own blue-collar roots. He’s from Bloomfield, Conn.

But what about the yelling?

“Yeah,” he said, matter-of-factly. “It’s fair, as long as you’re tough on everyone. I want to believe your story, to learn what I’m hearing is real. So I push a little bit.”

THE INITIAL VISIT TO MR. GEROVITZ'S involves a combination of demands, suspicion and odd insults. And some people—frightened, angry—never go back.

“There’s something Machiavellian about what he does,” said one former client, who added that the broker “worked a fucking miracle” for him. “It’s 60-40: his own craziness and the Machiavellian thing. His way of testing your reliability is to press you, and it isn’t pleasant …. A lot of kids who come and want to live in Brooklyn, and they think they know everything about the world because they read Gawker, and they want a real-estate broker to be a certain way—his method goes against that grain.”

In my case, Mr. Gerovitz took note of my height (I’m tall). One meeting, he didn’t like my hat; the next, it was my skirt that disappointed him. A friend recalled the time the broker called him a “pig” in Yiddish—merely for wondering if there were any places in the neighborhood closer to his partner’s work.

But rarely is the thick-skinned Allanite disappointed with their apartment. Mr. Gerovitz is typically insightful enough to land a client a dwelling on the first try, often in mere hours and—most surprisingly in this post-gentrification depression era—for a relatively decent price. (“Suzy,” he said to me like a game-show host, “I think I have the apartment for you.”)

The referrals help. Ms. Choi hired Mr. Gerovitz on novelist Francisco Goldman’s word; Mr. Goldman, by e-mail from Mexico, expressed guilt for having not visited Mr. Gerovitz in a while. (Mr. Gerovitz is good at eliciting guilt.) Of Brooklyn, it’s tough to say which came first, the writers or Mr. Gerovitz.

But it’s true that he likes “creative types.” Mr. Gerovitz particularly loves New York Times Magazine editor Alex Star, who used Mr. Gerovitz twice, and recommended Mr. Gerovitz to New Yorker writer Alex Ross.

Mr. Ross, in turn, said that during his introductory interview with Mr. Gerovitz, he met Ted Koppel, who’d come into the office with his son. “It’s the closest I came to being a guest on Nightline,” Mr. Ross said. He recalled a bit of dialogue from the day: “Mr. Koppel, this is Alex Ross. He writes for New York magazine,” said Mr. Gerovitz. “Indeed!” said Mr. Koppel. “Uh, actually, The New Yorker,” said Mr. Ross. “Well, I won’t hold that against you,” said Mr. Koppel.

Urban legend has it that another magazine writer was thrown out of Mr. Gerovitz’s car. A couple of people suggested it was Mr. Ross (it was not). Instead, this unfortunate writer, who requested anonymity, clarified that “it was not quite that dramatic,” but that after seeing three apartments and finding them sub-par, Mr. Gerovitz did in fact say, “That’s it! You’re hopeless! Get out of my car!”

New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor endured a sort of rental bake-off with other potential clients, in which the landlord got to choose who they liked better—as they anxiously stood around in the landlord’s living room. On another occasion, back in the slightly sketchier late 90’s, Ms. Kantor, just out of college, had brought her mother along on the hunt. Ms. Kantor hesitated before jumping at an apartment that Mr. Gerovitz had shown them. “Your daughter is a princess!” Mr. Gerovitz said. “If my daughter were a princess,” Kantor mère replied, “she wouldn’t be looking in this neighborhood.”

Sadly, Ms. Kantor didn’t make it to the party, though she expressed affection for Mr. Gerovitz. Two journalism types who did show up for the late-night festivities were New York magazine editor Jared Hohlt (who also said it might have been the ubiquitous Mr. Ross who recommended him, but he’s not sure) and reporter Felipe Ossa.

“When he met me and my boyfriend, Allan declared that I was the ‘dry white wine of the relationship,’” Mr. Hohlt said later by e-mail, “which wasn’t exactly flattering but wasn’t entirely inaccurate, either.”

Mr. Gerovitz was right about my hat, too. Perhaps that’s why he did not invite me to the party, but word travels fast in his weird sub-community. That night, across the room, I spotted the woman who rents to my friends, the ones who told me to go through Mr. Gerovitz. And standing outside the restaurant later, the music having faded from Motown to the Killers, I ran into someone I’d sent along to him: Mina Mishrikey, a 28-year-old sales trader.

Inside, Mr. Mishrikey introduced me to two lawyers he’d just met: Vivian Huelgo, 33, and Emilia Sicilia, 32. “We totally love Allan,” Ms. Huelgo said. “We developed a relationship—we even asked him about single men.”

I mentioned this to Mr. Gerovitz later. “Well, you can say: I’m looking too,” he said. “I’m ready.”

Inside, there were ramps for strollers and, to the left of the pews, an entire stroller parking area. A Kolcraft and Chicco stuck out amongst the many Maclarens, like two Pintos in a cavalcade of BMW’s.

“This is crazy!” cried a mom.

“This is chaos!” cried another mom.

It was a happy chaos, and yet one worried. An encumbered stroller fell backward, its human cargo’s legs suspended in the air. Parents rushed to the rescue. A toddler standing nearby began to wail, horrified at the toppling of another’s trusted street tank.

New York State Assembly candidate Bill Batson was outside introducing himself to the eager adults, who were dressed in jeans and windbreakers and sneakers: middle-to-upper-class ready-for-anything wear. “These would be my peeps,” Mr. Batson said. And later added: “Brooklyn doesn’t need to be given a makeover. We stand within a half-mile of some of the greatest cultural institutions in the world. It’s not the place for 17 skyscrapers and a steel city.

“Brownstone Brooklyn is not a white, yuppie community,” Mr. Batson also said, and then scanned the very white crowd, which numbered over 1,400 and, according to D.D.D.B., included actress Michelle Williams.

“The folks who came to the concert have the money to do so,” Mr. Batson said. (Tickets cost $12.) A tall man slunk by carrying two kids at once—presumably to get them in for free.

(Controversy would erupt a few days later when African-American leaders who support the Atlantic Yards project called for an apology from D.D.D.B. spokesperson Daniel Goldstein after comments he made to a reporter; he later issued the apology.)

Incidentally, this was right across the street from another Ratner project, the Atlantic Terminal mall, home to Target and Designer Shoe Warehouse and wind tunnels. Construction on the nearby subway station, a hub in Brooklyn, clogged the streets; between that and the 512-foot-tall Williamsburgh building and the big, brown blocky mall, the teeny fans must’ve felt very teeny indeed. Where, oh, where was their beloved Brooklyn sky?

But spirits were high at United Methodist. Before long, a volunteer lawyer named Candace Carponter— not the founder of iVillage—took the pulpit to introduce the musical guest. “Kids, do you know how tall 60 stories high is?” Ms. Carponter said, describing the Atlantic Yards project, phasing in and out of adult-voice and kid-voice. “How many of you live in a building 10 stories high?”

“I can’t see! I can’t see!” cried a neurotic youngster in the crowd, having an anticipatory meltdown. Another overzealous toddler-fan in a striped shirt and jeans kept screaming “Yay!” at the wrong times. (Toddler-fans are a strange sight: It’s never clear whether they’re screaming and bouncing around because they actually love the musician, or because they’ve realized that when in the presence of the musician, Mommy and Daddy don’t scream at them for screaming and bouncing.)

Ms. Carponter introduced “our youngest spokesperson—my daughter,” who promptly apologized for her mother’s “boring” speech. “I don’t want Brooklyn turned into another Manhattan,” said Alia, age 12. After a few more words, she in turn introduced the actor Steve Buscemi.

“His music has ruined my life,” Mr. Buscemi, a good sport, said of Mr. Zanes. “Now, since I’ve been listening to Dan, I can’t stop cock-a-doodle-doodling in the kitchen!” And with that he started flapping his arms and legs. But it was dark and loud and everyone clearly wanted the music to start. “Dan Zanes! Dan Zanes!” chanted a grown man holding his daughter in the midst of the speeches, as if he were a disgruntled fan at a normal concert.

Then there was a great hush. Mr. Zanes, in a red suit, and a bunch of other people came trotting down the aisle, softly playing. The entire church sang along. It was like 1962 all over again. Or perhaps just 2000.

“You sound great,” the performer told the crowd, with a hint of irony. “This is going to be a wild party.”

From Del Fuegosto Diapers

Mr. Zanes, 44, a former member of the 80’s rock band the Del Fuegos, re-emerged some years ago as a “family musician.” He is now one of the marquee advisory-board members of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, along with actor Ms. Williams, her fiancé Heath Ledger and the authors Jonathan (Lethem and Safran Foer).

“Man, I didn’t know anything!” Mr. Zanes said a week before the concert, sitting at the Flying Saucer Café on Atlantic Avenue, near his Boerum Hill office, and discussing his newfound activism. A former West Village resident, he renovated and moved to a Cobble Hill brownstone seven years ago with his wife Paula, who directs TV commercials, and their daughter, Anna, now 11 and attending St. Ann’s School. He has a kind face, with crinkly eyes and a slightly devilish smile, and his trademark hair was shooting all over the place thanks to “some beeswax.”

“I was just carrying on with my life,” Mr. Zanes continued. “All I knew was that there was a stadium and Frank Gehry was gonna be designing it. It all felt inevitable. I had no idea 17 skyscrapers were going up around it. The stadium was the parsley, but the skyscrapers were the pig …. I know people who have sons who want to go see basketball games, but anyone who realizes what 17 skyscrapers and a stadium will do to an already complicated neighborhood …. Anyone who thinks that through is not at all in favor of it.”

Mr. Zanes spoke a little about his career. After his daughter was born, he “was really excited to listen to music with her, and all I wanted was a shared musical experience,” he said. He made about 300 tapes of Anna-inspired tunes and handed them out to friends. The response was enthusiastic and has grown almost fanatical, but Mr. Zanes is modest, as befits the kiddie folk-rock tradition (Peter Yarrow used to strum songs for his son’s elementary-school class at P.S. 6 on 81st Street). “Everything I do is based in real tradition,” he said. “I might be doing it in a new way, but I’m not doing anything new. And I’m certainly not trying to make children’s music cool or groovy …. I wanted music to sound as though it was made by people in a house.” His latest album of “house” music, Catch That Train!, was just released by Festival Five, his own Brooklyn-based label. “Any kind of music I’ve ever been interested in, people are making in Brooklyn,” he said.

The Develop Don’t Destroy concert “was my idea, but it’s an easy idea,” Mr. Zanes said. “I can do interviews, but the concert is really the thing I can offer. That’s easy. It’s harder for the authors to try and figure out what they can do.” (Besides Messrs. Lethem and Foer, the shiny new board, announced a month ago by the two-year-old organization, includes Jennifer Egan, Nelson George and Mr. Foer’s wife, Nicole Krauss, among others.) “I think the writers are starting to do dinners—where people will pay X amount to have an evening with somebody,” Mr. Zanes said. “So if you love Jonathan Lethem, you can have dinner with him.”

Mr. Zanes himself hosts dinner parties, which usually include lots of music-playing and stoop-sitting, and he often speaks about the Ratner project to friends (his wife counseled him to be funny about it). He’s constantly stopped in the neighborhood by weepy little fans, so Mr. Zanes also carries around leaflets to pass out to their moms. But “for a lot of people, this will be their first experience with Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn,” he said. “So if there’s stroller parking and a diaper-changing station and everything’s been thought of and everyone’s really well cared for, that’s going to create a really good impression.”

Valet stroller parking? A Station of Diapers?

“Welcome to my world,” Mr. Zanes said.

Tending Violet

Back at the event, which organizers said netted $17,000, everyone was dancing, in curious and creative ways. A tall man in green wellies and shorts swayed as if at a Phish concert, a child of indeterminate sex on his head. (Later, the toddler grasped perilously onto a chair; the dancing dad had abandoned him/her to concentrate on his moves.) A few feet from him, another couple hopped together, child perched on the man’s shoulders, the mother holding onto the kid’s hands. One dad had one tot on his shoulders, the other running back and forth through his legs. Over and over again. A baby whizzed by in his mother’s arms, waving a red electric guitar. Two moshing 4-year-olds nearly took out a wavy-legged 1-year-old. A number of times, parents who’d split up would reunite, trade kids and return to their spots; the two-kid handoff was clearly a practiced maneuver. “O.K., swap!”

Jeannine, a mother from Windsor Terrace, said she came “in support of the cause. And also, we’re really big Dan Zanes fans.” She looked down. “This is actually her favorite song,” she said, nodding at Violet, her 1-year-old in pink tie-dye and Converse sneakers, who was sitting on a pew cushion on the floor, her pacifier bobbing à la Maggie Simpson as she watched Mr. Zanes intently. Suddenly, Violet waved her arms toward the stage—like a mummy in a trance—and wobbled away. Jeannine followed.

The dangerous, moshing twosome found a large man to ring-around-the-rosy with. Not clear if any of these people were related. They all fell down—crashed to the floor, really—and someone got hurt. Crying, etc.

Scott Alexander, an editor for Playboy who has lived in Brooklyn since 1994 and moved to Fort Greene two and a half years ago, was wearing a black The Warriors T-shirt and had slightly graying, longish hair. He has three children and was holding a nonplussed 3-month-old baby girl named Frida.

“Good name,” said a stranger. “The whole Brooklyn baby-name thing is weird. But I haven’t heard Frida before. Spelled like Kahlo?”

“Yeah. And my eldest is Phineas,” Mr. Alexander said proudly.

“It’s a no-brainer,” he said, of the show. “I have two older boys who are massive fans. That’s not to say I’m not simpatico with what they’re doing.” He said that the project “hasn’t been a topic amongst my acquaintances” and that he “felt like I wasn’t getting the whole story.” He noted that the high-rise towers are a “big problem.”

But what of this Dan Zanes cult? What does it all mean?

“My boys and I have code names for sugary music: Barney,” said Mr. Alexander, explaining his kids’ preference for Zanes-like music—Woody Guthrie, They Might Be Giants, “stuff that doesn’t discount negative emotions.” “They’ll say, ‘That’s really Barney,’” Mr. Alexander said. He noted that he sometimes plays Led Zeppelin for his small offspring.

“We moved here from the East Village to get away from the density,” said David Brown, 37, an attorney who lives in Fort Greene and sported that hot paternal ­accoutrement, the red-and-black BabyBjörn, in which bobbed a child named Isaiah. “We’re concerned about the high-rises ruining the character of the neighborhood.” And Dan Zanes?

“It’s a no-brainer,” he said, the apparent daddy declaration of the day. “Ella loves Dan Zanes. She’s thrilled.” He pointed to a little blond girl standing on a pew, high above the detritus below: Target bags, sippy drinks, plastic tambourines, Goldfish bags, napkins, napkins everywhere. Over an hour had passed, and people were leaving—shimmying out the door.

Outside, Mr. Buscemi was kindly, wearily greeting guests and posing for photos. “We do need jobs and housing,” he said to a reporter about Atlantic Yards. “But there are other ways.”

Groups of parents were pushing their stroller armies up the hill, toward Fort Greene Park, toward their brownstones, toward naptime.

Inside, there were ramps for strollers and, to the left of the pews, an entire stroller parking area. A Kolcraft and Chicco stuck out amongst the many Maclarens, like two Pintos in a cavalcade of BMW’s.

“This is crazy!” cried a mom.

“This is chaos!” cried another mom.

It was a happy chaos, and yet one worried. An encumbered stroller fell backward, its human cargo’s legs suspended in the air. Parents rushed to the rescue. A toddler standing nearby began to wail, horrified at the toppling of another’s trusted street tank.

New York State Assembly candidate Bill Batson was outside introducing himself to the eager adults, who were dressed in jeans and windbreakers and sneakers: middle-to-upper-class ready-for-anything wear. “These would be my peeps,” Mr. Batson said. And later added: “Brooklyn doesn’t need to be given a makeover. We stand within a half-mile of some of the greatest cultural institutions in the world. It’s not the place for 17 skyscrapers and a steel city.

“Brownstone Brooklyn is not a white, yuppie community,” Mr. Batson also said, and then scanned the very white crowd, which numbered over 1,400 and, according to D.D.D.B., included actress Michelle Williams.

“The folks who came to the concert have the money to do so,” Mr. Batson said. (Tickets cost $12.) A tall man slunk by carrying two kids at once—presumably to get them in for free.

(Controversy would erupt a few days later when African-American leaders who support the Atlantic Yards project called for an apology from D.D.D.B. spokesperson Daniel Goldstein after comments he made to a reporter; he later issued the apology.)

Incidentally, this was right across the street from another Ratner project, the Atlantic Terminal mall, home to Target and Designer Shoe Warehouse and wind tunnels. Construction on the nearby subway station, a hub in Brooklyn, clogged the streets; between that and the 512-foot-tall Williamsburgh building and the big, brown blocky mall, the teeny fans must’ve felt very teeny indeed. Where, oh, where was their beloved Brooklyn sky?

But spirits were high at United Methodist. Before long, a volunteer lawyer named Candace Carponter—not the founder of iVillage—took the pulpit to introduce the musical guest. “Kids, do you know how tall 60 stories high is?” Ms. Carponter said, describing the Atlantic Yards project, phasing in and out of adult-voice and kid-voice. “How many of you live in a building 10 stories high?”

“I can’t see! I can’t see!” cried a neurotic youngster in the crowd, having an anticipatory meltdown. Another overzealous toddler-fan in a striped shirt and jeans kept screaming “Yay!” at the wrong times. (Toddler-fans are a strange sight: It’s never clear whether they’re screaming and bouncing around because they actually love the musician, or because they’ve realized that when in the presence of the musician, Mommy and Daddy don’t scream at them for screaming and bouncing.)

Ms. Carponter introduced “our youngest spokesperson—my daughter,” who promptly apologized for her mother’s “boring” speech. “I don’t want Brooklyn turned into another Manhattan,” said Alia, age 12. After a few more words, she in turn introduced the actor Steve Buscemi.

“His music has ruined my life,” Mr. Buscemi, a good sport, said of Mr. Zanes. “Now, since I’ve been listening to Dan, I can’t stop cock-a-doodle-doodling in the kitchen!” And with that he started flapping his arms and legs. But it was dark and loud and everyone clearly wanted the music to start. “Dan Zanes! Dan Zanes!” chanted a grown man holding his daughter in the midst of the speeches, as if he were a disgruntled fan at a normal concert.

Then there was a great hush. Mr. Zanes, in a red suit, and a bunch of other people came trotting down the aisle, softly playing. The entire church sang along. It was like 1962 all over again. Or perhaps just 2000.

“You sound great,” the performer told the crowd, with a hint of irony. “This is going to be a wild party.”

From Del Fuegosto Diapers

Mr. Zanes, 44, a former member of the 80’s rock band the Del Fuegos, re-emerged some years ago as a “family musician.” He is now one of the marquee advisory-board members of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, along with actor Ms. Williams, her fiancé Heath Ledger and the authors Jonathan (Lethem and Safran Foer).

“Man, I didn’t know anything!” Mr. Zanes said a week before the concert, sitting at the Flying Saucer Café on Atlantic Avenue, near his Boerum Hill office, and discussing his newfound activism. A former West Village resident, he renovated and moved to a Cobble Hill brownstone seven years ago with his wife Paula, who directs TV commercials, and their daughter, Anna, now 11 and attending St. Ann’s School. He has a kind face, with crinkly eyes and a slightly devilish smile, and his trademark hair was shooting all over the place thanks to “some beeswax.”

“I was just carrying on with my life,” Mr. Zanes continued. “All I knew was that there was a stadium and Frank Gehry was gonna be designing it. It all felt inevitable. I had no idea 17 skyscrapers were going up around it. The stadium was the parsley, but the skyscrapers were the pig …. I know people who have sons who want to go see basketball games, but anyone who realizes what 17 skyscrapers and a stadium will do to an already complicated neighborhood …. Anyone who thinks that through is not at all in favor of it.”

Mr. Zanes spoke a little about his career. After his daughter was born, he “was really excited to listen to music with her, and all I wanted was a shared musical experience,” he said. He made about 300 tapes of Anna-inspired tunes and handed them out to friends. The response was enthusiastic and has grown almost fanatical, but Mr. Zanes is modest, as befits the kiddie folk-rock tradition (Peter Yarrow used to strum songs for his son’s elementary-school class at P.S. 6 on 81st Street). “Everything I do is based in real tradition,” he said. “I might be doing it in a new way, but I’m not doing anything new. And I’m certainly not trying to make children’s music cool or groovy …. I wanted music to sound as though it was made by people in a house.” His latest album of “house” music, Catch That Train!, was just released by Festival Five, his own Brooklyn-based label. “Any kind of music I’ve ever been interested in, people are making in Brooklyn,” he said.

The Develop Don’t Destroy concert “was my idea, but it’s an easy idea,” Mr. Zanes said. “I can do interviews, but the concert is really the thing I can offer. That’s easy. It’s harder for the authors to try and figure out what they can do.” (Besides Messrs. Lethem and Foer, the shiny new board, announced a month ago by the two-year-old organization, includes Jennifer Egan, Nelson George and Mr. Foer’s wife, Nicole Krauss, among others.) “I think the writers are starting to do dinners—where people will pay X amount to have an evening with somebody,” Mr. Zanes said. “So if you love Jonathan Lethem, you can have dinner with him.”

Mr. Zanes himself hosts dinner parties, which usually include lots of music-playing and stoop-sitting, and he often speaks about the Ratner project to friends (his wife counseled him to be funny about it). He’s constantly stopped in the neighborhood by weepy little fans, so Mr. Zanes also carries around leaflets to pass out to their moms. But “for a lot of people, this will be their first experience with Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn,” he said. “So if there’s stroller parking and a diaper-changing station and everything’s been thought of and everyone’s really well cared for, that’s going to create a really good impression.”

Valet stroller parking? A Station of Diapers?

“Welcome to my world,” Mr. Zanes said.

Tending Violet

Back at the event, which organizers said netted $17,000, everyone was dancing, in curious and creative ways. A tall man in green wellies and shorts swayed as if at a Phish concert, a child of indeterminate sex on his head. (Later, the toddler grasped perilously onto a chair; the dancing dad had abandoned him/her to concentrate on his moves.) A few feet from him, another couple hopped together, child perched on the man’s shoulders, the mother holding onto the kid’s hands. One dad had one tot on his shoulders, the other running back and forth through his legs. Over and over again. A baby whizzed by in his mother’s arms, waving a red electric guitar. Two moshing 4-year-olds nearly took out a wavy-legged 1-year-old. A number of times, parents who’d split up would reunite, trade kids and return to their spots; the two-kid handoff was clearly a practiced maneuver. “O.K., swap!”

Jeannine, a mother from Windsor Terrace, said she came “in support of the cause. And also, we’re really big Dan Zanes fans.” She looked down. “This is actually her favorite song,” she said, nodding at Violet, her 1-year-old in pink tie-dye and Converse sneakers, who was sitting on a pew cushion on the floor, her pacifier bobbing à la Maggie Simpson as she watched Mr. Zanes intently. Suddenly, Violet waved her arms toward the stage—like a mummy in a trance—and wobbled away. Jeannine followed.

The dangerous, moshing twosome found a large man to ring-around-the-rosy with. Not clear if any of these people were related. They all fell down—crashed to the floor, really—and someone got hurt. Crying, etc.

Scott Alexander, an editor for Playboy who has lived in Brooklyn since 1994 and moved to Fort Greene two and a half years ago, was wearing a black The Warriors T-shirt and had slightly graying, longish hair. He has three children and was holding a nonplussed 3-month-old baby girl named Frida.

“Good name,” said a stranger. “The whole Brooklyn baby-name thing is weird. But I haven’t heard Frida before. Spelled like Kahlo?”

“Yeah. And my eldest is Phineas,” Mr. Alexander said proudly.

“It’s a no-brainer,” he said, of the show. “I have two older boys who are massive fans. That’s not to say I’m not simpatico with what they’re doing.” He said that the project “hasn’t been a topic amongst my acquaintances” and that he “felt like I wasn’t getting the whole story.” He noted that the high-rise towers are a “big problem.”

But what of this Dan Zanes cult? What does it all mean?

“My boys and I have code names for sugary music: Barney,” said Mr. Alexander, explaining his kids’ preference for Zanes-like music—Woody Guthrie, They Might Be Giants, “stuff that doesn’t discount negative emotions.” “They’ll say, ‘That’s really Barney,’” Mr. Alexander said. He noted that he sometimes plays Led Zeppelin for his small offspring.

“We moved here from the East Village to get away from the density,” said David Brown, 37, an attorney who lives in Fort Greene and sported that hot paternal ­accoutrement, the red-and-black BabyBjörn, in which bobbed a child named Isaiah. “We’re concerned about the high-rises ruining the character of the neighborhood.” And Dan Zanes?

“It’s a no-brainer,” he said, the apparent daddy declaration of the day. “Ella loves Dan Zanes. She’s thrilled.” He pointed to a little blond girl standing on a pew, high above the detritus below: Target bags, sippy drinks, plastic tambourines, Goldfish bags, napkins, napkins everywhere. Over an hour had passed, and people were leaving—shimmying out the door.

Outside, Mr. Buscemi was kindly, wearily greeting guests and posing for photos. “We do need jobs and housing,” he said to a reporter about Atlantic Yards. “But there are other ways.”

Groups of parents were pushing their stroller armies up the hill, toward Fort Greene Park, toward their brownstones, toward naptime.

None of the elite streaming out of Manhattan and over the pretty bridge to the mirror world on the other side want to live on St. Marks Place. But what do they want exactly? Brooklyn isn’t a united front. The North Brooklyn of do-it-yourself fashion and vinyl siding (Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick) just feels separate from brownstone South Brooklyn (from Fort Greene to Park Slope). South Brooklyn is rich and pretty; North is rougher-edged and moody. “I’m firmly committed to the notion that there’s an unbridgeable divide,” said a 27-year-old Bushwick resident, who explained that he even feels this way about “literary-minded, quasi-hipsters” like himself who live in the nether regions of the Hills and Slopes and Heights. “I’ve always felt deeply uncomfortable in Park Slope. And for everything that’s hateable about Williamsburg, I have this feeling that they’re my people.”

Of course, all of gentrified Brooklyn is somewhat similar. It’s mostly white. It’s mostly partial to some form of indie rock. Refugees from small colleges like Vassar and Wesleyan may trudge North; shiny Ivy Leaguers could prefer the South—but the bottom line is that they all attended fancy colleges. Southerners reluctantly fork over deceptively low salaries for DVF dresses and Paper, Denim, Whatever jeans; Northern chicks would rather jump off the Williamsburg Bridge than wear something they didn’t iron on themselves. But in the end, they all care a lot about what they wear.

So why can’t they get along? It might be that development, from Ratnerville to waterfront condos, newly threatens the borough’s beloved low-rise lifestyle. The gentrifiers are being gentrified. Even Heath Ledger has stood up and declared, Not in my three-car garage! And like citizens of the Holy Roman Empire, Brooklyn residents turn in on each other, clinging to the rapidly eroding identities of their neighborhoods in a desperate bid for that increasingly rare New York commodity: personal authenticity.

“It’s more like World War II France,” said a 27-year-old Fort Greene resident on a recent Saturday evening, sitting at the bar Rope on Myrtle Avenue.

The place was typical South Brooklyn, filled with plainly dressed white kids, one black couple warily regarding the scene. But a group of twentysomethings from both sides of the metaphorical Mason-Dixon Line were drinking vodka tonics, grumpily discussing how, when they see a block-sized, generic doorman building sprouting up on Court and Atlantic, or a plastic-looking condo park rising Lego-like out of the dust in Greenpoint, they inexplicably get angry at the people who already live in the neighborhood, as if they were responsible for attracting that sort of building rather than the developers who’ve imposed it.

“Everyone loves to say who was part of the Resistance and who was Vichy, and the reality is most everyone was the same,” World War II guy went on.

“Everyone was a collaborator.”

‘OH, GOW-AH-NUS’

Pan over to Pete’s Candy Store in Williamsburg—which is not, of course, a candy store.

“Helloooo!” screamed the girl in the red cotton dress, hugging perhaps her fifth victim since she’d ambushed the amber-lit bar. “I love when everyone’s drunk!”

“I’ve been drunk for hours,” replied the huggee, a young man in camouflage.

More hugging: a girl with a clothespin in her hair, an indie rocker with a hairdo from a band called Cheese on Bread. A boy in a makeshift dunce cap—or was it a Harry Potter reference? How old were these people?—exclaimed, “Hey! It’s my CD-release party!” Whole decades, in human form, passed by—the 1950’s, the 80’s, cruel amalgamations of the two, black leather jackets and Facts of Life hair.

“It’s all coming back,” said a Fort Greene friend, 30, her chair batted around by the love-in tornado behind her. “Why I left.” She lived in Williamsburg years ago. But the kind of performative aspect so garishly on display in Pete’s makes many Brooklynites (especially the older ones) happy to abandon the party.

“I read on the Internet that this was the place to live if you couldn’t afford anything else … ,” said Jay Brandt, 24, standing outside another Williamsburg bar, the Royal Oak, on a recent Saturday night, smoking in a tight, striped sweater. He moved here 10 months ago from Minneapolis and works both at a hedge fund and the Chelsea restaurant Parish. “I heard it was a post-collegiate utopia.” But alas …. “I don’t like it,” Mr. Brandt said. “It’s insular and cliquey …. I’ve heard good things about Gowanus—is that how it’s pronounced? Oh, Gow-ah-nus ….

“Identity in New York seems to be so connected to your neighborhood,” he said. “I sometimes think, ‘There’s no way I can go to Williamsburg in this.’”

No doubt: The endless evolution of avant-garde fashion in North Brooklyn can be exhausting. For example, the other day at the Verb Café on Bedford Avenue, amidst a parade of studded belts, sundresses paired with cowboy boots and denim miniskirts paired with footless black leggings, a woman with a shaved head was reading Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet.

She was wearing a seersucker skirt, a belted black-and-white-striped secretary’s blouse, lime-green latticework pumps and a perfectly placed lime-green bangle. It was the bracelet that sealed the woman’s Williamsburgness, the extra work involved to a) find and purchase the lime-green bangle bracelet, b) remember one owns it, c) remember one also owns lime-green pumps, d) remember to put them both on, during the same morning. Williamsburg girls don’t forget the bangle, that’s the point. Anyone unarmed with such stylistic hand grenades feels vulnerable and exposed around her.

Candice Waldron, 32, recently opened a new high-end boutique, Jumelle, on Bedford Avenue, that sells clothes by designers such as Sonia Rykiel. “The style is really eclectic,” she said, describing the local customers. “A lot of women here wear vintage; they don’t really buy designer clothes. That was one concern about my store.” But “in the end,” Ms. Waldron said, “with the lines I would be selling I thought I’d be better off in Williamsburg.

“I like Park Slope a lot,” she said, adding that she’d considered a location there instead, on Fifth Avenue. “When I was doing my business plan, the average medium income was definitely higher over there.” But in the end, “I felt this is a better fit for me,” Ms. Waldron said. “I’m more in with this crowd.”

LITERATURE AND T-SHIRTS

While the North sees the South as moneyed squares, the South frowns on the North as poseurs—intellectual lightweights.

“In Williamsburg, everyone’s kind of illiterate. Relatively,” said Christian, a 29-year-old Williamsburg transplant who moved there from Park Slope and regrets it. “One time I was on the L train, and the girl sitting next to me was reading Women in Love, and I said, ‘That’s good—have you read The Rainbow?’ And she said, ‘No, this is my first Lawrence—is it all so deep and philosophical?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah … it’s literature.’”

On another occasion, he said, “I met a very bright and literate girl in Williamsburg, and we immediately started having a conversation about James Wood. It turned out she lived in Park Slope.”

Park Slope bears the brunt of a lot of Brooklyn contempt, so his heroic and creative defense was refreshing. And he speaks for the whole of South Brooklyn when he calls attention to its proficiency in both literature (Paul Auster! Jhumpa Lahiri! All those guys named Jonathan!) and literary critics; at this point, it’s fair to say that the easygoing nabes of Boerum and Cobble Hills are just as affiliated with the Slope, no matter what the early settlers of Smith Street might contend.

On that area’s border, Atlantic Avenue, just down from the proposed Ratner arena site, “Brooklyn” and “Breukelyn” T-shirts are hung proudly in the windows; the “bklyn”-embossed onesie has become a popular, even reflexive gift for the recent boom of newborns. In the window of artez’n, a store that caters to local artists, hangs a shirt that reads: Williamsburg. Too hip. Too far. Curiously, insultingly, the outline of the borough of Manhattan stretched down the front. (In Park Slope, legend has it that there’s a T-shirt printed with the motto “This is how we roll,” above a rendering of a stroller. This is how we roll?) Along the strip, one can also find “Red Hook” T-shirts, “Carroll Gardens” tank tops, all things “Park Slope”—the dream of a thousand real-estate agents realized in soft cotton and an array of fine colors.

“The ‘Fort Greene’ is so popular,” said Un Sook Lim, an owner of Enamoo on Smith Street, flanked by her partner, Michael Schade, who was wearing a “Cobble Hill” T. “Now everyone wants the ‘Windsor Terrace.’” But what of Williamsburg? It was nowhere to be found.

“It feels super-trendy …. I don’t feel comfortable there,” Jessica Furst, 32, the owner of artz’n said, musing on her popular anti-Williamsburg T-shirt. “But I don’t feel comfortable in Soho either.” She noted that it can be hard to get to Williamsburg.

“I laugh every time they shut down the L,” cracked her co-worker, who lives in Boerum Hill.

‘THESE YUPPIE BASTARDS’

One could argue that this narcissism of minor differences among neighborhoods masks a deep anxiety about change—not to mention nagging guilt about one’s role in that change. (As Mr. Flansburgh put it, “There are a lot of people who are perfectly well-heeled who talk about gentrification as if it’s an airborne virus that can kill you.”) But new arrivals to this fractured borough tend to be sweetly innocent to such angst.

“Is there any animosity between North and South Brooklyn?” an interloper asked a young group of picnickers in Greenpoint’s McCarren Park on a sunny Thursday afternoon. The foursome, three guys and a girl, were all dressed completely in black—even much of their skin was black with tattoos—and they were lying up against and on top of one another in black, artful, leisurely body configurations. Nearby sat a chipper red-and-white cooler, the kind that recalls your mom’s cold peanut-butter sandwiches at the beach.

“No,” said Carmen Mello, 22, a bartender with good hair, as her friends laughed wryly. “I mean, I don’t really like Park Slope, but it’s very nice there.”

“A Cobble Hill friend once remarked that Williamsburg is like Portland,” said the stranger.

“Portland!” Ms. Mello said, not smiling, her pale skin coloring. “I’m from Portland! What does that mean? That’s a compliment.” The group twittered.

“I don’t pass judgment on people,” said Montana Masback, 24, a bartender and guitar teacher who lives in Williamsburg. “And I’m sorry if these—”

“These yuppie bastards!” laughed another, smoking.

“—yeah, if these yuppie bastards, who don’t dress as well as me, think that way,” Mr. Masback said.

“I bet they don’t have a kickball league,” said another man, off to the side, also dressed in black. He was, the interloper suddenly noticed, holding a large tan ball.

Hovering around them, skeletal luxury condos clashed with the folksy baseball games and jungle gyms and … well, the kickball.

“No question about it—it’s hipper,” said Michael Brooks, 30, over the phone, of North Brooklyn. He’s a project manager with the Developers Group, the company that’s bringing high-rise condos to the McCarren Park area. “If there’s a hipness meter, Carroll Gardens is not on the same end of the scale as Williamsburg,” he continued. “There’s a lifestyle in Williamsburg. It’s become a place that people want to identify themselves with, being in a place that feels like everything is happening. It’s just a moment—there’s a moment in Williamsburg right now.”

Mr. Brooks should know: He himself has lived in Williamsburg for three years. He grew up on the Upper East Side.

None of the elite streaming out of Manhattan and over the pretty bridge to the mirror world on the other side want to live on St. Marks Place. But what do they want exactly? Brooklyn isn’t a united front. The North Brooklyn of do-it-yourself fashion and vinyl siding (Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick) just feels separate from brownstone South Brooklyn (from Fort Greene to Park Slope). South Brooklyn is rich and pretty; North is rougher-edged and moody. “I’m firmly committed to the notion that there’s an unbridgeable divide,” said a 27-year-old Bushwick resident, who explained that he even feels this way about “literary-minded, quasi-hipsters” like himself who live in the nether regions of the Hills and Slopes and Heights. “I’ve always felt deeply uncomfortable in Park Slope. And for everything that’s hateable about Williamsburg, I have this feeling that they’re my people.”

Of course, all of gentrified Brooklyn is somewhat similar. It’s mostly white. It’s mostly partial to some form of indie rock. Refugees from small colleges like Vassar and Wesleyan may trudge North; shiny Ivy Leaguers could prefer the South—but the bottom line is that they all attended fancy colleges. Southerners reluctantly fork over deceptively low salaries for DVF dresses and Paper, Denim, Whatever jeans; Northern chicks would rather jump off the Williamsburg Bridge than wear something they didn’t iron on themselves. But in the end, they all care a lot about what they wear.

So why can’t they get along? It might be that development, from Ratnerville to waterfront condos, newly threatens the borough’s beloved low-rise lifestyle. The gentrifiers are being gentrified. Even Heath Ledger has stood up and declared, Not in my three-car garage! And like citizens of the Holy Roman Empire, Brooklyn residents turn in on each other, clinging to the rapidly eroding identities of their neighborhoods in a desperate bid for that increasingly rare New York commodity: personal authenticity.

“It’s more like World War II France,” said a 27-year-old Fort Greene resident on a recent Saturday evening, sitting at the bar Rope on Myrtle Avenue.

The place was typical South Brooklyn, filled with plainly dressed white kids, one black couple warily regarding the scene. But a group of twentysomethings from both sides of the metaphorical Mason-Dixon Line were drinking vodka tonics, grumpily discussing how, when they see a block-sized, generic doorman building sprouting up on Court and Atlantic, or a plastic-looking condo park rising Lego-like out of the dust in Greenpoint, they inexplicably get angry at the people who already live in the neighborhood, as if they were responsible for attracting that sort of building rather than the developers who’ve imposed it.

“Everyone loves to say who was part of the Resistance and who was Vichy, and the reality is most everyone was the same,” World War II guy went on.

“Everyone was a collaborator.”

‘OH, GOW- AH-NUS’

Pan over to Pete’s Candy Store in Williamsburg—which is not, of course, a candy store.

“Helloooo!” screamed the girl in the red cotton dress, hugging perhaps her fifth victim since she’d ambushed the amber-lit bar. “I love when everyone’s drunk!”

“I’ve been drunk for hours,” replied the huggee, a young man in camouflage.

More hugging: a girl with a clothespin in her hair, an indie rocker with a hairdo from a band called Cheese on Bread. A boy in a makeshift dunce cap—or was it a Harry Potter reference? How old were these people?—exclaimed, “Hey! It’s my CD-release party!” Whole decades, in human form, passed by—the 1950’s, the 80’s, cruel amalgamations of the two, black leather jackets and Facts of Life hair.

“It’s all coming back,” said a Fort Greene friend, 30, her chair batted around by the love-in tornado behind her. “Why I left.” She lived in Williamsburg years ago. But the kind of performative aspect so garishly on display in Pete’s makes many Brooklynites (especially the older ones) happy to abandon the party.

“I read on the Internet that this was the place to live if you couldn’t afford anything else … ,” said Jay Brandt, 24, standing outside another Williamsburg bar, the Royal Oak, on a recent Saturday night, smoking in a tight, striped sweater. He moved here 10 months ago from Minneapolis and works both at a hedge fund and the Chelsea restaurant Parish. “I heard it was a post-collegiate utopia.” But alas …. “I don’t like it,” Mr. Brandt said. “It’s insular and cliquey …. I’ve heard good things about Gowanus—is that how it’s pronounced? Oh, Gow-ah-nus ….

“Identity in New York seems to be so connected to your neighborhood,” he said. “I sometimes think, ‘There’s no way I can go to Williamsburg in this.’”

No doubt: The endless evolution of avant-garde fashion in North Brooklyn can be exhausting. For example, the other day at the Verb Café on Bedford Avenue, amidst a parade of studded belts, sundresses paired with cowboy boots and denim miniskirts paired with footless black leggings, a woman with a shaved head was reading Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet.

She was wearing a seersucker skirt, a belted black-and-white-striped secretary’s blouse, lime-green latticework pumps and a perfectly placed lime-green bangle. It was the bracelet that sealed the woman’s Williamsburgness, the extra work involved to a) find and purchase the lime-green bangle bracelet, b) remember one owns it, c) remember one also owns lime-green pumps, d) remember to put them both on, during the same morning. Williamsburg girls don’t forget the bangle, that’s the point. Anyone unarmed with such stylistic hand grenades feels vulnerable and exposed around her.

Candice Waldron, 32, recently opened a new high-end boutique, Jumelle, on Bedford Avenue, that sells clothes by designers such as Sonia Rykiel. “The style is really eclectic,” she said, describing the local customers. “A lot of women here wear vintage; they don’t really buy designer clothes. That was one concern about my store.” But “in the end,” Ms. Waldron said, “with the lines I would be selling I thought I’d be better off in Williamsburg.

“I like Park Slope a lot,” she said, adding that she’d considered a location there instead, on Fifth Avenue. “When I was doing my business plan, the average medium income was definitely higher over there.” But in the end, “I felt this is a better fit for me,” Ms. Waldron said. “I’m more in with this crowd.”

LITERATURE AND T-SHIRTS

While the North sees the South as moneyed squares, the South frowns on the North as poseurs—intellectual lightweights.

“In Williamsburg, everyone’s kind of illiterate. Relatively,” said Christian, a 29-year-old Williamsburg transplant who moved there from Park Slope and regrets it. “One time I was on the L train, and the girl sitting next to me was reading Women in Love, and I said, ‘That’s good—have you read The Rainbow?’ And she said, ‘No, this is my first Lawrence—is it all so deep and philosophical?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah … it’s literature.’”

On another occasion, he said, “I met a very bright and literate girl in Williamsburg, and we immediately started having a conversation about James Wood. It turned out she lived in Park Slope.”

Park Slope bears the brunt of a lot of Brooklyn contempt, so his heroic and creative defense was refreshing. And he speaks for the whole of South Brooklyn when he calls attention to its proficiency in both literature (Paul Auster! Jhumpa Lahiri! All those guys named Jonathan!) and literary critics; at this point, it’s fair to say that the easygoing nabes of Boerum and Cobble Hills are just as affiliated with the Slope, no matter what the early settlers of Smith Street might contend.

On that area’s border, Atlantic Avenue, just down from the proposed Ratner arena site, “Brooklyn” and “Breukelyn” T-shirts are hung proudly in the windows; the “bklyn”-embossed onesie has become a popular, even reflexive gift for the recent boom of newborns. In the window of artez’n, a store that caters to local artists, hangs a shirt that reads: Williamsburg. Too hip. Too far. Curiously, insultingly, the outline of the borough of Manhattan stretched down the front. (In Park Slope, legend has it that there’s a T-shirt printed with the motto “This is how we roll,” above a rendering of a stroller. This is how we roll?) Along the strip, one can also find “Red Hook” T-shirts, “Carroll Gardens” tank tops, all things “Park Slope”—the dream of a thousand real-estate agents realized in soft cotton and an array of fine colors.

“The ‘Fort Greene’ is so popular,” said Un Sook Lim, an owner of Enamoo on Smith Street, flanked by her partner, Michael Schade, who was wearing a “Cobble Hill” T. “Now everyone wants the ‘Windsor Terrace.’” But what of Williamsburg? It was nowhere to be found.

“It feels super-trendy …. I don’t feel comfortable there,” Jessica Furst, 32, the owner of artz’n said, musing on her popular anti-Williamsburg T-shirt. “But I don’t feel comfortable in Soho either.” She noted that it can be hard to get to Williamsburg.

“I laugh every time they shut down the L,” cracked her co-worker, who lives in Boerum Hill.

‘THESE YUPPIE BASTARDS’

One could argue that this narcissism of minor differences among neighborhoods masks a deep anxiety about change—not to mention nagging guilt about one’s role in that change. (As Mr. Flansburgh put it, “There are a lot of people who are perfectly well-heeled who talk about gentrification as if it’s an airborne virus that can kill you.”) But new arrivals to this fractured borough tend to be sweetly innocent to such angst.

“Is there any animosity between North and South Brooklyn?” an interloper asked a young group of picnickers in Greenpoint’s McCarren Park on a sunny Thursday afternoon. The foursome, three guys and a girl, were all dressed completely in black—even much of their skin was black with tattoos—and they were lying up against and on top of one another in black, artful, leisurely body configurations. Nearby sat a chipper red-and-white cooler, the kind that recalls your mom’s cold peanut-butter sandwiches at the beach.

“No,” said Carmen Mello, 22, a bartender with good hair, as her friends laughed wryly. “I mean, I don’t really like Park Slope, but it’s very nice there.”

“A Cobble Hill friend once remarked that Williamsburg is like Portland,” said the stranger.

“Portland!” Ms. Mello said, not smiling, her pale skin coloring. “I’m from Portland! What does that mean? That’s a compliment.” The group twittered.

“I don’t pass judgment on people,” said Montana Masback, 24, a bartender and guitar teacher who lives in Williamsburg. “And I’m sorry if these—”

“These yuppie bastards!” laughed another, smoking.

“—yeah, if these yuppie bastards, who don’t dress as well as me, think that way,” Mr. Masback said.

“I bet they don’t have a kickball league,” said another man, off to the side, also dressed in black. He was, the interloper suddenly noticed, holding a large tan ball.

Hovering around them, skeletal luxury condos clashed with the folksy baseball games and jungle gyms and … well, the kickball.

“No question about it—it’s hipper,” said Michael Brooks, 30, over the phone, of North Brooklyn. He’s a project manager with the Developers Group, the company that’s bringing high-rise condos to the McCarren Park area. “If there’s a hipness meter, Carroll Gardens is not on the same end of the scale as Williamsburg,” he continued. “There’s a lifestyle in Williamsburg. It’s become a place that people want to identify themselves with, being in a place that feels like everything is happening. It’s just a moment—there’s a moment in Williamsburg right now.”

Mr. Brooks should know: He himself has lived in Williamsburg for three years. He grew up on the Upper East Side.

“Now that’s the difference between Brooklyn and Manhattan,” whispered some single, childless, brownstone-less person among a crowd of similarly “without” people, standing outside smoking. A tree full of perfect white flowers bloomed nearby. “Bringing a baby to a book party.”

This party—and it was catered—was for an anthology published by HarperCollins called Maybe Baby: 28 Writers Tell the Truth About Skepticism, Infertility, Baby Lust, Childlessness, Ambivalence, and How They Made the Biggest Decision of Their Lives— which made the presence of an infant appropriate, decisive, a human gauntlet thrown upon the hardwood floors in the original-molding- trimmed vestibule entrance. Maybe baby? Here’s my baby. Take that!

The party was hosted by Elle editor Laurie Abraham, a contributor, and her husband, a lawyer, whose two small daughters could be glimpsed tangled around their parents’ legs throughout the evening. “I hope this starts a trend of book parties in Brooklyn,” said Lori Leibovich, 35, the editor of Maybe Baby and a friend of this reporter’s who works at Salon, thanking them for having the event in this “beautiful brownstone.”

And the brownstone was beautiful. In Brooklyn, it might actually be a faux pas to forget to call a brownstone beautiful, to neglect to recognize this life achievement. Everyone at the party recognized it, their faces twisted in paroxysms of admiration and financial calculation: When did they buy it? How long into the Brooklyn gentrification process? Seven years ago? What was I doing seven years ago? Where’s the bar?

(The bar was in the playroom. Kids too! When did they …. )

Because this is what happens when New Yorkers enter a Brooklyn brownstone: Their lives pass before them.

Though it’s raw material envy of a sort, it’s different than the sort of raw material envy one experiences in Manhattan. Recently, at a birthday dinner on Chrystie Street in Nolita, guests also ran wide-eyed and complimentary through the home, marveling at the expansive, stark space, at once like a loft and an unfinished basement. The toilet was but a small and minor destination in its gigantic bathroom; the bed seemed miles away from the entrance to the bedroom. Whee! The downtown Manhattan loft! What a throwback! The place was sparely furnished—it had a feeling of being unfinished, and therefore of possibility.

But a brownstone is not unfinished. It is quite finished. These days, even in Brooklyn, a brownstone is procured by a successful career; a brownstone shelters one’s family. It is densely populated with chunky chairs and antique end tables. It has children. It is not for “hipsters.” It is a destination, a certain kind of life—one that required planning, wisdom, foresight and/or a lot of money. Still, Brooklyn’s homey, outer-borough-ness, reminiscent of suburban childhood, always suggested a myth of attainability.

“If anything, it’s kind of so aspirational,” said Maybe Baby attendee Michelle Goldberg, 30, also of Salon. “As if you cobble together some success in this world, eventually you will have a brownstone big enough to host a book party too.”

When the brownstone-less enter these small palaces of existential reckoning, their minds reel: the jobs they took and didn’t take, the people they slept with and didn’t sleep with, the dollars they spent and the dollars they did not invest.

Ms. Goldberg lives in an apartment in Cobble Hill; her agent and editor are also in Brooklyn. Next month, a party for her book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (Norton) will be held at the Last Exit bar on Atlantic Avenue. “Far more of the other writers and journalists I was likely to invite live in Brooklyn,” she said. “All of us are less likely to flake if the party is in the neighborhood.”

Still, despite the looming literary presence of Norman Mailer in the Heights (and who lives in the Heights these days? Lawyers and investment bankers, right?), it’s not yet standard-issue to hold a book party in an outer borough—not for those who remember the endless rows of gins and tonics and pretty girls in George Plimpton’s Upper East Side townhouse, anyway—and there was some initial concern among the Maybe Baby crowd about whether anyone would show up. But many writers, editors and interns trekked to Brooklyn on this night, including 11 out of the book’s 28 contributors: novelist Dani Shapiro from Connecticut, writer Peter Nichols from Maine.

As Ms. Leibovich gave her thank-you speech, standing next to the obligatory brownstone fireplace, a gilt-rimmed mirror overhead, The Observer wondered: Was it original to the brownstone, or a new addition?, and felt sharp pangs of self-hatred for such thoughts, ultimately resolving to believe they were spawned by a worthy and academic interest in 19th-century (early 20th?) design. The living room was narrow and homey, filled with women, a few men, but mostly women, of the who-have-it-all variety: skinny moms, media people, loyal husbands and daughters (Salon editor in chief Joan Walsh had brought her preternaturally wise teenager from San Francisco). There were falafel balls, bottles of white wine (16 would ultimately be consumed—hey, it’s spring!) and marauding toddlers being kept up past their biologically appropriate bedtimes. A plush chaise spread out across the fireplace, bifurcating the room.

“I want one of those,” someone said later, pointing to the long, funny chair.

“What would you do with that? You’d never use it,” said her boyfriend.

“Yes, I would. For reading.” Other women chimed in that they would want it too. And for reading.

The lone man bravely shook his head. “Oh, come on, you don’t read!”

The chair was lovely. And is this what Brooklyn has come to? The home design touted in New York magazine’s discomfitingly consumerist “Brooklynism” issue this week—less reading than gaping at “Tobias Wong’s solid-gold Coke Spoon 01,” “intended as a commentary on luxury obsession” ($265) and “Portia Wells’s Slipcover Chair Project” ($7,500)?

Arrivederci, Tony Manero—check out this cool ashtray in the shape of a gorilla.

“When I got out of the subway, I thought how annoying Smith Street was,” said a friend who moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn back to Manhattan. “I’m so proud of my 212 area code!”

How does a neighborhood suddenly become so loathsome? What is this Brooklyn worship and this Brooklyn hatred?

Are they bitter? Mounting the unending, narrow staircases of these Brooklyn brownstones, another unsettling feeling seeps into the consciousness of moderately paid New Yorkers in their 20’s and 30’s: I can no longer afford this. This is the bourgeois utopia that take-out-loving white kids created in the shells of middle-class homes built for home-cooked meals, where everyone spends thousands of dollars to escape the shallow, conspicuously consumptive evils of deepest Manhattan. But down-home luxury and refuge may never be theirs, either. These young people will probably never buy a brownstone for a pittance and watch it appreciate into millions. That Brooklyn—from Fort Greene to Carroll Gardens—has been sealed.

“I like my apartment,” said another Maybe Baby guest, Carlene Bauer, 33, who is working on a memoir for HarperCollins while freelancing from a rental in Park Slope. “But often I think if I did buy a house, I would have to go back to South Jersey.” When you enter a brownstone, she said, “you do think: If I want this, I’ll have to start thinking about things I’m not thinking about now. I sometimes walk around Park Slope and think, ‘I’m gonna have to get a movie deal!’ I don’t really want to go back to New Jersey, where I came from. And then I think, ‘Well, maybe I won’t have a kid.’”

And so one leaves the Brooklyn party, no matter how lovely and beer-filled, a little dejected and a little more confused, wondering whether they should have wasted so much money on last night’s dinner at Frankies 457. Where will their lives unfold if not here? Brooklyn is so big, and yet ….

Outside of Maybe Baby, a party guest ducked out of the ground-floor entrance, two beers in one hand.

“Did you see it down there?” she said, addressing the solemnly nodding stoop-gang audience, still littered on the stone steps.

“She’s making real-estate plans,” said her friend. It was a joke. Maybe a dream, too.