Welcome to Contemporaries
With the romanticism of a wiser woman looking back on a fleeting youth, Joan Didion once described New York City as the “shining and perishable dream itself”. In her 1968 essay ‘Goodbye To All That’, Didion retraces the beginning and end of her relationship with the city that never sleeps – an eight-year affair that transpired with the “deceptive ease of a film dissolve”.
Beginnings and endings have been at the forefront of our minds lately as we reflect upon our newly-formed relationships to this city and to each other. After a long hot summer that oscillated from lockdown to protest, on 15 October 2020, Stephen Burks and I opened the doors to Contemporaries in the Brooklyn waterfront neighbourhood of Dumbo. Neither a gallery, nor a storefront, nor a studio, Contemporaries is a hybrid – a storefront studio project that uses creative methods to explore what it means to be of and in our time.
We stumbled upon 192 Water Street on an afternoon bike ride in late January 2020. A 100-year-old tea warehouse – where Contemporaries now occupies the ground-floor commercial space – the building was converted into expansive lofts in 2012. The three-bedroom penthouse is currently listed at nearly $5m.
During the industrial boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when New York City produced more than 50 per cent of the US’s total manufacturing output, the neighbourhood of Dumbo was home to a host of paint, steel wool, and coffee companies. The industrialist Robert Gair, inventor of the corrugated cardboard box, once owned such vast holdings in the area that it was referred to in the 1880s as “Gairville”. Today, however, Dumbo is one of the most expensive property markets in New York City, with its highest concentration of resident billionaires.
This twist in the fate of the waterfront industrial zone was sealed in the 1980s, when David Walentas, a property developer and founder of Two Trees Real Estate Development Firm, is alleged to have first heard the word “Dumbo” at a party. A catchy acronym for “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass”, the neighbourhood was at that time a desolate area of derelict warehouses and factories, overgrown vacant lots, and pioneering artists in search of high ceilings and light. One of those artists was Steve West, the owner of Stephen and my favourite neighbourhood dive bar, whom we met on Contemporaries’ opening night. Steve moved here in 1989, working odd jobs including one at the MoMA where he was an art handler for the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He, along with other creatives such as the experimental filmmaker Matt Bass and collagist and painter David Auzenne, came to Dumbo to take advantage of the space and cheap cost of living. What they didn’t realise, however, was how the cultural production they were responsible for would later be appropriated by speculative real estate and development forces. By the early 90s, Two Trees had purchased around 2.5m sqft of Dumbo for $12m.
Is the dream of New York perishing? It seemed for some time that the possibilities of New York were caving in on us. As we were conceiving of Contemporaries, articles in CityLab, Dezeen, and The New York Times began to predict the impending obsolescence of urban lifestyles. This came as no surprise given that public transportation was being suspended, telecommuting began, and beloved cultural institutions closed. Our friends with the means to do so packed up their brownstones and moved upstate, while the cries of outrage and calls for justice in response to George Floyd’s murder forced storefronts from Midtown to SoHo to board up their windows for fear of violent looting.
Before the pandemic struck, when international travel was alive and well, you could spend an afternoon in Dumbo among its throngs of tourists, posh residences with pristine views of the Manhattan skyline, and waterfront amenities without realising just how recently this urban dreamscape was created. Like the glass-enclosed merry-go-round that sits on the East River in Brooklyn Bridge Park, the nostalgia for an old New York is omnipresent, hyper-stylised, and entirely fabricated.
Step outside the boundary of Dumbo’s historic designated neighbourhood, however, and you find three Housing Authority buildings dating back to 1952. The median household income in the Farragut, Ingersoll and Whitman houses is roughly $17,000; by comparison, the median income for the district as a whole is approximately $83,000. Beyond the crude figures that account for this wealth gap is the palpable sense that Dumbo has turned its back on its neighbours. Just around the corner from these buildings, the shadow of 728 apartments under construction looms large. “Coming soon | Front & York,” the sign reads. Once completed, the project will add 1.1m sqft to Dumbo’s residential holdings, along with a private park designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, the landscape architects responsible for the design of the Brooklyn Bridge Park.
Cognisant of this divide between pro-development forces and longer-term occupants of the neighbourhood, our vision for Contemporaries was to cultivate a creative community in Dumbo that could use culture at the street level as a means of engaging one another during a time of isolation. Our model was simple. We would open our doors to our community, offering a space to gather and help heal the deep wounds that were opened during this moment of crisis.
Our inaugural installation and event, A Radical Window, exhibited historic posters, prints, and design objects from the collection of Archiviste XX, founded by the artist and designer Henrik Ansat. From the raised fists of Angela Davis, to the May 1968 Paris student protests, and even the Sottsass Valentine portable typewriter, we sought to examine the most pressing issues of our time through the lens of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Much like today, these explosive decades saw racial justice, sexual equality, and freedom of expression being negotiated publicly. This was the era of the Vietnam War, the Pop Art and Free Love movements, the Swinging Sixties, and the height of the Black Power struggles. It was an incredible project to kick off with, but also a sobering reminder of how little things have changed. We were at Contemporaries when we heard the shouting and horns honking in celebration of Biden’s victory in one of the most volatile elections in American history, the results of which continue to be contested. Even as I write this, America is deciding how it will respond to the violent takeover of the Capitol building by Trump-supporting white supremacists.
For our second activation, These Are The Gifts, we invited architect Katie Swenson to be an author-in-residence at Contemporaries. Having recently experienced profound loss after the sudden death of her fiancé, Katie channeled her energies into writing In Bohemia: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Kindness, while also finishing another book chronicling 20 years of community-based design initiatives, Design With Love: At Home In America. Both were published in the fall of 2020. With a clean lick of paint, and the help of a new assistant, Chummeng Soun, we began taking apart the pages of her books and spray mounting them onto the walls of the space. A quote by the philosopher and activist Cornel West, “Justice is what love looks like in public”, greeted visitors as they walked through the doors and engaged in conversations surrounding architecture’s ability to heal communities, and what it looks like to confront pain and come out the other side with joy.
Nevertheless, the realities of social gathering forced us to reconsider the viability of the storefront as a typology for the future. The Contemporaries Holiday Design Market, our third and ongoing activation, brought together some of our favourite brands in a kind of pop-up shop for contemporary design. We had high hopes for the project, which were quickly thwarted as the colder weather and increasing rate of infections across the US moved people into deeper isolation. Traditional brick and mortar retail has been in decline since the emergence of e-commerce giants like Amazon, but this period has delivered what some consider to be a fatal blow to the sector. As people become more comfortable shopping online, we have to be aware of what is lost in the process. Of course, we believe there is more to retail than the exchange of goods and services. For us, objects must be encountered, touched, and used to avoid the waste of quick returns. The challenge becomes, how do we express that need to others?
Opening this space has allowed us to re-engage with the city in new ways, but the question remains as to how we, creatives in America’s largest city, where the benefits of development are reaped by the few, can continue to create beginnings in the face of endings. How do we feel free, curious, and generous during a time that seems to lack these capacities?
To discuss these issues, Leiper and Burks hosted a digital roundtable in January 2021. Present on the call were their contemporaries, business owners, designers, and artists from in and around Dumbo: Maria Cornejo, the fashion designer behind Zero + Maria Cornejo; Alexandra Hodkowski and Mösco Alcocer, co-curators of the Contemporaries Library and the founders of the Head Hi bookshop espresso bar in Fort Greene, Brooklyn; Katie Swenson, senior principal at MASS Design Group and inaugural author-in-residence at Contemporaries; and Ebon Heath, a graphic designer and artist who has a studio in Dumbo.
Malika Leiper How was the cafe today?
Alexandra Hodkowski It was good. January is off to a good start, and people are drinking more coffee than ever.
Maria Cornejo Where’s your coffee shop?
Alexandra We have a shop called Head Hi, which is a bookshop and espresso bar. It’s technically Fort Greene, but it’s right on the border of Navy Yard and Dumbo.
Stephen Burks Maria has got a fabulous studio in the Navy Yard, although she thinks of it as a storage room.
Maria It’s an archive room. I’m only there a couple of times a week and I’m mainly at Bleecker Street, where we have our main studio. But now with the pandemic, I really like working by myself in the archive – not having to wear a mask and social distance. I can get lost in there.
Stephen How many of us are working between multiple neighbourhoods? Malika and I were talking about our triangle, which is living in Boerum Hill, with the storefront in Dumbo, and then having a studio in Clinton Hill. That’s our little triangle, and we don’t really have to go outside of that much.
Maria Well, I’m still taking the subway between neighbourhoods – for me being on the subway is part of feeding my brain. It’s people, clothes, moving, young people. It’s energy. You can’t live in a bubble if you’re a designer.
Stephen I’ve always had this love/hate relationship with New York. The brutality is real and it’s both thrilling and depressing at the same time – so ugly that it’s beautiful. But it still captivates me.
Mösco Alcocer It’s a city that’s always changing and because it’s changing so often, it challenges you. You cannot just say, “This is it.” New Yorkers are people from all over the world, and everybody’s pushing. There’s an exchange every day, even if you don’t talk to people. If you’re in the subway, there’s all this information that you’re receiving. In our neighbourhood by the Navy Yard, there’s really not much going on, so we saw the opportunity to open a space. It’s a difficult location, because it’s not Nolita, it’s not SoHo, it’s not Park Slope – it’s an industrial area, literally in the middle of nowhere. Dumbo used to be like that – hip, quiet, with a lot of artists, and no stores at all. And it was a really cool neighbourhood. It’s still a cool neighbourhood, but in a very different way. It’s part of the drastic changes that happen here.
Katie Swenson I moved to New York in 1990 as a modern dancer, and had a wonderful loft on the Bowery where we had a rehearsal studio, and threw crazy parties and did all those early 90s things. When I left the city in 1996 for graduate school, it was starting to get so expensive – too much to raise three kids. But my children are grown now, so I moved back to New York. I live in Dumbo, with its incredible views of the East River and Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. In the 90s, the city was not as open to the water as it is now. Dumbo is a little bit like a bowl, once you enter it, it’s hard to climb out. It draws you down into the space. Coming here during the pandemic, you see that almost everything is closed. It was bold for Malika and Stephen to open Contemporaries, to create a public gathering space at this time. In our old lives, if you had a gallery opening and 10 or 12 people came, you might be disappointed. But now, the intimacy of gathering has changed that dynamic, and it’s somehow thrilling to have a place to meet new people, share in art and design, and to come together.
Stephen Contemporaries for me was about action. It was about doing something in a time when we all felt paralysed and were tired of feeling like nothing was happening. We came out of a very volatile summer, marching in the streets like everybody else, and wanted to take action.
Alexandra We also started Head Hi thinking we need a place for dialogue. We need a place for inspiration and a place where organic conversation leads to networks and relationships and ideas and friendships and community. One of the things that we think about a lot is what community means, because it can mean so many things. “I want to build community.” OK, well, we have the community of residents; the community of people who drink coffee; the community of people who like books; the community of people who come in from the city or work in the neighborhood. Community is so many different things on so many different levels, but we like those different communities and the tensions they create. We were excited when Malika and Stephen approached us and told us what they were doing, because it’s hard to find a design space in New York where you’re not necessarily required to buy something. They’re inviting you to think about design in a different way to normal.
Stephen Contemporaries is very uncommercial.
Malika In what is now an incredibly commercial neighbourhood, as Mösco was alluding to.
Ebon Heath Wait until all these new buildings open up – it’s going to get real commercial on you. I’ve been in Dumbo since the winter of 1994 when I got out of RISD [Rhode Island School of Design, ed.]. It was beautiful back then. In my building there were woodworkers, and craftsmen, and industrial spaces. I was the gentrifier; I was the college kid coming in displacing workers. It was super quiet and there was something quite peaceful about it. I thought it was a hidden gem because my view was onto the water, whereas if you go to any other city around the world, any major city, the waterfront is always the first to be developed. It’s only in the past 20 years that New York City’s waterfront has been developed. But now they’re building all around me, and I got no more friends in the neighbourhood, and there are few people of colour. I could talk more about that in regards to a public art proposal that I’ve recently submitted, which explores the modern day redlining that’s still happening in Dumbo [a discriminatory practice by which mortgages are denied to people of colour to prevent them buying in a particular neighbourhood, or from renovating existing properties, ed.]; and how so much equity is not reaching the community living in NYCHA [New York City Housing Authority, ed.]; and how the success of the Tech Triangle is only benefiting a very few (mainly white) people.
Malika So if anyone’s not familiar with it, the Tech Triangle was a 2013 initiative from the Mayor’s Office of New York to facilitate the growth of the tech sector in Downtown Brooklyn, the Navy Yard, and Dumbo. Dumbo was also designated a historic district in 2007. There are some serious competing development forces at play in the neighbourhood. Some advocates of historic preservation would say it preserves Dumbo’s character and keeps its history accessible to the public, but others read the historic district boundary asa modern evolution of redlining.
Ebon Dumbo and the Tech Triangle have two or three of the biggest public housing communities in New York: Whitman, Farragut and Ingersoll. They really haven’t had any benefits, whether employment or opportunities or changes to their public landscape in many years. The Tech Triangle ignores those NYCHA communities, which haven’t gained any equity from all the success. There are so many buildings being built in downtown Brooklyn, and massive funding where they’re giving out $50,000 to public art projects [the Downtown Revitalization Initiative, ed.] but without any sustainable element and without any connection to the community. I just found out recently that they didn’t award anything to the many local artists who applied.
Stephen As Malika was mentioning, there’s a border there – it runs along Front and Jay, and it’s a divider between public housing and very expensive condo development. Then there’s a new condo project going up in Dumbo – Front & York.
Ebon That’s nearly 800 units coming in, with no public access and no community engagement on the street front. Urban planners are devils.
Maria Aren’t they supposed to provide public services?
Ebon They’re supposed to, just like they’re supposed to provide affordable housing, but do they? There’s a private park in the middle of that complex that none of the neighbourhood will have access to.
Katie At MASS Design Group, we’re designing a senior housing building for an RFP [request for proposal, ed.] at a NYCHA site called Kingsborough Houses, in a neighborhood in Crown Heights called Weeksville – one of America’s first free Black communities. Weeksville has a wonderful community centre that highlights the history of the community, offering classes in how to trace your own history and heritage. It’s a neighbourhood that is really fighting back against gentrification and homogenisation. Over half a million New Yorkers live in NYCHA neighbourhoods. From a design perspective, they have some planning flaws, but also have a lot of benefits, such as a campus feel with beautiful large trees. But they’ve suffered from a terrible lack of investment, and little upkeep of the public spaces. Investing in NYCHA campuses is one of the most important things the city could do – a way to ensure that the affordable housing we have is also a great place to live.
Ebon Weeksville is amazing, but it also has an inconsistent history when it comes to its engagement and relationship to community. A lot of great people have come through there, but that place has almost crashed many times because there hasn’t been investment in those Black institutions that lots of people like to talk about. Where’s the hope for Weeksville? It’s an incredible first – a free Black settlement in New York – but last I heard it was falling to pieces.
Stephen We recently watched the Jane Jacobs documentary, Citizen Jane, where she essentially started a revolution that saved Washington Square Park and most of SoHo from “urban renewal” – the process whereby Robert Moses, the city planner, would come in and literally wipe out large swathes of what he treated as ghettos. A person who lived in Connecticut, who didn’t understand why New York City and the tenements of the early 20th-century worked, came in and decimated blocks and blocks of New York City, and is responsible for many of those public housing projects of the 1960s that we all know so well. But here we are 60 years later, and these places that were considered urban ghettos have now changed so much. This part of Brooklyn used to be completely undesirable.
Malika Then in the 1980s David Walentas and Two Trees started coming in and buying up Dumbo.
Ebon Two Trees are devils. In the beginning they used to try to take percentages of people’s businesses in exchange for free rent, and they had all these ways to get into the neighbourhood, like Smack Mellon [a non-profit arts organisation that Two Trees provided a space for, ed.] and Jane’s Carousel [a restored 1922 carousel installed in a Jean Nouvel structure in Brooklyn Bridge Park, ed.], but then they forced out the artists. It was the beginning of how developers exploit artists to make a neighbourhood cool and now there are no more artists in the neighbourhood. I’m only still here because I happen to be in a building that’s not owned by Walentas or Guttman [Joshua Guttman is a New York property owner who has been accused by a number of his tenants of operating as a slumlord, ed.].
Stephen Do you have any friends, any fellow artists, who are still in the neighbourhood?
Ebon Not from back in the day. They all got shut out. There’s a couple of musicians, some older generation artists who were already invested, and the women at Superfine [a restaurant and cultural space, ed.] who are still holding it down. They bring great energy and are the last frontier of freaky good energy in our neighbourhood. I was late for this call because I had to jump in an Uber back to Dumbo from my laser cutter in Bushwick. And that’s why Dumbo’s so fucked up, because I’ve got to come to Bushwick to get my laser cutting done.
Maria Don’t you feel guilty when people like us move into a neighbourhood? When I moved to Mott Street it was a garage, so really I was guilty of gentrifying. And then the rents went up and we could no longer afford it, so we moved. Creative people make an area cool and then we get developers. They lose the spirit of the neighbourhood because the minute the artists and the creative people go, it just becomes about money.
Mösco In my defense as an artist, I am not wealthy. I’m talking about literally starving artists, working multiple jobs and prioritising their craft, creating a space and working in a street that is dirty, painting murals in a neighbourhood that nobody has any desire for whatsoever. You go there and you fix it, just as you have the squatters in the Lower East Side, or Berlin, or Paris, or Mexico City who have fixed buildings that were otherwise going to fall down. I don’t think we’re the gentrifiers. Developers have the money, and they have the means and ways to change zoning, which is crucial to developing anything anywhere. If you have the right connections and money, you can change zoning to suit your commercial interests. But I’m not coming into a neighbourhood because I want to transform it. I’m going there because it’s what I can afford.
Maria I think we all did that, but the reality is that developers follow creatives because we make a neighbourhood interesting. When I moved to Mott Street, there were no stores on that street and literally two doors down were the mafia. But my landlord went from the rent being $2,700 to eventually charging $15,000 and we just couldn’t do it anymore. I’m not saying that we do it purposely, but the reality is that my space was a creative space that used to host a lot of other artists. It brings an energy, which attracts people with money.
Ebon Dumbo was such a slam dunk. With all these other examples of gentrification my parents told me about, like SoHo or Harlem, there was this organic nature to urban growth. Now, the developers are smart. They’re setting us up to fail. They see you and they’re like, “Yeah, brother, come here, free rent.” Whatever you want in order to be a marketing tool for rich hipsters to displace you with higher rents. To bring it full circle, let’s talk about housing and the glut of development that’s happening in downtown Brooklyn, Dumbo, and the Tech Triangle. With all this Covid and people now being remote, that shit ain’t getting filled up. They’re trying to create Silicon Valley, but it ain’t happening now. So the exciting part is what the hell do we do with all that empty real estate?
Stephen We’re in this position where it’s speculative for everybody, right? You’ve been looking at empty storefronts. I’ve joked that we’re reverse gentrifiers with Contemporaries, because we’re coming at the end of gentrification and have found, believe it or not, a storefront in Dumbo that we can afford. It’s not like we’re the first trying to make Dumbo cool – we’re the last. David Walentas came in and bought the entire neighbourhood. Ebon was speaking about how gentrification happened organically in the past. Well, in the new millennium, one person is able to buy a whole neighbourhood.
Ebon And he gets put on magazine covers and treated as a success story for that. This is Two Trees as a model that everybody’s trying to replicate and that’s what makes me even more nauseous. It’s not like this is an exception. This is the standard. This is what people are trying to reach.
Alexandra I think Ebon’s right, but there are different responses. Developers are applauding this Walentas guy, but then there are communities who are totally against it. And that’s New York – you’re going to have a myriad of responses. But the ownership is so powerful, with good lawyers and money, that a lot of the time the community response is not as powerful.
Stephen Sad to say, but this is not a socialist country.
Ebon There are lots of positive things happening in grassroots communities around the city though. In the Navy Yard, there’s an incredible vocational school that just opened up called the STEAM school. I don’t want to just paint things with a negative focus on development money, because if we zoom in with a smaller lens, and look at people power, normal working people trying to make shit happen with design solutions, then there’s incredible things happening that need to be applauded. I think we get distracted, because developers take the oxygen out of the room.
Stephen What’s been exciting for me during the Covid crisis is that the streets have become public again. I mean, who would have thought that you’d be eating outside al fresco as if you were in Paris and Rome?
Maria Art is reclaiming all those boarded up storefronts in SoHo. I mean, I keep taking pictures because there’s so much art going up on the plyboard. There’s some great stuff going on and New York’s got this new energy, which was all of a sudden like, “Fuck, it feels like New York used to feel.”
Stephen And it’s local energy because we don’t have tourists, right?
Maria A lot of affluent people with secondary homes left in March and they’re not coming back. They can work from home so they’re not coming back.
Ebon Dumbo is empty. All the tourists and techies are gone, so it’s really quiet. It’s like the 90s. You want to see what it was like in the 90s? Come during the next lockdown. It’s beautiful.
Stephen So this is the potential, right? To be able to do something. We see Contemporaries as a model for how neighbourhoods could take over these empty storefronts. Different neighbourhoods can say, “OK, Contemporaries can work in one storefront. Could it also work in multiple storefronts? Could it be a model for a whole neighbourhood to bring culture back?”
Maria I hope so, Stephen, but apparently landlords get major tax breaks if the stores sit empty.
Ebon Let’s keep it real though. The one consistent thing about New York is it’s constantly changing. My dad talked about SoHo being prairies and grassland – “You thought you hip? You should’ve seen when I was a kid.” So everyone has their own moment of glory. The same way that our kids have their glory moment and the best New York they’ve ever fucking tasted is right now. Same way our New York and the 90s was the best that I ever fucking tasted. My dad was in New York in the 50s and the 60s, and that was the best New York he ever fucking tasted. There’s always a sense of reinvention, which is why it’s brilliant. Regardless of this specific moment, and all the hardship Rona has brought, this too shall pass.
Malika At root, we’re talking about people coming together to try and protect a neighbourhood from being gentrified, or just to show up and support each other. One of the most remarkable things in the summer for Stephen and I was that we observed many of the people during the protests were young white kids calling for Black Lives Matter. Maybe there is a new generation who are willing to show up, and hopefully this solidarity and resilience will continue.
Katie Contemporaries has been meaningful for me as a way to get connected during the pandemic. But I also think the larger gestalt of what they are doing is significant – highlighting that people aren’t creative in a vacuum. They’re brushing up against each other. And, while there is a lot of online activity now, coming together in person is still the most catalytic. Opening a storefront studio in 2020 is radical.
Alexandra We need spaces that are not like Starbucks and that is a part of the reason we started Head Hi. We need people to walk in, ask questions, be curious and not know exactly what it is, but to have a dialogue and see that experimenting is good. The platform that you’ve set forth from the beginning is collaboration. None of us would be here if it weren’t for collaborative experimentation, supporting and showing up, whether it’s showing up on Instagram or showing up in a physical space. We need to do that for each other.
Ebon We need colleagues and contemporaries and allies to check in with people these days. Whether you’re talking about arts or wellness or BLM, that’s a necessity. Who’s got your back? Who can challenge you? That’s the basis of structural analysis and dialogue and good critique. If not, you’re just jerking yourself off. Sorry to end on a rude note – I got no more time for self-censorship.
Introduction Malika Leiper
Photographs Dean Kaufman
This article was originally published in Disegno #28. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.
RELATED LINKS
Contemporaries
Ebon Heath
Head Hi
MASS Design Group
Stephen Burks Man Made
Zero + Maria Cornejo