Brooklyn’s identity is a density of layered migrations, not a single character

Evidence

Brooklyn is “chiefly no whole or recognizable animal,” writes James Agee, “but an exorbitant pulsing mass of scarcely discernible cellular jellies and tissues.” With more than 2.5 million residents, it is the third-largest metropolitan area in the country. Size alone does not account for its energy. Robber barons, refugees, free blacks, and the international working class have all settled here, whether in leafy Victorian mansions or in limestone, brownstone, or Federal-style row houses, making the story of Brooklyn a short history of human escape and reinvention flattened through geography and narrated through architecture. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 53

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s own framing throughout of Arab Brooklyn as a node of layered migration, and to James Agee’s Brooklyn writing.