Brooklyn Heights came into being as a posh neighborhood overlooking the East River, within easy travel of the businesses attached to the ports of New York City. It gave us Whitman and Crane and Alcoholics Anonymous and Mailer, and a line about Montague Street in a pretty good Bob Dylan song.
If things work out, the Heights could make one more big contribution to the national fairy tale: it could be remembered as the launching ground for the nation’s first female president. According to an anonymous source quoted on Friday morning by Politico, the incipient Hillary Clinton campaign – or proxies thereof – has rented two floors in an office building in Brooklyn Heights.
According to Politico, the offices, at 1 Pierrepont Plaza, would serve as headquarters for a Clinton presidential operation, and would thus be sure to host some of the most dramatic, pissed-off phone calls and painfully confidential closed-door meetings of any building on earth in the next 19 months. (And, who knows, maybe a congratulatory phone call from Joe Biden on Super Tuesday.)
Luckily, the renowned Heights promenade, and the analgesic tranquility of its airy views of New York harbor and the rump-end of Manhattan, lies mere blocks away. Situated just below the promenade is one of the most felicitous recent additions to New York’s impressive roster of green spaces: the elaborately landscaped Brooklyn Bridge Park, good for a jog, a stroll, or a phone call not detectable by most audio surveillance equipment.
The Heights site offers opportunities for almost any mood the candidate might find herself in over the long course of the campaign. In search of patriotic inspiration, she might cast her eyes south to Liberty Island, where the green statue tirelessly hoists her torch. To reflect on the marvels of engineering of which man is capable, she might contemplate the bridge that tied the suburb to the city in the wake of the Civil War. If she’s hungry, there’s Shake Shack.
The Brooklyn location does raise one delicate question, having to do with a certain air of exclusivity that clings to the borough thanks to its native resourcefulness and to decades of exertion by talented, attractive arrivals from across the globe. Brooklyn is not the world’s borough like Queens, or the blue-collar borough like Staten Island. Brooklyn is hip. But is Clinton hip?
Is it good to be hip in politics? Does being hip help win the white male voters in West Virginia and Arkansas, whose abandonment of Barack Obama Democrats represents perhaps the most significant demographic conundrum for the party’s 2016 nominee? Will Clinton dare to launch her campaign from Brooklyn, which has not housed a swing voter since around the time that bridge was finished?
In Clinton’s favor, for the last 150 years or so, while Brooklyn has become ever hipper, Brooklyn Heights has become more hip-replacement. It’s not a place to make the scene. But it might be a place for making history.
