Whose Brooklyn? Film criticizes development of Downtown, Fulton Mall
Almost everything we’ve heard about the Downtown Brooklyn Plan and the coming of national chain stores to the Fulton Mall has been positive.
However, in the new film, “My Brooklyn: The Battle for the Soul of a City,” director-producer Kelly Anderson and writer-producer Allison Lirish Dean are saying, in effect, “Not so fast!” Their focus is not on the new stores, but on the small merchants who have been displaced to make room from them.
Anderson, an admitted “gentrifier” who originally came from Montreal and moved to Brooklyn in 1989, got the idea for the film in the early 2000s, when she saw an explosion of luxury housing and chain-store development in Fort Greene, where she was then living.