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Brooklyn Heights Association Annual Meeting features music & architecture critic Justin Davidson

February 9, 2015 By Mary Frost Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Justin Davidson, New York magazine architecture and classical music critic. Photo courtesy of Justin Davidson
Justin Davidson, New York magazine architecture and classical music critic. Photo courtesy of Justin Davidson
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The Brooklyn Heights Association’s Annual Meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, Feb. 24th at 7 p.m. at Grace Church, located on the corner of Hicks Street and Grace Court.

The guest speaker this year is Justin Davidson, New York magazine architecture and classical music critic. He will speak about “Preservation as an Agent of Radical Change.”

Contributing to New York magazine since 2007, Davidson writes about a broad range of urban, civic, and design issues. Before that, he spent 12 years as classical music critic at Newsday, where he also wrote about architecture and was a regular commentator on cultural issues. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his music criticism in 2002.

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He is currently at work on a book, “Magnetic City, a cultural, historical, architectural and personal guide to New York.”

Davidson has written in depth about the ambiguities of gentrification. In his Feb. 2, 2014 New York Magazine article, “Is Gentrification All Bad?” he described neighborhoods where “the poor are confined to islands of deprivation, encircled by oceans of prosperity.”

Yet these “Dickensian juxtapositions” are actually a sign of a city that is doing something right, he wrote.

“Gentrification can nudge a neighborhood up the slope; decline can roll it off a cliff. Somewhere along that trajectory of change is a sweet spot, a mixed and humming street that is not quite settled or sanitized, where Old Guard and new arrivals coexist in equilibrium. The game is to make it last.”

BHA President Alexandra Bowie will open the meeting with a report of association activities, followed by Thirteen/WNET host Tom Stewart with a presentation of BHA Awards for Community Service.

Wheel chair access into the church is available through the red doors on Grace Court.

The BHA Annual Meeting is open to the public. Reservations are not necessary. A reception with light refreshments will follow.

For more details, please contact the BHA office at 718-858-9193 or visit www.thebha.org


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