Playground magazine

Everyone who has followed the independent pop scene over the last decade, even from afar, knows that the city of Brooklyn is an international musical hub. The emergence there of interesting experimental, multifaceted pop is combined with certain elements that have made Brooklyn a paradise for trendy culture - the international centre of hip - and definitely a cultural enclave that can be as odious as it is attractive. Despite the obvious differences, Brooklyn has become a sort of new Hollywood of music. A place that aspiring musicians from all over the country emigrate to in search of their opportunity to make it big. If in Hollywood every waiter and waitress is a would-be actor or actress, it seems that there is nobody working in any of the millions of bars in Williamsburg who doesn’t aspire to be a musician or filmmaker. Originally centred on Williamsburg, hip has spread to Greenpoint in the north, reaching Long Island City on the east, and Red Hook on the west,  making hipster Brooklyn an enormous indie kingdom that is as idiosyncratic as it is easy to caricature (as has been done in television series like “Two Broke Girls”).

I must confess that the Brooklyn hipster mystique irritates me, in part because I love the city (my adopted home, for years), but mainly because in the eyes of many it has eclipsed the wonderful legend and identity of Brooklyn itself. Brooklyn is a port city, complex and polyphonic, built on waves of Dutch, English, Italian, Polish, Jewish and Hispanic immigration. Working class, rough, and fiercely proud; it is huge, densely populated and divided into about eighty historic neighbourhoods, many of which are still ethnic enclaves. It is the dark twin of New York, like South London is the dark twin of London. A real Babel, almost an alchemical microcosm of the world. The stockpile of Brooklyn legends is simply interminable, but in this article, I want to present three as a sort of antidote or vaccination against the new hipster mythology: the Masonic Temple at Fort Greene, the collection of Egyptian artefacts at the Brooklyn Museum and Lovecraft’s The Horror of Red Hook.

Very well known today as a concert hall, the Brooklyn Masonic Temple at Fort Greene, on the corner of Clermont and Lafayette, was built between 1907 and 1909 as the meeting hall for all of the lodges in Brooklyn. When you see the building for the first time, it takes your breath away. It is an almost perfect cube made of marble, brick, and terracotta, measuring thirty metres on each side, at once colossal and delicate. Inside, full of marble staircases and Masonic murals, there are two larger lodge halls, one smaller one - a banquet hall - and its spectacular four-story auditorium, which is where concerts are held today. In recent years, since it became more popular, bands such as Swans, Neurosis, Throbbing Gristle, Sunn O))) and Godspeed You! Black Emperor have played there (as well as many other less illustrious bands).

Needless to say, if the band knows how to take advantage of the stage, and sometimes even if it doesn’t, the auditorium of the Masonic Temple can turn the experience of a live musical performance into an absolutely magical ceremony. Local legend has it that the Masons are the ones who rent the auditorium for holding concerts, but strictly speaking, this isn’t true. For decades the Fort Greene Masonic Temple was the spiritual centre of the Brooklyn lodges, coming to house about forty of them, but in 1977 the lodges lost the building, which was acquired by an organisation called The Empire State Grand Council, Ancient & Accepted Scottish Rite Masons Inc. The organisation in question is an unusual Mason’s lodge, made up of Afro-Americans and not recognised by practically any legitimate Masonic organisation. In 1977, it was The Empire State Grand Council that started renting the different meeting rooms out to various groups, in order to pay the building’s high maintenance costs. Nowadays, all sorts of public acts, weddings, baptisms and rock concerts are held there, generating a certain debate about how all of this is affecting the building’s wonderful interior.

Located on the northeast corner of Prospect Park, the Brooklyn Museum is home to one of the largest collections of ancient Egyptian art in America. The museum has been buying ancient Egyptian objects for over a century and sponsoring its own excavations in Nubia and Egypt. In fact, the museum’s biggest archaeological project is currently the excavation of the Temple of the Goddess Mut in South Karnak, which was begun in the 70s. The great treasure of the museum’s Egyptian section is without a doubt the private collection that the museum bought from the heirs of eminent American Egyptologist Charles Edwin Wilbour (which makes up a substantial part of the collection). Besides his collection of objects, Wilbour’s heirs also donated his professional library to the museum and created a research fund that has ensured that the museum can continue to make acquisitions. This is how the Wilbour Library was established, one of the main Egyptology libraries in the world. These days, just the part that is on display is enough to make a visit to the museum worthwhile, with thousands of objects and nine brand-new mummies, of which there are always four or five on permanent display. The most popular of them, recently restored, seems to answer to the name of Melvin.