Lenore Berner, born at the very tail end of the baby boom generation, turned 50 in February. (Her husband, Dan, had hit the half-century mark the previous year.) A few weeks later, the Berners moved from a two-bedroom apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, which they were renting for $4,500 a month, to a 39th-floor waterfront rental in Long Island City, Queens — the price tag a more modest $3,850.
“We were longtime Park Slopers,” Ms. Berner said. “My husband had spent his whole life in the neighborhood — he grew up in a brownstone on Garfield Place — and I’d lived in the Slope for 22 years. But our two kids were out of the house, and we needed something smaller and cheaper.”
And though they’re just settling into the TF Cornerstone tower on Center Boulevard, they feel surprisingly at home. “It seemed that everyone knew someone who lives there,” Ms. Berner said. “And in terms of both the apartment and the neighborhood, this felt ideal.”
The Berners — she’s a middle school principal in Park Slope and he’s in sales — are part of a small but visible wave of New Yorkers over 50 who are forsaking the city’s more traditional neighborhoods for its youth-oriented outposts.
Many of these neighborhoods, especially those defined by deep-rooted ethnic communities, are already home to an older population, people who may, in fact, be displaced by newcomers. But now, driven by a taste for adventure and a lively urban lifestyle, a new crop of older New Yorkers are casting an eye on areas heavily populated by the young and the artistic. These neighborhoods include Greenpoint, Red Hook, Gowanus, Bushwick, the East Village, the Lower East Side and notably, Long Island City, which is luring boomers with a passion for craft beer, first-rate latte and a laid-back vibe, just as Williamsburg beckoned them a few years ago.
“It was a big leap of faith,” Ms. Berner said of her move. “But we’d heard only amazing things about the neighborhood. And just walking these streets makes me feel younger. I feel like I’m starting a whole new chapter in my life.”
Greg Stone, 57, was also drawn to the youthful vibe of Long Island City. Mr. Stone lived in the New York area until 2007, relocated to Florida, and returned to the city last summer. In early March he moved to a one-bedroom rental in the Maximilian, whose amenities include a gym, a landscaped roof deck and bike storage. He pays about $2,700 a month for his apartment, and was attracted in part by the easy commute to his office in Midtown, where he works as a financial analyst. But as a single man, a powerful lure was the vibrancy of the street life.
In searching for a home, he had ruled out neighborhoods like Forest Hills, Queens — “a grandma place,” as he described it. “I wanted to live someplace younger,” Mr. Stone said. “I liked that the restaurants on Vernon Boulevard aren’t too stuffy, that they’re more casual than the ones you find in older neighborhoods. I like that you see people walking the streets late at night.”
He is looking forward to biking the local streets and hopping the G train to Greenpoint, another up-and-coming community. “I’ll be young again — what can I tell you?” he said. “It’s an adventure for me.”
Does he worry about fitting in? “Does it matter?” he said. “If people are younger than me, that’s fine.”
Jessica Kaufman, the Citi Habitats agent who helped Mr. Stone find his apartment, is not surprised by her client’s enthusiasm for this ever cooler neighborhood, whose attractions include espresso bars with leathery sofas, taco happy hours and destination restaurants, along with a growing number of museums, galleries and other cultural outposts.
“People are always looking for the next big thing,” Ms. Kaufman said. “There are lots of boomers out there who might be empty nesters, but they’re not retiring. This neighborhood is hip-hopping, and they want to be part of it.”
And while it might seem that swimming in a sea of skinny-jeaned hipsters would make an older New Yorker feel more geezer than cutting-edge adventurer, many transplants report just the opposite emotions. Taking up residence in a culturally rich environment, they say, makes them feel more buoyant, more energetic, more engaged with the world.
This story is a familiar and well-documented one in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the granddaddy of neighborhoods with hipster cachet, where the number of baby boomers rose an estimated 38 percent between 2000 and 2012. Estimates from the American Community Survey conducted by the United States Census Bureau show that between 2010 and 2012 an average of 1,249 baby boomers (Americans born between 1946 and 1964) a year moved to the Williamsburg-Greenpoint area.
Census data also shows that the percentage of residents age 50 to 69 in some of the city’s other youth-oriented neighborhoods increased in those same years. In the East Village the increase was 42 percent, in Red Hook 32 percent, on the Lower East Side 29 percent and in Bushwick 27 percent.
Janette James, a broker with Modern Spaces whose specialty is Long Island City, has seen these moves up close. Typical of her clients are a couple, both professionals in their 50s, who raised two children on Park Avenue, bought both children apartments in Long Island City, and last year bought themselves a two-bedroom condo at the View, yet another luxury high-rise steps from the water.
“Brokers aren’t allowed to cite demographic information,” Ms. James said. “But the first question out of the mouths of people like this is always, ‘Are there people here our age?’ And increasingly the answer is yes.”
“Sometimes their friends will express surprise at the move, especially if it’s a neighborhood the friends have barely heard of,” she added. “But a lot more baby boomers are moving to these neighborhoods than people realize.”
The still gritty waterfront districts of South Brooklyn, attractive to many young artists because of the relatively cheap lofts, are also experiencing an influx of more venerable types.
John Weir, 55, moved last year to an apartment within spitting distance of Gowanus, a neighborhood defined in part by its namesake canal. Mr. Weir, who teaches English and creative writing at Queens College and is the author of two novels, spent 33 years in Manhattan, most recently in a sublet near Times Square. But heat problems, he said, “made my apartment feel like something out of ‘Doctor Zhivago,’ ” forcing him to look farther afield.
A year ago, thanks to a response to his tales of woe on Facebook, Mr. Weir ended up in a ground-floor rental in a friend’s century-old red brick townhouse on Union Street, for which he pays under $1,800 a month. The building sits on the Park Slope-Gowanus border, “although,” he said, “when people ask where I live, I always say Gowanus, because I prefer grunge.”
The place is steps from what Mr. Weir describes, only half tongue in cheek, as the “groovy dad Gowanus coffee shop,” a.k.a. the brick-walled Root Hill Cafe on Fourth Avenue. “It’s always filled with lots of arty, paint-spattered stay-at-home dads,” Mr. Weir said, “along with kids wearing natural fabrics.” He suspects that everyone he sees hunched over a laptop is laboring over a webcast TV show.
An incident that occurred his first week in the neighborhood encapsulates what he likes about it. Mr. Weir needed a slab of plywood for his bed. He poked his head into an artists’ supply store, where a blue-jeaned worker “gave me a piece of wood and said, ‘O.K., man, just take it for free and pay it forward.’ It was like something out of a movie.”
“I’m still a little afraid of how groovy and arty my neighbors are,” said Mr. Weir, who is working on a novel about a 50-something man much like himself living in a neighborhood much like Gowanus. “To be honest, I don’t feel hip enough for Brooklyn. But when you’re 55, and you see people forming themselves and determining what they’re going to be, that’s a good feeling. I like being around people who haven’t fully found themselves.”
A variety of forces are drawing people in their 50s and 60s to neighborhoods that until recently were better known for crime than cool.
“Low crime is God’s gift to gentrification,” said Harvey Molotch, a professor of metropolitan studies and sociology at New York University. “The decline of violent crime in the city, especially random crime — the stray bullet — has significantly opened up the so-called frontier. The need of the fearful to cluster in a fortress, in a secure zone like the Upper East Side or later, Park Slope, is alleviated. People have more choice, and they can feel comfortable venturing farther from home base.”
Sometimes the attractions are more subtle.
“Some of these people previously lived in neighborhoods like the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side or Park Slope, and now that the kids are out of the house, they want to resume their pre-parent lives, to pick up where they left off,” said Sharon Zukin, the author of “Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Spaces” (Oxford University Press, 2009), a study of the evolution of onetime fringe neighborhoods like Williamsburg and the East Village.
“They also want to invest their nest egg prudently,” added Dr. Zukin, who is a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and the City University Graduate Center, and is herself a baby boomer parent of a recent college graduate. “They don’t want to rent an unimproved loft and live there with roommates, but they can buy a nice clean space in Long Island City. And because property values have risen, it’s prudent, not crazy, to buy in a neighborhood that’s still a little rough around the edges.
“Maybe everyone around them is incredibly young and thin,” she said. “But their sense of self is formed by a mirror reflection from other people, and that mirror makes them feel young and spry.”
Among the early adopters to make a beeline for a hip-hopping New York neighborhood was Victoria Hamilton, 70, a retired psychologist and now a full-time painter and classical pianist who moved from Los Angeles to the Upper West Side in 2000 and to Williamsburg eight years later.
As often happens, she was introduced to a cool area by a child, in her case, her son, Sam Tufnell, a sculptor who moved to Williamsburg in 2004. “I started coming to the neighborhood a lot because I used to house-sit and dog-sit for him,” Ms. Hamilton said. “And to be honest, I didn’t like Manhattan that much.”
While occupying her first apartment, at Kent and North Eighth Streets, she discovered the cluster of waterfront towers known as the Edge. Three years ago, she paid $1.2 million for a two-bedroom corner apartment with a balcony whose sweeping river view is emblazoned on her website.
“From the first, I simply liked it out here,” Ms. Hamilton said. “I liked the sky, the space, the different kinds of people. When I first moved, I definitely felt like the oldest person in the neighborhood, and it was weird for a while. Then I forgot about it. People were kind, and they never made me feel old. Plus, after a while there were more people of mixed ages around.”
Despite the nonstop din that sometimes emanates from the neighborhood’s bars and clubs, she has no complaints about noise. “I’ve never been anywhere so quiet,” she said.
Aldo Sampieri, who is in his 50s, ventured even deeper into hipster territory. After 16 years in a loft near New York University, Mr. Sampieri, a painter and graphic artist, moved to Williamsburg in 2010. And last August he paid $760,000 for a renovated century-old townhouse on Moffat Street in Bushwick, a couple of subway stops farther along Brooklyn’s hipster trail. And he has only good things to say about the perks of living in a youth-oriented part of town.
“It helps you be looser, not so uptight,” Mr. Sampieri said. “Your mannerisms change. You feel comfortable wearing more eccentric clothing.
“I’ve always had a very funky life,” he added. “I was married, divorced. I have no family. I can do what I want. And when you’re in a neighborhood filled with people of different ages, you feel like you’re not that old. Seeing young people walking around makes you feel happy, more alive. You find yourself playing bass with some guys in a studio, leading a life that a person my age usually can’t do.”
Visuals help, too.
“The good thing is, I still have hair on my head,” Mr. Sampieri said. “People think I’m in my early 40s. And in a way, that’s what I am.”