According to an article in today's Times, Brooklyn's Smith St. is fast falling into the comfortable embrace of upmarket mass-commodification. Lucky Jeans recently opened a store there, Trader Joe's is coming soon and the long-time residents are in as much of a furor as their yoga practice will let them be. (Breathe, breathe, engage moola bandha.) Styles reporter Eric Wilson took to Smith street to find the longest-time resident he could—presumably the one with most historical perspective.

Maria Cornejo, the fashion designer, bought a house in Cobble Hill in 2000, charmed by its resemblance to a European village — the cute restaurants and bars and, at the time, the lack of fashion stores....The risk is that the neighborhood loses its heart, eventually," she said, although it has not yet come to that...."I call it the European ghetto, because it feels like you are living in a neighborhood in London, having the town houses, the butcher shop, the cheese shop and the fish shop.

I don't know Maria. That's not what the ghettos of my people looked like. (Less food, more concertina.)

The neighborhood, we also learn, has earned its own abbreviation. BoCoCa, a charming neologism that is screechingly similar to cloaca, and really captures Smith Street's hustle-and-bustle.

Anyone, however, surprised that Lucky Jeans and Trader Joe's has come to Boerum Hill needs only to remember that little Matilda Ledger has to get her Blossom denim mini skirts from somewhere!