They moved a little to the east, which was north of Little Italy. That became NoLita. Prices went up. They also moved a bit to the south and west, the triangle below Canal Street, which became Tribeca. By then, commercial developers were doing the conversions of loft spaces into apartments. They quickly became so expensive that only people working in finance could afford them.

The next wave of hipsters moved across the East River to Queens and, especially, to Brooklyn. The Brooklyn that I grew up in, blue-collar, segregated into ethnic neighborhoods, with gangs and thugs, became today’s Brooklyn, a place so hip that even Parisians reference it as branchée.

One little pocket of that borough, between the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the East River, the Brooklyn Navy Yard at one end and the steep hill up to Brooklyn Heights at the other, had gone unnoticed. It was full of buildings constructed for industries that had vanished. Like SOHO had been. It still had cobblestone streets. It had views. All it needed was an intriguing moniker to turn it into real estate riches. It had two bridges going over it. Under the Brooklyn Bridge would just be UBB, but Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass—which it also was—became DUMBO, with all its warm, cuddly, cartoony, Disney connotations.

The transformation was so fast that it hopped and skipped across the standard sequence of artists coming in, redeveloping industrial space to livable quarters, followed by galleries, gourmet grocers, and boutiques to serve them, which would attract visitors, including tourists, and went directly to being the place for trendy businesses.

—

Elizabeth had half of the fifth floor in a six-story building. It had been built in the 1870s, the boom times after the Civil War, spending most of its life as a coffee warehouse. The ceilings were high. The windows were big. Some of them had views that looked out under the two bridges to the East River, and across it, to Manhattan.

The space was being done over. The door was propped open. I walked in.

An interior design architect was directing construction workers and painters.

A set of huge graphic posters was leaning up against the wall, waiting to be hung. Each one had a banner headline across the top, LITIGATION INVESTMENT for FEMALE EMPOWERMENT. One had a picture of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the left and the words “The Equality Clause of the 14th Amendment Applies to Women” to the right of her. RBG was wearing green earrings and one of her special collars over her judge’s robe. The poster was about six feet wide and three feet high.

“Equal Justice Under Law,” as it appears carved into the white marble facade of the Supreme Court, was on another poster. The poster then declared “Financial Inequality = Unequal Justice.” Followed by, “That’s why we’re here. Litigation Investment means Female Empowerment.”