Watching your hometown change before your eyes can bring up a host of emotions: sadness, nostalgia, anger, acceptance.
The Chapin Sisters, Lily and Abigail, who grew up in Brooklyn and witnessed their neighborhood’s endless development, have spun those feelings into a heartfelt new ballad called “Bergen Street.”
The song explores the “dance between the timelessness of a place … with the history that's constantly written and rewritten over it,” Lily told BK Reader. “New developments going over old developments, things coming down and going up, people coming and going, businesses closing and opening.”
Revisiting the slice of Prospect Heights where Lily lived with her husband, “Bergen Street” is both an ode to her memory of the neighborhood and a goodbye to what the area used to be.
“I’ll come back round, check out what’s torn down, sign the wet concrete,” reads one of the song’s verses.
Although Prospect Heights has resisted large-scale development longer than other places, new high-rises are still breaking ground in the area. A plan to rezone the area and fertilize this development has been in the works since December 2022, building off an earlier plan from Community Board 8 called M-Crown.
“In New York City, and specifically in Brooklyn in the last few decades, where there's been such a building boom, you see [development] happening faster. It's like a time-lapse sometimes,” Lily said.
Watching their hometown change isn’t a new theme for the Chapin sisters. The pair spent the first years of their childhood living in a small apartment building in DUMBO. At the time, the neighborhood wasn’t even called “DUMBO." The developer-friendly acronym came after artists moved in and the tech industry trailed eagerly behind.
The sisters can still spot their childhood apartment from the bridge, but it now resembles a scene from the Pixar movie “Up,” as giant towers surround the comparatively tiny building.
Growing up, art and music permeated Lily and Abigail’s lives. With Grammy-winning singer Tom Chapin as a father and folk-rock musician Harry Chapin — of “Cat’s in the Cradle” fame — as an uncle, it’s no surprise that music accompanied the sisters’ artistic lives.
Their mother, just in time for the macrame craze of the 70s, owned a supply store off Atlantic Avenue dedicated to the groovy craft. The Chapin family was blossoming with successful artists.
Witnessing the success of their creative family members showed Lily and Abigail that art could provide them not just fulfillment but also a paycheck.
Around the ages of 4 and 5, the sisters moved out of Brooklyn and into the small town of Piermont, New York. Despite the suburban change of scenery, a large portion of their lives remained rooted in Brooklyn. A web of extended family still lived in the borough, and the sisters visited frequently.
As adults, the sisters lived on and off in Brooklyn most of their lives. But, narrowly before the pandemic, Lily moved upstate to Nyack, and in November of 2020, Abigail followed suit.
Both sisters now raise their children there and live within 15 minutes of each other. Together, the pair also runs a small clothing shop, “Abigail Rose & Lily Too,” which their mom created in the 80s.
Even though Brooklyn sits only 36 miles away from Nyack, their life in the city feels a world away.
“Brooklyn specifically … feels like a symbol,” Abigail said. “A symbol of my youth, a symbol of pre-parenthood, of just a different life.”
These transitory feelings — feelings of leaving home, coming back as a visitor and discovering both familiarity and estrangement — inspired the song “Bergen Street.”
“It's like a sedimentary rock of ideas and identities,” Lily said. “It feeds back into this idea of 'What are you saying goodbye to?'”
“Bergen Street” was one of 10 songs the sisters recorded. The Chapin Sisters will release the rest of them soon, one song at a time.
