DJ Huppatz, author of the blog Critical Cities, recently published Design and the Divided City, or the Myrtle Avenue Style, a modern day investigation of Adrian Forty's idea of design and social differentiation, where he posits the purely functional, crime prevention-based designed in the Brooklyn neighborhood against the presence of high-end design emerging with the influx gentrification.

Opening with an amazing quote by Henry Miller, Huppatz shows just how far, both historically and geographically this aesthetic segregation reaches. A recent article in the NY times suggests that the divisions are still very clear.

More after the jump. "But I saw a street called Myrtle Avenue, which runs from Borough Hall to Fresh Pond Road, and down this street no saint ever walked (else it would have crumbled), down this street no miracle ever passed, nor any poet, nor any species of human genius, nor did any flower ever grow there, nor did the sun strike it squarely, nor did the rain ever wash it. For the genuine Inferno which I had to postpone for twenty years I give you Myrtle Avenue, one of the innumerable bridlepaths ridden by iron monsters which lead to the heart of American emptiness. If you have only seen Essen or Manchester or Chicago or Lavallois-Perret or Glasgow or Hoboken or Canarsie or Bayonne you have seen nothing of the magnificent emptiness of progress and enlightenment. Dear reader, you must see Myrtle Avenue before you die, if only to realize how far into the future Dante saw."

Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn, 1938