Bburg: Not Just for [American] Hipsters Anymore

Well, OK, there used to be almost exclusively musicians and creative directors living in Williamsburg — I know, I interviewed about 40 people on the street for a project there once — and now there are more first-year lawyers and other office professionals and actors. It feels more ordinary and commercial and trendy, kind of like the East Village circa 2001. I miss the quiet village days (not that there’s anything special about musicians and creative directors) — the perfect overlap of subcultural and geographical community was perhaps unique. But everything changes. I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did.

hahah deal. Thanks for making the last few hours of work fly 11217! Goodnight!

“I find the people totally vapid” – Wrong. It’s a very diverse neighborhood. This statement is the equivalent of me saying everyone in Park Slope is a self entitled breeder.

“I find they don’t really care about anyone in the neighborhood who’s lived there for generations” – Not true. I have lived all over Manhattan and Brooklyn and by far Williamsburg has the greatest sense of community of all the neighborhoods I’ve lived in. The local italian butcher, pizza guy, bodega workers etc all know many of the names of newcomers and oldtimers alike. It’s rare I leave my apartment that I don’t run into one of my neighbors who have lived in the hood all their lives and strike up a conversation for a good 5 minutes. I have asked them how they feel about how the neighborhood has changed, and they think it is for the better. It is cleaner and safer than it used to be, and most homeowners have profited in someway from it.

“We hit all the bars, we hit all the “great” restaurants (even Dumont with a roach crawling on our table) – I saw a roach on my most recent visit to Jean Georges. Once again not sure what your point is. Dumont is crappy anyway – Restaurant row is on Broadway. Dressler, Diner, Marlow and Sons etc.

“I feel that calling McCarren a “park” is laughable” – It is no prospect park, but it is an open greenspace that is enjoyed by many of the residents and outsiders. It is packed in the summers with the southside hispanics BBQing and playing soccer, people from all over enjoying the free shows at the pool and the fantastic track.

“I found that there are a lot of people willing to pay a million dollars to live in an area that looks a lot like Beirut in the 1980’s.” – Not really – it’s more like a post industrial neighborhood that was recently rezoned and being developed.

“We have differing opinions here and that’s fine.
Although I have to say that I love Brooklyn…all of it really…and I’ll lump Williamsburg in there if I must cause my love of the BK is that strong. I appreciate that it exists, I just don’t want any part of it.” That’s great, and is the way it should be. You should save this post and just copy and paste it into every subsequent Williamsburg post just to cover all your bases.

Here’s the take on this article from Curbed.com:

Europeans Messing with Burg Vibe, Hipsters not liking it.

An apology if it took us a few extra minutes to get this weekend’s Times story about the heavy presences of Europeans in Williamsburg, but we were too busy (pissing ourselves because we were laughing so hard) carefully considering how to deal with it that we had to wait a bit. The Times wrote that:

There is a distinctly West European flavor to the social calendar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, these days, as affluent buyers from France, Germany, Italy and Britain are transforming a neighborhood better known for attracting hipsters, Midwesterners and Polish immigrants. Other neighborhoods that have been reshaped by the condo boom of recent years have also seen influxes of foreign buyers investing their yen, pounds and euros in real estate. But the trend has been most visible in Williamsburg, where the newcomers are establishing deeper roots and are not simply looking for weekend pieds-à-terre or investment properties.

So, you know, the French hang out at Fabian’s on Bedford, the Brits go to Spike Hill Bar & Grill, Urban Rustic sells baguettes to French people near McCarren Park (not the side of the park where alcoholics drink Vladlimir Vodka out of brown paper bags, pass out on the benches and puke on themselves in a more Old European way), the Swedes learn to sell furniture in different languages and at one cafe the little ones are bilingual if not trilingual. One resident gushes, “You can’t step outside without hearing French around you.”

For real laughs and chuckles, however, head directly to the local blog Bad Advice, which did not take well to the “discovery” of Europeans in the Burg. Bad Advice writes:

Apparently there are a lot of Europeans in Williamsburg these days. Wow. This is news? I guess the newsiness lies in that these are rich, annoying Europeans. Not the artist types that got priced out of the nabe few years back. Instead of Swiss cartoonists and Lithuanian sculptors, we have British i-bankers and Swedish marketing professionals. And not only are they buying apartments with their bushels of Euros, they’re opening businesses…

And continues about a comment made by a Swedish shop owner that Europeans are “more serious shoppers”:

More serious than who? More serious than moi? (That’s French for “me,” btw.) It’s true. I do tend to adopt a lighthearted, whimsical attitude when snapping up Marimekko washclothes and panda bear pillows. I see now that attitude is wrongheaded and I will never again walk through those doors without an appropriate pout on my face.

Is this why the dude in the bodega spoke French to us when we went in for a PRB the other day and asked us why we weren’t buy, you know, the Duvel?

http://www.newyorkshitty.com/?p=11569

That actually pretty much sums up my disillusionment with Williamsburg pretty well. First of all, the “art” is terrible. Secondly, I remember watching them race to tear down the old movie theatre that was there last year. They ripped it apart in like a week to try and beat the downzoning… and now there’s an enormous vacant lot. In the middle of one of Williamsburg’s “prime” shopping strips. Across from another vacant lot. Right next to Bird, which sells $300 T-shirt dresses, but is ecologically sustainable. Whatever.

I still love the neighborhood. More than any other place in New York it feels like home to me. Not because I’ve bought and sold and profited from it, but because it was the place I spent my twenties in, and the place I moved back to raise a family. I was bullish on raising a family there too. I promoted PS 17 on the local listserve. I looked into preschool options. I ignored what I knew about superfund sites, lead in the soil, and rates of asthma along the BQE corridor. But what finally hit home for me was that I didn’t want to spend half our take-home pay on a crappy condo across the street from another half-built crappy condo on top of an oil slick next to a former cadmium paint factory. Nor did I want to rent the same crappy condo for $3K/month. Increasingly, as I walked down the street, I wondered, “Who the hell are these people?”

I wonder that still. Perhaps the answer really is, “They are clueless European ex-pats who are willing to spend too much to live in the next soho, not having noticed that the first soho is actually not that nice at all.”

And, while on the topic, since when are all of these people who work in “the arts” rich? Am I just bitter? Or has there been some kind of sea-change, in which decorators can afford to live in Schaeffer landing and buy $1MM townhouses? And if so, why do they all have the exact same taste? When did being artistic involve becoming such a conformist that you do all your shopping at DWR?

Most of the new businesses in Williamsburg have been propped up by foreign currencies and foreign investment. I know that too. Some of the new business owners are great people. And there’s nothing wrong with it… I’m just not convinced those businesses are sustainable in the new economy.

Then again, one of the BEST things about Williamsburg in 1995 was that it was exactly the same as Williamsburg in 1989, pretty much, with a few more cash machines and the L-Cafe. Maybe an economic downturn will stabilize things. Growth has not been kind.

If it collapses, I might move back. But in the mean time, except for the lack of decent coffee, Fort Greene is so much nicer there’s no comparison.