[music]

Alison: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Our next segment is about the history of Williamsburg and how it's changed in the last several decades. In light of our last conversation, we did want to acknowledge that the neighborhood, its borough, and the city we live in is on Lenapehoking, the ancestral, present, and future homelands of the Lenape people. Williamsburg occupies the land of the Canarsee Nation.

What the neighborhood of Williamsburg and that name conjures for you right now is probably pretty different depending on the generation you're from. For some, it's a Bohemian artist haven of cheap rents and open spaces. For more recent generation, it's a land of luxury apartments and designer brands, and Trustafarians, if I can say that word.

Over the last several decades, Williamsburg has undergone a major transformation physically and culturally. Steve Kurutz is a New York Times reporter covering cultural trends, and the writer behind the recent piece, Williamsburg, What Happened, a four-decade timeline of total transformation in Brooklyn. He joins me now to talk about the neighborhood and why it's changed so much in this past four decades. Welcome to the show.

Steven: Thanks for having me.

Alison: Listeners, Williamsburg, discuss. Are you a Williamsburg resident? Did you used to be? Call in and share your memories and experiences of the neighborhood. Tell us what Williamsburg represents to you. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. That is our phone number. You can call in and join us on air, or you can text us at that number, or you can reach out on social media at All Of It WNYC. The conversation for the rest of the show is Williamsburg, what happened?

Williamsburg is big, Steven. There are many different Williamsburgs even now; South Williamsburg, Williamsburg west of the BQE, east of the BQE, East Williamsburg. When you're writing about Williamsburg and its culture and how it's changed, what area are we talking about, and what time period specifically?

Steven: You're right, there are these different neighborhoods within Williamsburg and also, Williamsburg bleeds into Greenpoint. We decided to take Williamsburg as a whole. That would include South Williamsburg, the north side, edges of Greenpoint altogether just for simplicity's sake when we were looking at the neighborhood.

The period of time, the piece is written as a timeline, and it starts in 1988 and it goes to 2024. That's the period we're looking at. I would say the last 40 years and the huge transformation that's happened in the neighborhood in that period.

Alison: In 1988, that's the year you mark as when artists come in. We should be clear, who was there before the artist started moving in?

Steven: It was an immigrant neighborhood of Puerto Rican and Dominican immigrants. South Williamsburg is known as a Jewish neighborhood. Ukrainians and Poles were also there and in Greenpoint. In fairness, the artists also didn't come in immediately in 1988. There were artists coming there in the early '80s, but 1988 seemed to us to be the point at which things started to coalesce and there started to be an artist scene in the neighborhood.

Alison: What kind of artists are we talking about? Why were they attracted to Williamsburg?

Steven: Because it's a classic artist story, they got priced out of Manhattan. Williamsburg was a rough neighborhood, and it was cheap, and it also had the benefit of being one subway stop from the East Village on the L Train. In search of cheap housing and cheap artist studios, artists started to come into Williamsburg at that time in the late '80s.

Then once the artists got there, you started to get early art galleries like LedisFlam and Herron Test-Site. These became the first commercial art galleries in the area, and it started very slowly to get this reputation as an artist's haven.

Alison: In this period, let's talk the first four years, '88 to '92 that you cover in the piece. Were there certain businesses, clubs, establishments that really defined the era?

Steven: Yes, I think we start with this place The Lizard's Tale which was in a makeshift artist space under the Williamsburg Bridge. It was a place where it hosted poets and rock bands and one-act plays, very makeshift. The spaces at this time, including the living spaces, this is where you take over an abandoned loft, or a derelict factory building and you turn it into something. That actually drew a New York Times reporter in 1988 who called it your Bohemia, and said it reminded them of the Lower East Side in the early '80s.

There's another place, the Right Bank Cafe on Kent Avenue. It was opened by a former firefighter in 1989, and it hosted rock bands and became a real gathering place for the neighborhood.

Alison: Let's take a call. Kate is calling in from the north side of Williamsburg. Hi Kate.

Kate: Hello everyone. I was telling the screener that I moved here in 1989, and a group of us got together and heard about a program called Homesteading. We all fit the low-income criteria because again, it was mainly artists here, and bought this building and we all still live in it. We bought it in '89. It took us until 1996 to get our C of O, but here we are.

Alison: Kate, why did you go there in the first place? What drew you there in '89?

Kate: Just looking for a place to live. I was on the J train. I got off and there were a bunch of men sitting around playing dominoes, and I could smell oranges in the air, and I just was like, "This place is awesome."

Alison: It's so funny you stay at convent Kate because I dated an artist back in the day who lived in Williamsburg, and the way on Grand Street, I can't even tell you what's there now. I can tell you, but I won't. To get into his house, which was an old church, we had to lift up the gate like you do on a store [laughs] to get in, and then inside. We would find old religious statues in the corners and in closets and things.

What was your experience like renovating the convent? I'm very curious. You just brought that memory back to me.

Kate: Oh yeah. One thing that was really cool is, so we're on Havemeyer and there's the Church Annunciation is right across the street. The building was built in the 1880s. When you went down in the basement, there was a little tunnel that you could go into that at one point connected with the church. We had to close that up but that was pretty cool.

Some of the other members too are one of the women who a major force in this program discovered that there had been an old garden in the back, which had been paved over and was a parking lot. We scraped up all the asphalt and brought the garden back to life. It's a substantial size.

Alison: Kate, thank you so much for calling in. Really love all the imagery you're painting for us. Listeners, are you a Williamsburg resident? Did you used to be? Call in and share your memories and experiences of the neighborhood? Tell us what Williamsburg has meant to you in your life. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. That's our phone number. You can call in and join us on air or text to us at that number. Social media's available as well at All Of It WNYC.

My guest is Steven Kurutz. He's a New York Times reporter covering cultural trends, social media, the world of design. He is responsible for the timeline Williamsburg, What Happened? In 1992, New York Magazine ran this cover story about Williamsburg, Steven, with a title The New Bohemia. What was the premise of the story, and how does that factor into the neighborhood starting to shift?

Steven: That is an important event. I think it's the first time the media starts to catch on to what is happening in Williamsburg. You have these nascent early years, and now all of a sudden you have artists on the cover of the magazine. It's The New Bohemia. There's this great quote by a performance artist named Madea [unintelligible 00:09:17]. The quote is, "In the '70s it was Soho, in the '80s, the East Village. In the '90s, it will be Williamsburg." It came true. It absolutely was. I think that was a real shift in perception that this is the cool, new neighborhood in New York City. This is where culture is happening.

Alison: In 1998, Diner opened under the Williamsburg Bridge and you write, "It embodies the artisanal Brooklyn aesthetic that will soon be everywhere." What do you mean?

Steven: Yes. This is another classic moment. It was local ingredients were the focus there. It was this old fashioned motif of a diner, but reimagined and modernized and hippiefied. You saw that in the next 10, 15, 20 years in Brooklyn over and over again where you'd get an old fashioned soda shop but it was done up in a different way, or a butcher but it was somehow a cool, modern butcher, or the Mast Brothers, the chocolatiers that were so famous in Williamsburg in the aughts.

Diner really created the template for this locavore, artisanal, casual, cool service that restaurants and other businesses adopted in the years following.

Alison: Then the next year, the zoning laws changed in 1999. How did the new zoning rules begin to change the tenor and the shape of Williamsburg?

Steven: Well, the zoning laws in 1999, the Board of Standards and Appeals grants some variance that allows for construction in a warehouse apartments to be made. Then when Bloomberg comes in, he says, "We're going to redevelop the waterfront." The Bloomberg administration passes a zoning variance that allows for buildings up to 350 feet to be built along the Williamsburg Greenpoint Waterfront.

That really lays the groundwork for the total transformation that you see today in the neighborhood. That allows for the glassy apartment towers that line Kent Avenue and other places.

Alison: We are talking about-- Oh, go ahead.

Steven: I was going to say, it's basically big money. Big money comes into Williamsburg and big developers. At one point when I was doing research, I didn't realize this when I was living through it and doing research, reading about it. Toll Brothers, which is a housing developer known for suburban McMansions, comes in and builds in Williamsburg. You get companies like that now coming into this neighborhood of artists in Bohemians.

Alison: We're discussing the New York Times piece, Williamsburg, What Happened? We're discussing it with you listeners. We've got several calls on hold. People calling in from Greenpoint and Williamsburg. We will have more with Steven Kurutz after a quick break and take your calls. This is All Of It.

[music]

Alison: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Williamsburg, What Happened? It's a New York Times piece. We're speaking with its writer, Steven Kurutz, as well as you listeners. Williamsburg, What happened? Let's talk to Roger from Greenpoint. Hi, Roger.

Roger: Hey, how are you today?

Alison: Great, thanks. Thanks for calling in.

Roger: I have a quick memoir of the Ship's Mast that was on [unintelligible 00:13:09], and it was run by John Gallagher and his wife. They used to have a Monday night, this is in the early '90s when we were a village back then. They used to have a Monday night sort of open mic night run by a guy named Wild Bill. Oh, they also had free dinner that night which consisted of hot dogs.

Wild Bill would run this open night mic and he would play the guitar for whoever got up to sing. The funniest thing was, the thing that cracked us all up was that if he didn't feel that you were doing very well, he would stop you in the middle of the song [laughter] and announces to everybody and tell everybody so everybody could hear him advise him, "Would you come back in a couple of weeks and we'll try again?" [laughter] I've missed that place ever since.

We had a candle-lit vigil outside when it closed down sometime in the middle '90s, and I'm sure there's a lot of people out there that will remember that place. It was great.

Alison: Roger, thank you for sharing your memory. Let's talk to Michelle, calling in from Williamsburg. Hi, Michelle.

Michelle: Hi. Can you hear me?

Alison: Yes. You are on the air.

Michelle: I moved to Williamsburg when I got married in 1981. My husband, then my boyfriend, would take me around Williamsburg and say to me, "This neighborhood is going to change. This neighborhood is going to change because of its proximity to the bridge." Here I am, a girl from Queens, come into a neighborhood that is totally devastated. The only thing that was functioning around here was the Domino Sugar Company, which I live two blocks away from it. I came here in 1981. The reporter who was talking about the Right Bank, I celebrated my son's first communion there.

Alison: Oh.

Michelle: I'm still here. I was 25 when I came here. Now I'm 68. I have watched the transformation of Williamsburg. We bought a house here. We bought a house here on South 3rd Street, and I inherited tenants that were working in Domino. In 1981, '82, '83, they were paying $90 for an apartment. Now, you need at least $5,000 to rent an apartment here.

I have watched the transformation in terms of gentrification, economically it changed. The things that were here disappeared, including somewhat the Polish neighborhood in the North Side. I believe, and I may be wrong, that Williamsburg went as far as Metropolitan Avenue. Then from Metropolitan Avenue northward it was considered Greenpoint.

I may be wrong but I think that what they did was that they extended the neighborhood further north because it was becoming more and more attractive. Then afterward to develop Greenpoint, they stuck Greenpoint with Williamsburg. That L train, that become impossible to get on. When I used to go to work in the morning because I was a New York City public school teacher, and I used to work on 132nd Street in Washington Heights, there were only six of us on the train.

Alison: Wow. Michelle, I'm going to dive in here because we have a lot of phone lines. Thank you so much for all the context and for sharing your history with us, a deep history in Williamsburg. I got another text that says, "I was a '90s pioneer in South Williamsburg, where my band mates and I took a 3,000 square foot loft, lived in it and hosted rock shows for hundreds of people. It was called Happy Birthday Hideout. Our band was [unintelligible 00:16:43], and my rent was $300 a month."

I have a feeling we're going to get a lot more of these kind of calls, Steven. I did want to talk about the next phase in your piece and it's an important phase to talk about, post 9/11 Williamsburg, 2002 to 2008. What are the hallmarks of this period?

Steven: Well, these happened to be my Williamsburg years. I moved to the city in '99. I lived in Brooklyn. I didn't live in Williamsburg but I visited Williamsburg. The shorthand, I suppose, and I know this is a loaded word but it's like the hipster years. This is when you have VICE Magazine moving its offices to Williamsburg in 2001, and Northsix, the rock club opening up, and Williamsburg starts to get a music scene that's distinct from Manhattan.

This stuff is happening. These illegal parties and semi-legal performance venues are happening. Then you have Galapagos Art Space, which opened in the '90s but is still here in the early 2000s. This is all happening at the same time that the big developers are starting to move in. There's this period of time where, I wouldn't call it harmony, but there's a period of time where both of these things are existing at the same time. You have McCarren pool getting cleaned up, but you also have a place like Glasslands that's doing rock shows.

That goes on to, in our timeline, it's basically from 2002 to 2008. Then bigger changes, more noticeable changes start to happen in 2009 and beyond.

Alison: Let's take some more calls. Jenny is calling in from Bushwick. Hi Jenny?

Jenny: Hi Alison. Nice to be on. Thank you.

Alison: Sure.

Jenny: I grew up in the city and I had a friend who had a cool dad who had a huge apartment in Williamsburg. We always used to go there on Friday evenings because he was the cool dad and we could hang out. I remember you had to walk up a ladder to the bathroom and there was a swing in his apartment. It was really close to this place called Domsey's. There are some Domsey's still around in Bushwick and Williamsburg, but you could bring a garbage bag and it was 25 cents a pound for vintage clothing. As a high school kid in New York City, that was gold.

The other thing was, your guest talked about Diner being one of the first big restaurants, but I remember always it was Dumont. Dumont was where we would go for a nice cocktail, do mac and cheese and really good burgers. Those are my Williamsburg memories. Even though I'm not too far away in Bushwick. [laughter]

Alison: Jenny, thanks for calling in. You mentioned the thrifting Mecca in your piece, Steven.

Steven: Yes. I wanted to put a lot of Easter eggs in the piece, places that if you lived in Williamsburg were touchstones for you, and Domsey's was one of those places. The inspiration for the piece was really Hermès and Chanel moving in, in the last couple of years. It's a long way from Domsey's to Chanel. That's what the piece is really trying to address and get at.

I'm glad some of the callers are name-checking these places like Dumont and others, because one of the difficulties of the piece was trying to figure out what to include, what to leave out. Everybody has their own touchstones and places, and there were many more we could have put in. All of them had meaning and significance and that a lot of the commenters were like, "What about this? You forgot about this." It's true, and that was a difficult thing in creating the timeline.

Alison: Someone is picking up on what prompted the piece. Someone texted, "OMG!! I'm a 66-year-old artist in Williamsburg. It has become a nightmare. Don't leave the house in the weekends, too many people double-parking and drinking coffee and vintage shopping, but getting worse, Hermès!!! Chanel!!! Help."

Let's talk about what led to Hermès and Chanel being in Williamsburg. That is the peak gentrification part of the conversation. What are the markers? We talked about these stores. How did we get to the point that Hermès and Chanel--

Steven: I scratch my head, and I can only speculate because I didn't talk to these luxury houses, but it's surprising and not surprising. You have this neighborhood, even before Chanel and Hermès, this is a neighborhood where you have multi-million dollar apartments and rentals that are $5,000 and $6,000 a month. You have an Apple Store.

Over and over again in researching the piece, it was when Ralph Lauren decided to open up its first branch in Brooklyn, it went to Williamsburg. Apple's first, and maybe only store in Brooklyn, Williamsburg. Retailers decided that this neighborhood was the place to be, it increasingly throughout the 2000s became a destination for international tourists. Brooklyn itself became an international brand, and I think Williamsburg more than any other neighborhood personified that.

If you were a tourist coming to New York and you wanted the Brooklyn experience, you went to Williamsburg. Somehow, it still had some vestiges of grit. It's not a leafy, brownstone, Brooklyn neighborhood, so there is parts of it that are still gritty and some might say ugly. That balance of grit and lux, I think is very appealing to Chanel and Hermès.

Is this peak gentrification? Time Out asked that question when the Hermès went in? I don't know. In 10 years from now, every luxury house may be in Williamsburg, and we may look back at this period and think it's some sort of gritty era. I think it's only going to get more and more upscale.

Alison: I wanted to read you this text we got from Aaron. Long time, Gowanus South Slope resident here. Hearing Williamsburg was rezoned in '99, and considering what it's like now makes me ever more worried for my neighborhood. Any lessons on how to keep a neighborhood interesting and accessible? What do you think are some of the lessons that could be learned from the Williamsburg story?

Steven: That's a good question. It so happened that I was in Gowanus yesterday, and I hadn't been there in a while, and my head was blown. I could not believe it. It wasn't just one or two buildings, the entire area from Carol Gardens to 4th Avenue is one huge construction site. I couldn't get over what I was seeing.

I remember when I first came to New York, this happened in Soho, and there's a feeling now among some that Soho jumped the shark, and that to the point of that earlier email, that there's too much traffic that it's crowded on the weekends. It's not for the locals, it's for the tourists. It's become an upscale mall. I don't find myself going to Soho. I haven't found myself going to Soho for years. That could be Williamsburg's fate. That could also be Gowanus's fate.

It's a delicate balance maintaining a neighborhood vibe and a sense that it is a real functioning neighborhood for everyone, and not just a play land for the international rich.

Alison: Let's talk to Brady calling from Greenpoint. Brady, we got about a minute for you.

Brady: Hi, I'm here.

Alison: What's going on?

Brady: I just wanted to say thanks for the article. I could talk for 10 hours about my experience being here. I moved here in 1996. I lived in a loft on the South Side and among other places, and I had a shop, a wood shop on North 6th Street. I rented from Galapagos, the owner of Galapagos. I had a hand in building out Monster Island and a bunch of galleries I showed in the neighborhood. I saw the gallery scene pop up and disappear to Chelsea very quickly. I went to parties on half-sunken barges on the East River. I watched the towers fall from the water.

What I wanted to say, aside from thank you for writing it, is that I just saw a flood of Instagram posts coming off of the article of everybody reminiscing and putting in their experiences of being here, and I wrote one. A lot of the things that were mentioned, everybody had something to say. What was really great about it, is it just brought up-- To have lived here in that time and read the article, it may not mean much to a lot of people, but if you lived through it, and I currently live in Greenpoint near McGolrick Park. It's great, it's very quiet and it's very sleepy.

I just got an influx of people reaching out, and it's rekindled some friendships of people that still live in the neighborhood that I don't see that much because I don't walk back to Williamsburg. That was a really nice experience. I love living here. Greenpoint is great. Williamsburg was fantastic. Like I said, I could write 10 more pages about my experiences being here.

Alison: Brady, thank you so much for calling in. Everyone, check out the piece, Williamsburg, What happened? It's written by Steven Kurutz who has been my guest. Thanks to everybody who called in, and thanks, Steven, for sharing your work with us.

Steven: Thanks for having me.

Alison: That is All of It for this week. All of It is produced by Andrea Duncan-Mao, Kate Hinds, Jordan Lauf, Simon Close, Zach Gottehrer-Cohen, L. Malik Anderson, and Luke Green. Meg Ryan is the head of live radio. Our engineers are Juliana Fonda and Jason Isaac. I'm Alison Stewart. I will meet you back here next time.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.