North Williamsburg since the 80’s
North Williamsburg, a neighborhood in the most densely populated borough in New
York City, Brooklyn, has gone through major demographic, social, and economic
changes in the last century. Once the Williamsburg Bridge was built in 1903, many
immigrants came over from the Lower East Side to the Williamsburg area. Then in
1938 marked the opening of the first public housing in America, the Williamsburg
Houses. Twenty years later, Robert Moses implemented a city project to construct the
Brooklyn Queens Expressway. This was supposed to have minimal impact on the
surrounding neighborhoods, but this was not the case for Williamsburg as a blue-collar,
lower middle class area. The area did not undertake any extreme changes until the
70’s and 80’s. Immigrants who arrived for factory jobs were unfortunately disappointed
to see that the market was drying up. The number of factory jobs in Williamsburg
dropped from 90,000 in 1961 to 12,000 in 1990. Crime rates were at their all time high,
and did not attract anyone but people who could not afford to live anywhere else, like
young artists, and Polish Immigrant families. This will be just the start of many years of
change for the local Polish immigrants. Many issues will be addressed, one being
authenticity. Who’s neighborhood did Williamsburg belong to? If you can imagine
factories of Mustard, Domino Sugar, spices, coffee, and more everywhere you look,
empty warehouses, quaint townhouses for the working-class families, and barely a
storefront, restaurant, or bar throughout the streets, this is what it might of looked like
during the start of Williamsburg’s bohemian period in the late 80’s into the 90’s. This is
before the era of glass towers and big corporate money.
There are many sites to cover in North Williamsburg, but one in particular that talks
about how industrious the area primarily was would be the Old Dutch Mustard Factory,
where it provided an immense amount of jobs for immigrants in the area. It recently in
2009 was converted from the Old Dutch Mustard Warehouse to 80 Metropolitan, and
used for residential purposes. The argument is to make it a mixed-use development.
This is interesting, because in 2005, the Williamsburg waterfront was rezoned. The 375
acres were rezoned into mixed use, and in exchange for letting developers build tall
luxury condominiums; the city required them to make 20 percent affordable housing
units. When the housing market crashed a few years later, the new construction came
to a halting stop. Presently, in 2013 only one-third of the originally projected number of
housing units have been created, and about 20 percent of the affordable housing units
have been built. Now Jane Jacobs, as an urban planner, argued for the development
of mix-used buildings to improve the safety of the people, and overall make for a more
beautiful city. Specifically, the Old Dutch Mustard Factory, a historical structure, is said
to be converted. The choice of the word ‘converted’ was used loosely, because there
are no remains of the old building. It was not preserved and not even the frame was
kept to at least have a part of the original infrastructure. Steiner Equities demolished
the Old Dutch Mustard Factory, even after the developer was ‘behooved’ to tear down
what was one of the Williamsburg’s most charming surviving old industrial buildings.
Now, we know that a ‘conversion’ is a synonym for ‘demolition’ into a pile of bricks,
concrete, and twisted metal. The other piece of the story was the fact that it was written
in a story in Flatbush Life that a group called the Four Borough Neighborhood
Preservation Alliance (FBNPA) has put the Old Dutch Mustard Building on a list of
historic structures to save. Obviously, someone made a mistake, because if this is
what they call preserving a site, we are in a world of trouble.
North 1st and Berry Avenue is a great example of how some immigrants might
have lived. This building had a fire broke out in the early 1980’s. It is now a vet clinic
but an old Polish-American couple lived there previous to that. A resident who lived
across the street witnessed a hundred men streaming out of this little building one
early morning to escape from a fire, they dispersed among the herd of fire trucks. Later
a fireman told him, that the building was filled with triple-decker bunk beds, where
Polish men on visitor visas were working to make money to send home, slept in shifts,
two men rotating to a bed. It was an interesting contrast to the man who lived across
the street, because it turned out he occupied a 4000 square feet loft by himself. This
comparison is a great example of how close two situations of living are in one
neighborhood. During the ‘80’s there was a major shift between factory workers and
those who commuted into Manhattan. There were little rules back then, to control the
standard of how people lived and worked. The city did not take notice until
Williamsburg was a destination rather than an after thought for residence. A couple
blocks south from here, Grand Avenue or what we can identify as the Mason-Dixon
line, separates the two parts of Williamsburg, the North and the South. The Polish
community trickled down from Greenpoint into North Williamsburg to be closer to the
work. History of Williamsburg demonstrates that the wave after wave of newcomers
has been one of the neighborhood’s defining characteristics. Just as immigrants have
seen a reason to call Williamsburg their home, other people have agreed as well over
the last thirty years. The neighborhood has a convenient location to be right on the
edge of Brooklyn across the river from Manhattan and cheaper. Williamsburg has a
trend to act similarly to a port city, people flock to it and then they eventually leave.
This characteristic changes the conditions and landscape of Williamsburg, and as the
people change, the neighborhood will follow shortly.
Metropolitan Avenue extends into the heart of Williamsburg as it intersects with
Bedford Avenue. There is a venue that is currently popular amongst the local artists
and music lovers, but also represents what has brought so many people to this area:
the music scene. In the late ‘80s and ‘90s punk, hip-hop and grunge were extremely
popular amongst younger people. The Knitting Factory is one example of venues in
Williamsburg that have the essence of Bohemian lifestyle. It was founded in 1987, but
originally occupied a space in Manhattan on Houston Street. It later moved to
Williamsburg in 2008, because of how popular Williamsburg has become, some will
say it is the next hip, artsy neighborhood in New York City. The Knitting Factory grew
into Knitting Factory Entertainment and handles the careers of emerging and critically
acclaimed recording artists both in the U.S and overseas. Music has been one of many
ways in which people who reside in Williamsburg express themselves, and spend their
time.
To come full circle, a Polish restaurant called Kasia’s Restaurant represents the
presence of a Polish influence in the community. This is one of only a handful of
stalwart Polish restaurants in Williamsburg that has survived the neighborhood’s
population shift, primarily drawing a faithful, older clientele. This is no small feat so it
seems as though this physically bland, dinner-style eatery is doing something right. In
this quaint restaurant, there are cacophonous conversations between customers who
order off a menu mainly consisted of meat and fried food. They are known for their
cheap large portions of filling Polish eats, like stuffed cabbage, beef, goulash, kielbasa,
and of course Pierogis. This is a great example of how commercial and expensive
restaurants have become in North Williamsburg. Kasia’s Restaurant is an anomaly
compared to the rest of Bedford Avenue. It may not be as pretty and ‘unique’ as other
commercial stores, but it served what was primarily the community. People shared
their day over a simple cup of coffee; now we have wealthy hippies overflowing coffee
shops, where they might order iced, double shot, soy milk, salted-caramel coffee.
Many scholars would say that Williamsburg is a primary example of gentrification.
What is gentrification, and is it a problem or not? We have Polish immigrants who have
welcomed the newcomers with open arms, because it made it possible for the
community to be noticed and receive funding to keep the streets safe. There are others
though that have disagreed, as an interviewee noted in the 21 year old “New York”
magazine article on Williamsburg as the “New Bohemian”, “They march off the train in
their thrift-store clothing carrying their art-supply bags and stretchers on their way to
the health food store”. The authenticity differs from one local to the next, and as you
explore up and down Bedford and Metropolitan Avenue, consider asking your own
questions about the change in architecture, the goods being sold, the people who
wander the streets, the noise, the restaurants, and so forth. The story of Williamsburg
is in the hands of those who write it, those who live it, those who love it.
Restaurants/bars:
Roebling Tea Room
143 Roebling Street, Brooklyn, NY 11211
The woods
48 S 4th St, Brooklyn, NY 11211
Radegast Hall & Biergarten
113 N 3rd St, New York, NY 11211
Union Pool
484 Union Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211
Dumont
432 Union Ave.
Pies-n-Thighs
166 S 4th St
Brooklyn, NY 11211
Shopping:
Crossroads trading C.
135 N 7th St, Brooklyn, NY 11249
Junk
500 Driggs Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211
Buffalo Exchange
504 Driggs Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211
Brooklyn Flea Market, Williamsburg
90 Kent Ave, New York, NY 11211
Music:
Pete’s Candy Store
709 Lorimer St, Brooklyn, NY 11211
Movies:
Williamsburg Cinemas
217 Grand St, Brooklyn, NY 11211
Work Cited
“10 Things We Learned From This 21-Year-Old Williamsburg Time Capsule.” Bedford
Bowery. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Nov. 2013.
<http://bedfordandbowery.com/2013/07/10-things-we-learned-from-this-21year-old-williamsburg-time-capsule/>.
“Back from the Dead: Preserving Demolished Dutch Mustard.” New York Curbed, n.d.
Web. 26 Nov. 2013.
<http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2007/03/23/back_from_the_dead_preservin
g_demolished_dutch_mustard.php>.
"The L Magazine." The L Magazine. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.
<http://www.thelmagazine.com/BrooklynAbridged/archives/2012/10/04/brook
lyn-timelinewilliamsburg?showFullText=true>.
Williams, Alex. “The Williamsburg Divide.” Fashion and Style. The New York Times, 25
Sept. 2013. Web. 26 Nov. 2013.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/26/fashion/the-williamsburgdivide.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&_r=1&>.