Transforming Brooklyn

Fascinating feature at the NY Times on how Williamsburg, Brooklyn went from a working-class neighborhood known for crime and ethnic strife to a booming, largely wealthy community. Above, North 6th Street in 1992, featuring an abandoned sawdust factory. 

And the same view in 2023, with an art gallery called National Sawdust and big new condominium buildings.

The change began in the 1990s Williamsburg when became the new home of the bohemians driven out of Manhattan by high prices. In 1992 one hipster said, "In the 70s, it was Soho. In the 80s, the East Village. In the 90s, it will be Williamsburg." Above, a 1991 photo of people working to turn an abandoned warehouse into The Fly Trap, a music and arts venue that hosted a lot of raves.

This was done with the cooperation of the borough authorities, who approved all of this, including the use of old, dodgey warehouses as music venues. The government also helped stage a long series of street music festivals that solidified Williamsburg's status as an art mecca. In my experience no neighborhood is ever transformed without both private initiative – from both nonprofits and businesses – and a lot of input from government. The presence of all these Bohemians drew restaurants, and by 1994 the Times food critics had noted the arrival of Williamsburg as a dining destination.

Williamsburg hosted breweries for a century, but by 1990 they had all closed, part of the gradual takover of American beer by a few enormous companies. But then we got the craft beer revival, and in 1996 Rudy Guiliani served as brewmaster for the opening of the new Brooklyn Brewery. (Honestly Rudy was a pretty good mayor before he went crazy.)  But the city modified its zoning laws to allow most of the old factory district to be converted to residential space.

Things really took off during the Bloomberg administration, 2002 to 2013. Bloomberg's people rezoned 37% of NYC and did everything they could think of to promote housing construction, which was built in NYC faster than in any older city in the country. This included 175,000 units deemed "affordable." Bloomberg also pushed the construction of the new commerical district in downtown Brooklyn, which was soon covered with high-rise buildings. During Bloomberg's time in office more than 10,000 new apartments and condomiums were built in the new downtown, and more than 4,500 in Williamsburg. From 1950 to 1980 Brooklyn lost 500,000 inhabitants, or 18.5% of its population; it has now regained all of those people and probably passed the 1950 level last year. Since the average household is smaller, that means many more units.

One of the spots that captures this history is the McCarren Park Pool, which was built to a New York scale, measuring 50 by 100m. This was built by the Works Progress Administration in 1935-1936. It eventually became a derelict site of drug deals and gang fights and was closed in 1984. During the 1990s revival various dreamers tried to bring it back to life, but no plan ever took off. 

In 2005 to 2008 it hosted concerns, especially hip hop.

Then in 2012 it was reopened as a pool.

But along with all this growth came the first complaints about "yuppification" and "gentrification". Upscale retailers like Hermes arrived downtown. Bohemians who came in the 1990s became opponents of development, trying to block new condo buildings so as to keep their neighborhoods as they were. They waged a decade-long fight to prevent the redevelopment of the old Domino Sugar factory on the waterfront, which they finally lost in 2014. Nearby music venues closed and moved to grittier spaces in other neighborhoods.

The Williamsburg waterfront in 2015.

It's a story many American cities have seen over and over: neighborhoods get run down and dangerous, which drives rents very low, which pulls in people like rave promoters and artists who need big loft spaces, which draws in hipster bars and restaurants, which draws in yuppies, which drives up housing prives and eventually drives out the music venues and the hipster bars.

But I don't think there is any realistic alternative to this. The world doesn't stand still. Yes, there is something weird about the repeated, rapid transformation of neighborhoods by capitalism and the quest for cool, but what really kills cities is for things to stay as they are. Living beings are always changing.