A Kids’ History of Historic Williamsburg – The Ringer

motion and on a mission; four minutes later, you’d step off at Bedford Avenue, greeted by buskers, bookstores, and dive bars inhabited by people who seemed to be on a vaguely similar, if more leisurely, mission.

Williamsburg’s L trainia was kind of a cultural hotbed. You’d see musicians carrying their gear alongside professionals lugging laptops on Monday mornings, and by Thursday, you might spot them jamming together at Spike Hill or the Living Room. Everyone agreed that the Guitar Center guy on Union Square had nothing on the cool gearheads at Main Drag Music on South First Street. 

Chapter 3: Listen, My Friend—The Money Never Lied The rent, oh the rent, Mr. McSweeney exclaimed!In dot-com heyday, a life could be framedFor just a few hundred per month—and, heavens, don’t scoff!—In a loft where the highest shelf held but a single Folgers can toppedAnd, yea verily, it was gooooooooodIn the year of our lord (Martha) Streisand Ninety-NineWith Creative Commons, freedom, and timeFull well it is known now to one and to allA new dot-com boom could only end in a fall For a long while, Williamsburg became a place, again, where the young and the jobless could come live out their dingbat dreams. Rent was relatively cheap, and, because the professional class had mostly not arrived yet, the city felt more like a sandbox than a workplace. Cocktails were $3 (“Even if the measure was a bit light,” one old-timer said). A bag of groceries from the Polish greengrocer would run you $8, tops. And if you were lost in a tempest of creative pursuits but, like, didn’t have a job, you might still find yourself with the occasional free drink or bodega sandwich. As the aughties heated up, though, so did the rental market—and now and then, the rental wars. Young people flocked to Brooklyn to avoid Manhattan’s astronomical prices, but lo, Brooklyn’s prices were ascending too. Even the quaint, timeless Polish babushka (nie masz nic przeciw dziewczętom?), long a lodestar of Williamsburg dysfunction and delight, eventually found she could not resist the cry of money. And just as all must decide, at last, when exactly was the moment they could no longer justify Holland Nostalgia at an Impossible Price, so too did the time come for many to set off for someplace other than Williamsburg. The great force then astride the land of the vintage store—whether you were on the hunt for collector’s Ray-Bans or idea-splicing, trend-bucking record labels—seemed for a minute to be money. But as we all know, in the morning of another hurried workweek or two, the money was just the weather. Chapter 4: But Why Leave Williamsburg—The Friends Were Made Up Michael Noble In the East River we’d swim—First Housemate—But the water, it glimmered, with more than just baitFor as you dove under we’d all wait, secureThrough the centuries and the ceaseless allureOf Brooklyn, a place made of solid timesAnd fragments of sidewalk, and Jerry-rigged rhymes.With Williamsburg’s surging popularity came a changing cast of characters. The friends you made on your first day might vanish into the ether weeks later, only to resurface at a Bushwick bar months after that. Someone would complain about a fashion friend who was snobby about being into LCD Soundsystem long after other people liked them, only to be scolded for being reductive by their outspoken Marxist acquaintance who actually went to The Bell House for Yacht Rock Night once but swore she was being ironic. And Jared would still be there, always, telling everyone one after the other that Representative Chuck Schumer was his sixth-grade counselor and that Midwood High School, where he matriculated in 2006, had a kid from the cast of Higher Ground.

A lot of these people thrived in a scene—a scene that shifted and transmogrified constantly; a scene that resented being called a scene but also kind of embraced the label; a scene that, despite its imminent extinction, had a half-life longer even than tabloid fame. There were writers, painters, filmmakers, sculptors, and people who styled themselves as such. There were licensed therapists who juggled three day jobs while they wrote novels by night and people who gamely accrued thousands in debt to go to masters programs in documentary filmmaking. Someone knew how to work around some computer programs, certainly, and some people easily could sublet others’ apartments and knew every venue in the tri-state area. That guy over there did prop work for Disney reboots no one saw