The other day, I visited my friend Hearn who was cat-sitting in Greenpoint. After leaving his place, I took a bike home to Park Slope in the early evening. Dusk. I headed down Driggs through a crowded McCarren Park.
We were having a few mild summer days. Hundreds of people were still barbequing and playing volleyball in the fading day.
I had smoked a tiny puff of weed that gave me a very, very mild buzz.
And the dreamy observation hit me, as I cruised under the trees, that due to the simple facts of my life in New York … age, kids, occupation, etc. … I had missed out on Williamsburg.
Williamsburg, the phenomenon. I missed out on the whole thing, more or less.
My experience with the neighborhood bookended its main explosion as hipster central, its emergence as the “it” neighborhood in the city.
Or … as my daughter bluntly put it … I missed out on the gentrification of Williamsburg.
The first time I went to Williamsburg was 1988. My friend Wayne and I visited a German guy named Sascha.
We were thinking about asking him to join our band. He wanted us to see his “home studio” … whatever that meant in 1988 … so we had to make the schlep to this weird neighborhood.
By trade, Sascha was a fashion photographer. He had come to New York from Stuttgard when people were still going to Studio 54 to snort coke and hope for a glimpse of Andy Warhol and Grace Jones.
Interview Magazine New York. I think Sascha even did a shoot with Grace Jones.
It’s hard now to convey how random Sascha’s choice of neighborhood struck us. Three decades later, we’ve all been trained to know that any neighborhood could be the next cool place to move.
Marine Park? Who can say?
Canarsie? Why not?
I’ve even heard Philly called the “new Brooklyn”, as though you’d suggest it along with Jersey City as an option for someone who landed a coding job in Tribeca.
But the notion that one lone white guy in some random neighborhood all but guaranteed a stampede of vegan grocery stores and expensive coffee shops didn’t yet exist.
Wayne and I were living on Old Fulton Street at the time, a street that runs next to the Brooklyn Bridge and ends at the River Cafe on the water.
We’d say, “Oh, we’re in Brooklyn Heights.” Then we’d laugh. It was 10 years before anybody besides a few kooks called that area Dumbo.
But thinking of Old Fulton Street as Brooklyn Heights kept us from feeling like we were living on Mars.
Williamsburg was Mars as far as we were concerned.
Approaching Sascha’s place in broad daylight, we encountered a huge crowd of juvenile delinquents screaming as they destroyed a bicycle. They took turns slamming it against the street.
On one hand, it’s pretty embarrassing to remember what scared little white boys we were. Gosh! Teens speaking Spanish! Someone save us!
On the other hand, when you’re in the wrong neighborhood, it’s hard not to think about how quickly things can take a bad turn. Hey white boy, whatcha doin’ uptown?
Plus, a shouting mob is a shouting mob.
Of course, Sascha’s place was vast. The whole top floor of a building. A block from the river with a view of Manhattan.
If the apartment is still there, it’s worth a fortune, but looking at Google Street View, I’m guessing that one of those big new buildings has replaced Sascha’s.
The last thing you would call Sascha is a colonizer or gentrifier. Truth be told, he was the quintessential European artist abroad in the barbaric world beyond his safe and ordered Teutonic home. He was in Williamsburg because it was exotic and cheap.
The address was elegantly remote. Residing in Williamsburg for him was more like Paul Bowles holding court in Tangiers than the painter-slash-healer who wants to “create a community,” perhaps by opening a cave-aged cheese shoppe. The idea that the neighborhood would “improve,” that other “cool people” were going to follow him, was nowhere in Sascha’s head.
Three years later I met my friend John somewhere in Williamsburg for a sprawling party in a massive warehouse. The bands were at one end playing MDMA-friendly grooves. At the other end was a garden of scrap metal you were free to beat with baseball bat-sized pieces of rebar.
We eventually went back to John’s place. He was living with a Korean sculptor in a big loft. He saw my incredulity that anybody would choose to live in this desolate neighborhood and told me that it was the prime destination for artists who needed space.
But … haha … he also added that Williamsburg was on track to be the next cool place for anyone to move.
I pondered this as I walked in the dawn to the L without seeing another living soul.
That was 1991.
Fast-forward.
Twenty or so years later, my friend Cody asked if I could play bass for a gig and wanted to rehearse in Williamsburg.
It didn’t occur to me then that I had missed out on Williamsburg because I was just glad to be leaving the house. I’d been immersed in parenthood for 10 years. Before that, I’d spent 10 years helping my wife run a small theater on 57th Street, which was like having kids.
Cody gave me a ride from Park Slope to the rehearsal space. It was nighttime, so I was looking at the happenin’ scene on Bedford in the glare of light from all the bars and restaurants … the same desolate streets I walked that morning 20 or so years before.
We rocked out for a while then went for a beer.
Okay, so the template in my mind for “going for a beer” after a rehearsal was walking up from Ludlow Street to Mars Bar on 3rd or The Blue and Gold on 7th. Dives. Places that stank. Where the surfaces were sticky. Places where you were sure to find some female skeleton with tattoos and bleached hair haranguing some fat guy with a fringed denim vest, a wild beard and more tattoos. Or something. That’s where you went after playing cool music in a shitty rehearsal studio in a tenement basement. You went to a dive because you were Lou Reed. Because you were Television. Because you were Jim Carroll. Because you were drunk on cliches about art, bohemia and dirty old New York.
Patti Smith’s prose used to make me cringe. Her refusal to use contractions is like she wants to force mythology and profundity into her reveries about writing poetry in the Chelsea Hotel. I cringed because she holds up a mirror. She says the quiet part out loud. We all came to New York from the suburbs because we wanted to be cool bohemians.
And real bohemian artists drink in dives.
The Williamsburg bar with Cody didn’t feel like a dive. It was clean. Warm light glowed from bulbs inside kaleidoscopic colored-glass shades. The floors were polished hardwood. The beer selection was as long as Moby Dick. There was no blonde skeleton. No fat guy in a denim vest. No sticky surfaces. It didn’t stink.
I thought, “Oh … right … the hipsters changed the tone a bit.”
Then I noticed that the twenty-somethings at the next table were sharing a rustic-looking charcuterie board. A boy with a full pomaded beard was daintily sawing off a piece of salami.
I felt a pang of melancholy. Twenty missing years were there in the little disk of sausage he lifted to his teeth.
To be fair, there may well have been a perfectly disgusting dive just around the corner. A dive with just the right aroma of stale beer.
And it was unreasonable to see one coif-bearded young man with his fancy little knife clicking on that wooden cutting board as it sliced off a scallop of Camembert along with the other children at the table laughing hahaha like a bunch of middle-aged liberal arts professors wrapping up a meeting about faculty parking … it was unreasonable to see him as the embodiment of Williamsburg. It was unreasonable in the same way as it was unreasonable for the yuppie in the 80s to see the white kid with the orange Mohawk and the safety pin in his nose squatting on the steps of Trash and Vaudeville as the embodiment of the East Village punk scene. But there was a kind of truthful shorthand in both cases.
Salami Boy was a measure of a paradigm shift that had happened while I wasn’t looking and for which Williamsburg was ground zero.
Aging Gen X-ers like me unconsciously assumed that the cycle would be perpetual where some new form of informality with an aura of immorality undermines then replaces mainstream culture only to be replaced in turn. Elvis, Jim Morrison, Johnny Rotten, Kurt Cobain. This is how it works and how it will always work. But with the rise of Williamsburg and hipsterdom, the smell of teen spirit became perfectly roasted free-trade coffee beans. A new generation rebelled not by tearing down the civilized adult world but by saying “We can do it a million times better.” You call that swill beer? Here, try my IPA brewed with these incredibly rare hops by a legendary and incredibly tedious method once practiced in a remote Bavarian village.
The bands stood up as proud artisans. Dirty Projectors, Parquet Floors, Grizzly Bear and similar bands to emerge at the time were free of the inferiority complex hiding just beneath the surface of bands like Sonic Youth and The Pixies. Punk made the break from 60s rock by making it crystal clear that nobody was trying to be “good” like Pink Floyd or Steely Dan. Even with consummate professionals like The Talking Heads, the oddness said “We’re not trying to be Michael Jackson or Bruce Springsteen.” That was the unspoken slogan of the period: “We’re not trying.” And this can only go so far in masking self-loathing.
The hipster bands did not loathe self. They were much more like the chamber ensembles formed by classical musicians with the clear intention of playing serious music seriously. Who brought the score? Do you need a music stand? Can we adjust the thermostat?
Salami Boy, for me, was not a figure to be ridiculed. On the contrary, he embodied the rather obvious and exceptionally rational notion that it’s better to eat a nice sausage with an excellent ale than to sit on a wobbly stool drinking piss while the fat guy shouts “Jus shad up, ya fuckin’ bitch” to the blonde skeleton. Why do without a charcuterie platter just to feel cool? Why not DECIDE that the charcuterie platter is cool?
Biking back from Hearn’s, I guess it just hit me that all of this is ancient history. Back at that bar with Cody, that was probably a decade ago, and I had the deluded hope that I could get back in the game. It might’ve been late in the game, I thought, but not too late to feel … what? … to feel the excitement of being part of a big cultural moment. The truth, of course, was that moment had already passed. To try to get in on any “scene” would’ve been like looking now for a cheap loft in Soho to make Keith Haring-like pop art.
But I didn’t realize that at the time.
Cruising through the dusk toward Kent, past the short houses, past the new high-rise condos, past the bars and cafes, past the fancy restaurants, past the custom furniture stores, past the designer shoe stores, past the art galleries, I felt relief. No more worry about missing out on something. And, of course, now at 58, it hardly matters which neighborhood the young artists and entrepreneurs from Vassar and Amherst are gentrifying. My adventures in Bushwick have left me feeling full-out geriatric.
So I can relax. I’m off the hook.
Kenny Nowell 