The Williamsburg Edge

My map begins mid-transit on the A train to Broadway Junction, where a pinstripe-suited figure carries a briefcase and a heavy leather-bound book, slowly ambling down the aisle. His exhortations are not the hellfire and brimstone of a Caribbean dialect, but the egalitarian accent of an American black man raised in Bed-Stuy. “Jesus loves you, he died for your sins!” Confessing his life story to the crowded train, we learned he had been a crack addict and a male prostitute, but was redeemed through the power of Christ.

Watching the figures on the L train, I contemplate the political economy of visibility. The body is a spectacle to flaunt a garish look, parry with a sneer, and compel the gaze of an other. The economy of postured images presented by young individuals on the L train fades when sonorous Mexican guitar players busk down the corridor of the subway car. Sitting next to me, a young man with a pad of paper and pencil clandestinely sketches an image of a woman sitting across from us.

Stepping out from the Bedford Avenue stop I see “Williamsburg Realty.” On the corner of the block, a sign says “Northside Shopping District,” indicating a committee of neighborhood businesses coordinating efforts to promote Williamsburg’s commerce. This is a familiar scene in gentrified neighborhoods dominated by consumption, such as places in NoHo/SoHo or parts of Midtown. I understand these organizations as a manifestation of neoliberalism in its privatization of public services; for example, many of these commercial organizations often employ the racialized poor, particularly ex-convicts, to provide the labor that makes these spaces palatable for the freedom to consume.

I decide to take a turn south. On South 1st Street is a real estate agency named “The Jacksonian”; the glass windows of the Jacksonian display various lofts for sale. The architecture is all glass framed by metal—the structural violence is transparent. Right next door is the Elliman Gallery which features an exhibit titled “Face Out” ( www.theportraitpainter.com/) about the Stolen Generation, mixed-race children of Australian Aboriginals who were forcibly extricated from their families by the government in attempts to acculturate proper citizen-subjects—an apt gallery for a space such as this.

Walking down Bedford, passing South 3rd, I see traces of immigrant populations scattered everywhere—numerous iglesias, restaurants with signs donning “comida crillos,” and the ever-present security camera surveying residents and passersby strolling down these lanes. It’s here that I see one clear indication of what we define as hip: a restaurant called “Simple Café,” it's storefront adorned with graffiti while its clientel seems predominately white. The Simple Cafe utilizes the structure of hip, employing the aesthetics of South Williamsburg to promote consumption. As I walk further along, close to the Williamsburg Bridge overpass on Broadway, the dominant commercial institutions are construction companies. The construction industry is profitting with development. Scanning the names of these companies elucidates that many of the entrepenuers are Italian Americans; the laborers also consist of working class whites, as well as Latinos and blacks. These businesses are similarly adorned with graffiti, many of which are marked by the artists’ tag and website; one construction supplier displayed an intricate graffiti piece and the address http://www.ymicrew.com/. I reflect on my own privilege as tourist and colonizer when I pull out my camera.

On Broadway and South 6th there are many landmark buildings, such as the Peter Luger Steak House and the Williamsburg Art and Historical Society. One large edifice is an HSBC Williamsburg Savings Bank, which upon closer inspection has a sign stating it used to be a children’s social services agency. I haven’t researched the history of this site yet, but I would venture that the original function of the building harkens to a point in time discussed by Dowling, either the reform efforts of turn of the century bourgeoisie, or the mobilization and organization of immigrant groups. Now it’s the branch of an international banking institution: the privatization of public services and globalization of markets--another manifestation of neoliberalism. Around these buildings there are scattered sites of hipster consumption such as the retailer “Brooklyn Industries.”

Walking down further to South 9th and Roebling, one gets a sense of the “old Williamsburg” (not to be nostalgic). Latino music is blasting around an area marked by housing projects, bodegas, places to wire money, and stores selling phone cards—a thoroughly immigrant population resides here. Walking further across Roebling one starts to see the synagogues and private schools of Hassidic Jews. The businesses here revolve around an economic relationship between Hassids and Latinos; for example, the supermarket arefrequented mostly by Jewish residents and also by Latinos, but the workers areall Latino. The relation is obviously asymmetrical, but there were no outright indications of discord.

Having explored South Williamsburg, I veered towards the river and started walking along the waterfront on Kent Avenue. Most of the buildings are either construction sites or municipal buildings owned by the Department of Environmental Protection. Further up are striking forms of hip: the laconic façade of the Domino Sugar Factory, organizations such as the Freestyle Arts Association or this enigmatic building “Duffs.” Intellectual labor reigns supreme, but historic spaces along the waterfront are conserved as repositories of nostalgia for sites of production. There are many new high-rise condos going up along the river. A couple in particular caught my eye. One prominent instance of hip is an apartment building adorned with a smokestack. Another building complex was titled “Williamsburg Edge.” Liminality and marginality are motifs that constitute and inform the hip desire for a space beyond the banality of middle class rationalism. Yet as the website advertises (http://www.williamsburgedge.com/) the amenities of this apartment complex centers around the privilege of seeing and consuming. The hipster embodies a gaze complicit with the machinery of his beloved’s displacement, attracting intensive capital investments from multinational corporations such as Hypo Real Estate, the company that funds “Williamsburg Edge” and other such luxury developments in global cities. The contemporary hipster is produced in conversation with transnational circuits of capital and labor, and an economy of desires that accompanies these relations of power.

One major site that currently looks dim but portends more neoliberal hipsterism is the Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal Six, a former docking station when the waterfront was industrially active. This is where I would like to conduct further research, particularly regarding the entitites that are funding its reclamation and development, including The Trust for Public Land, the Rhodebeck Charitable Trust, JM Kaplan Fund, and Citistorage. Right across from this bare park is Neighbors Allied for Good Growth (http://www.nag-brooklyn.org/) a community organization that works with city officials and businesses to come to comprises regarding the forms of development engulfing Williamsburg. As I continue to further conduct my research, this will be an interesting resource.

After walking along the waterfront I ambled up to North Williamsburg/Greenpoint, passing by McCarren Park, once called “Needle Park,” and stopped by a strip of businesses on one block. I went into a café named Mamalu to grab a cup of coffee. Mamalu is what I would classify as a “baby colony,” sites I’ve seen before in neighborhoods like DUMBO, where upper-middle class mostly white women come together for frothy cappuccino, bringing their babies along. The store has every conceivable need for a child , from baby food, diapers, a changing table in the bathroom, to a space with toys for the toddlers to hang out—the entire store brought to my mind the image of a mechanized mammy. I bought a cup of coffee and dropped my change in the tip cup. Latina labor substantiates bourgeois middle class femininity. The other two stores were Grooming and Baths, for petcare, and Urban Rustic, an organic food store big on “green” discourses of environmentally sustainable development. These three stores reflect aspects of the three relations of communication elaborated by Todorov—inter-human communication, communication with nature, and communication with the divine—and the shifts in these semiotic systems produced through neoliberal capitalism.

As it begins to rain, I head back towards the subway, and one if my last views is of the Orthodox Transfiguration Cathedral.