Razing Williamsburg
Who pulled the plug on America’s hippest music scene?
“Peak Brooklyn” is what they’re calling it: the ubiquitous saturation of Kings County-related prose blanketing the internet. Brooklyn has become a touchstone for comparison with places the world over, based on superficial qualities like the presence of busking musicians or so-called “artisanal” retailers. And while there’s always been that pervasive attitude on the part of New Yorkers—you know, how they think they’re living in the center of the universe—“Peak Brooklyn” implies a shift in our collective attention, away from the isle of Manhattan and toward the post-industrial waterfront of Williamsburg, or the family-friendly gourmet eateries in Park Slope.
The term has been bandied about for some time, but finally came to the forefront of the media world when the New York Times, in a surreal bout of self-awareness, turned its gaze inward, citing itself as chief purveyor of these Kings County comparisons.
“What’s next? Describing Manaus as the Williamsburg of the Amazon? Katmandu as the Cobble Hill of Nepal?” editor Philip B. Corbett ponders in a piece facetiously entitled, “Brooklyn, Planet Earth.” “It’s not news that we write a lot about Brooklyn—especially about a certain selection of Brooklyn neighborhoods,” says Corbett. “But as a colleague and others have recently pointed out, we now seem to be using Brooklyn as the measuring stick or point of comparison for everywhere.”
There is an incredulity in “the paper of record” finally acknowledging its own propensity for using Brooklyn as a sociocultural touchstone; after all, the Times is, itself, responsible for the “Brooklyn trend piece.” Gothamist seems to have taken particular affront to the Times’ consistent churning out of Brooklyn-oriented articles, and has taken to regularly poking fun at these trendy pieces whenever they’re published.
Indeed, “Peak Brooklyn” implies that all has been said and done with respect to the borough. “Peak Brooklyn” is a literary notion that once something has been described in painstaking detail, deconstructed to its most essential elements, that thing no longer conveys wonder or novelty or, at the very least, mild intrigue. And yet, the media seems to be frantically and continuously publishing take after take on the borough’s increasingly outmoded stature.
Unsurprisingly, one neighborhood lies at the epicenter of our unending and aggravatingly inundating infatuation with Brooklyn: the hamlet that started it all, that arbiter of cool, of hip — Williamsburg.
As for ol’ Billyburg, well, it’s done for. Old news. Dead and gone. Passé. You know it, I know it, hell, your mother probably even knows it. The signs are all there: the faux-wood-paneled Dunkin Donuts, the SoulCycle studio, the brand new Whole Foods. These harbingers of that dreaded and heavily loaded word “gentrification” have arrived en masse, and just about everyone seems to have taken notice.
“Everyone who has lived and/or spent time in and/or even just briefly passed through Williamsburg over the last two decades has a strong opinion about the exact year that Williamsburg died,” writes Ben Yakas of Gothamist. “All the new Starbuckses, J. Crews, and Urban Outfitterses are merely physical manifestations of the disease — but we’re just sifting through the wreckage of the infection.”
A quick online search for “the death of Williamsburg” yields a handful of articles with that phrase in their titles. There was even a “funeral party” held recently to celebrate and/or mourn the neighborhood’s demise. Bearing some semblance to a New Orleans-style jazz funeral, the “funeral procession wound through Glasslands,” its attendants decked out in glitzy black veils, grinding and making out under an unending shower of glitter. The revelers, in their bizarro funeral garb, conducted an avant-garde processing of the “five stages of grief.”
And while some bemoan the “death” of the neighborhood itself, most denounce what seems to be the latest set of casualties: Williamsburg’s mainstay music venues.
Times Are A Changin’
Over the past year or so, nearly a dozen venues have shuttered. The litany of closing or already closed live music clubs and DIY spaces is a lengthy testament to the power of gentrification, of rent hikes and intimidating developers, throughout the neighborhood.
In recent memory, we’ve mourned the loss or relocation of major Williamsburg institutions, both funded and DIY, and the list continues to stretch on, adding new names almost monthly: Spike Hill, Death By Audio, 285 Kent, Galapagos, Glasslands, Zebulon, Monster Island Basement, Uncle Paulie’s, Secret Project Robot, The Tonic, La Sala, Dead Herring, Trash Bar, Verb, the Pool Parties, Brooklyn Rod & Gun Club. These closings and relocations are especially jarring to a neighborhood once known as the foremost creative mecca in New York City’s five boroughs.
“Times are a-changin’ in Williamsburg, as some of NYC’s best music venues get razed, replaced with glass and steel condos for Wall Street dickheads and their hangers-on,” writes Peter Matthews for the blog Feast of Music in a piece called “The Death of Williamsburg.” “Pretty soon,” he says, “it’ll be nothing but Starbucks and Bowery venues in Billyburg. Sigh.”
The announcements read like obituaries, eulogies for snuffed-out cultural luminaries. But they also cite skyrocketing rents, among other causes, to blame for the venues’ shutdowns.
“When we first moved onto South 2nd Street the only things on our block were a used police car lot and several empty buildings,” write Edan Wilburg and Matt Conboy of the DIY venue Death by Audio. “Now there are a half-dozen expensive restaurants, bars, a daycare center and a new condo building (that was an empty lot when we moved in). All-ages DIY music venues are almost by definition temporary, and we feel fortunate to have lasted in this space for this long. We knew from the beginning that it couldn’t last forever and we are extremely grateful to everyone who has preformed [sic] or attended any of our shows.”
Along with this announcement, Impose magazine published “A Living Tribute to Death by Audio,” a collection of short pieces by various authors celebrating the space’s success.
The staff at Glasslands offered a similarly mournful adieu: “It was an awesome blur: there were shows with MGMT, TV On The Radio, Bon Iver, Yeasayer, Disclosure, Alt-J, there were Soul Clap dance competitions, there were aerialists, comedians, theater groups, fashion shows, raves,” they wrote. “Most importantly, the staff, artists, and party people that have been a part of Glasslands for the past eight years made the venue a special creative home for music, and a joy to run. It’s impossible to fully communicate how grateful we are for all your love and support.”
There’s an almost palpable heartbreak in these farewell addresses, and the closings themselves have been covered by numerous media outlets, from locally oriented sites like Brooklyn magazine, Wondering Sound, Brooklyn Vegan, and Gothamist, to far-reaching news and editorial sources like FlavorWire, Pitchfork, New York magazine, and FADER.
Operating Outside the Law
With these venue closings and the obituaries penned by their owners and staff members, there’s an implied cause of death, so to speak: that nasty, avaricious, all-consuming specter of gentrification.
One local author, Peter Rittweger, offers a particularly fatalistic take on all these recent venue closings: “There’s been countless DIY spaces, like loft parties and shows that happened in Williamsburg that don’t really happen anymore,” he says. “There’s been stuff going on a long time but this year’s been kind of the nail in the coffin.”
In part, he credits the aggressive, real estate developer-led gentrification of the neighborhood with the shutdown or exodus of these many performance spaces. But he predicts the upward socioeconomic climb of the neighborhood will soon plateau. “I want to believe that it’s going to crest at some point, that developers are going to run out of people to fill these condos,” he says. As a result, “there’s just less music coming out of Williamsburg… there’s not as much coming out just because people can’t afford to live here.”
Gentrification via rising rent prices has brought down many of the venues that have closed in the past year. Trash Bar, which will soon relocate to Bushwick, claimed in a Facebook post, “[T]hese days the increasing rental rates are a well-known force to be reckoned with.” However, the post continued, “the neighborhoods [sic] evolution has been exciting to watch and has, in many ways, been great both for business and for the nabe’s energy and action.”
The bar’s booking agent told Gothamist that Trash Bar simply could not afford to stay in the neighborhood, given a 400% rent increase, which he said was “out of the question.”
A major issue when a formerly industrial neighborhood like Williamsburg gentrifies is the matter of legality. At DIY venues like Death by Audio and 285 Kent, noise violations, issues with liquor licenses, and building code violations presented a troublesome set of obstacles.
In an essay on AdHoc, Brooklyn music scene stalwart Ric Leichtung discusses the huge role these legal issues played in the closing of 285 Kent, saying, “We closed 285 Kent for a lot of reasons. Over the course of the preceding year or so, the venue had gotten several thousands of dollars worth of fines and summons for things that we simply didn’t have the resources to obtain.”
Worse, there were issues with the NYPD. “We even got busted by cops on my birthday in 2013, and I had spent the night in jail after another similar raid,” Leichtung writes. “That felt kind of badass for a second, but that feeling goes away pretty quickly when you’re in a jail cell and you can hear the puckering of someone taking a shit two feet away from you.”
Peter Rittweger agrees that when an industrial neighborhood is gentrified, the increased police presence can cause difficulty for local venues. “It’s the not the wild west out here, anymore,” he says. “Back in the day, police wouldn’t come out here. With gentrifiers comes increased police presence. The thing that’s weird about Williamsburg is that most of the venues were operating in industrial areas. Once they changed these areas from industrial to residential, you no longer had these venues in desolate places where you could get away with shit.”
The difference between the new venues that will replace spaces like 285 Kent and DBA and their antecedents, says Rittweger, is that “These venues have an eye on sustainability. DIY spaces are always going to be temporary because they’re operating outside the letter of the law.” Rittweger cites the venue Silent Barn as “an example of what DIY could be or should be; they have an element of sustainability.” Meanwhile, he says, “Trans-Pecos and Palisades are legitimate venues; they have liquor licenses and are operating legally.”
A Matter of Authenticity
While the well-documented gentrification of Williamsburg is the most obvious cause of the closure of many distinguished neighborhood performance spaces, there seems to be a slightly more pernicious element at work, here. Call it a subset, if you will, of this broad-wave gentrification. You could say there’s a developer of sorts buying up the block that housed 285 Kent, Death by Audio, and Glasslands. That developer, though, happens to be Vice Media.
When Glasslands announced its impending closing in October, Gawker’s Jordan Sargent declared unequivocally, “Speculation aside: Glasslands, along with a half-dozen other businesses, are closing because of Vice. Vice signed an eight-year lease for 75,000 square feet of space this summer, comprised of two adjacent buildings, and have already begun the process of building out their offices, which they are hoping to move into sometime early next year.”
There’s a dissonance in Vice’s devouring of the neighborhood in the interest of constructing its new offices and the anti-corporate, alternative aesthetic and ethos Vice purports to espouse. When Vice does publish journalistic material, it tends to focus on countercultural, provocative, or politically important subject matter; for example, Vice’s reporters covered the ongoing political strife in Egypt, Syria, and Ukraine comprehensively and informatively. Noisey, a Vice subsidiary devoted to music, often covers shows at venues in Williamsburg and Bushwick, and provides local artists publicity in doing so.
There was, as people like Ric Leichtung and 285 Kent’s Todd Patrick would come to discover, a stinging disparity between Vice’s public commitment to the counterculture and the alternative music scene and its displacement of several major DIY music spaces in a neighborhood that had once nurtured the growing media company.
To people like Peter Rittweger and Ric Leichtung, Vice’s office upgrade and resultant displacement of several important DIY venues feels like little more than a stab in the back.
In his essay, appropriately titled, “I Felt My Size: A Year In Brooklyn DIY,” Ric Leichtung comes down hard on Vice, accusing the company of “killing,” whether blithely or deliberately, “one of the last true safe havens for arts culture in the neighborhood.” He offers financial data, claiming, “The company got a 6.5-million-dollar tax break for staying in Williamsburg, which makes me wish they had taken a high road and had been better role models by choosing a different building.” “I have a hard time,” Leichtung says, “seeing these forced closures as anything but killings, as anything but crimes.”
At the end of the day though, and as with most things, the decisive factor between Vice and the DIY spaces it’d set its sights on was money. When you’ve got money on your side, argues Leichtung, what does it matter if you follow the letter of the law? “Vice is acting just as morally—if not legally—reckless as I was,” he claims. “The difference is that Vice has millions of dollars, and that’s a an obvious game-changer. Hell, it’s a game-maker: they have the money and the power to define culture and feed it to the masses. 285 had just enough money to keep running in the same fucked up way.”
And while Vice might make “really good content,” Leichtung offers, “what’s scary is that the money that fuels the operation comes from major corporations who, through advertising, co-opt [the alternative] culture to sell jeans or vodka or sneakers. It’s straight-up corrupt.”
Leichtung may be onto something when he broaches the notions of co-opting and the matter of authenticity. Peter Rittweger agrees that Vice used to represent a progressive, alternative culture but he finds their displacement of venues like 285 Kent and Glasslands to be “particularly frustrating and disillusioning because [Vice was] supposed to be one of us.”
In terms of appropriating the local culture, Rittweger asserts that “VICE kind of tried to personify the coolness that this area exudes,” and that it was “the kind of publication that would write about shows at Glasslands or 285 Kent or [Death by Audio].”
“VICE is the kind of publication,” claims Rittweger, “that, if somebody else was moving in and taking over those venues, they’d be writing a piece taking that company down. Six months before DBA closed, they were writing pieces about how important these venues are to the neighborhood.”
Interestingly enough, while Vice was making its power play in acquiring the real estate for its new offices, Noisey published an article about “Why the Closing of 285 Kent Doesn’t Matter.” In a remarkably obtuse, myopic take on the situation, writer Gary Suarez claims, “If anything, 285 Kent’s closing is less an all-ages tragedy than a harbinger of things to come in Williamsburg.”
“Despite the convenient shorthand,” Suarez argues, “the neighborhood is hardly the hipster utopia it once was purported to be a decade ago. Rents have risen to the point where those without the means to afford it instead settle in abutting Bushwick or Greenpoint, the latter locale already eagerly following Williamsburg’s lead. As Williamsburg grows ever more upmarket residential, many of the neighborhood’s assorted nightclubs and rock bars will likely find themselves priced out or otherwise embattled, an extension of what’s already happened in recent years to local businesses like grocery store Tops on the Waterfront.”
Suarez makes a sensible point, except he neglects to mention his employer is behind these venues “find[ing] themselves priced out or otherwise embattled.”
Contention Over Gentrification
While the owners, both current and former, of these recently shuttered venues have surely felt the brunt of this wave of closings, one might stand to think the local musicians who played these venues, who provided these spaces with a significant portion of their revenue, would be similarly dismayed.
“It’s a huge bummer, but I’m not too surprised I guess,” says Geoff Bennington, who plays guitar and sings in the Bushwick-based Gillian. “Since I’ve moved here,” Bennington—whose favorite Williamsburg venue was Glasslands—says, “I’ve heard people talking about how much Williamsburg is changing and becoming more expensive, and pushing all of the artists and musicians out to Bushwick and other parts of Brooklyn.” While Gillian has played only a handful of shows in Brooklyn, says Bennington, “I don’t go to shows in Williamsburg as often as I used to.”
Similarly nonchalant about these closings is guitarist David Colicchio, who plays for the Williamsburg outfit VÉRITÉ. While he’s played a slew of key Williamsburg venues—Glasslands, Spike Hill, Knitting Factory, Trash Bar, Brooklyn Bowl, Rough Trade, Baby’s All Right—Colicchio insists, “The closings really haven’t affected how often and where I’m playing. There still seem to be plenty of venues in the area that people are willing to come out to.”
“I’m glad I got to play at Glasslands before it shut down,” he adds. “But it seems like a majority of the venues are still operating.” For his part, Colicchio seems to be right.
The Williamsburg scene may be pushing out into Bushwick due to the snatching up of real estate by developers and certain media companies. The confluence of the two neighborhoods’ scenes has created a hydra of sorts: cut off one head, two more spring up. With the advent of clubs like Trans-Pecos in Ridgewood, Queens, and Palisades and Aviv, both in Bushwick, the local scene in and around north Brooklyn is still quite vibrant.
Peter Rittweger agrees with this assessment. “The thing is, the places have just moved further out,” he says. “Williamsburg hasn’t really been the culturally vibrant place that people think it is for a long time. The people who are creating the art on display or the music in the venues can’t even afford to live in Williamsburg.”
However, the establishment of the creative class in Bushwick, with its carefully studied barista techniques and DIY venues, means the contention over gentrification has simply shifted to a new arena. While there’s a bitter irony in leasing a space because of a reasonable or even low rent, only to be priced out of the neighborhood several years later, there are several complex racial dynamics that are being contorted as Bushwick buckles under the pressure to allow new condos and artisanal cheese shops and the like.
Perhaps the immediacy of gentrification wasn’t noted within Williamsburg because of the racial, cultural, and ethnic makeup of the neighborhood; with the exception of the sizeable hasidic community in Billyburg, the neighborhood is, and always has been, predominantly white. In Bushwick, where, according to the 2010 US census, 65.4% of residents are Hispanic and 20.1% of residents identify as African-American, the arrival of a creative class that is, in all likelihood, mostly Caucasian stands to cause a bit of tension (in a recent article in FADER, Emilie Friedlander does a fantastic job unpacking this notion). Think the opposite of “white flight.”
However sunny the future of the Williamsburg-Bushwick music scene may seem, Gothamist has already conjectured Bushwick might not be the safest place to settle due to the ever-looming threat of being priced out of the neighborhood. Then again, there are venues like Galapagos—which is relocating to Detroit—that aren’t taking any chances of being gentrified out of another neighborhood.
What’s Next for Billyburg?
Gazing outward, nationwide, Williamsburg’s prognosis bodes not well for communities like Silver Lake, Portland, or Austin. If Williamsburg is the test case for this cycle of hipsterfictation preceding gentrification, can we expect to see analogous situations in other artist-friendly communities across America? Worse, this means we’ll also probably see venue owners competing for real estate with extant or emerging businesses, because venues aren’t protected anymore; they’re expendable (hey, maybe moving to Detroit, where you can buy a home for a few thousand dollars, isn’t such a bad idea).
As sure as it costs more to live next to the Bedford L station than it does to live on the Upper West Side, there are always going to be issues plaguing the Brooklyn music scene. The clash between the independent, DIY spirit of the local music and art communities and the letter of the law can create numerous legal and, consequently, financial problems for those who would seek to stage live performances at their rented-out spaces. The cycle of gentrification, of co-opting, and of lost and reappropriated authenticity persists as Brooklyn, whether having reached “peak” trendiness or not, continues to burgeon with members of the bourgeoise.
And though the scene suffers every time a club shuts down because the owners can no longer afford the rent, or when the cops show up to bust some kids running a warehouse show for not having a liquor license, everyone involved—everyone who participates passionately in the creation and staging of music and art in north Brooklyn—still seems to have reason to believe their scene will continue to forge on, whether by limping or sprinting, in the years to come.
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Header photo: Monotonix at Death By Audio, by Tod Seelie
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