Williamsburg’s hard-won reputation as a center of artistic production is becoming increasingly threadbare. The relocation of an art collective and the shuttering of several galleries and event spaces in recent months have called into question whether the neighborhood will remain the rough and ready haven for artists it once was.
The recent casualties—Not An Alternative, Cinders Gallery, Monster Island, Secret Robot Project and other evocatively named arts organizations—have all shut down or left Williamsburg in the last 12 months due to rising property prices.
“There’s a trend that’s been in place for a while now,” said Sto Len, former co-owner of Cinders Gallery, which shut its doors in December 2010. “Many artists and art spaces that I dearly love have had to move in the past year.”
Williamsburg, like other now-upscale neighborhoods before it, was once a welcome retreat for artists.
In 2003, when art collective Not An Alternative set up shop at 84 Havemeyer St., the neighborhood “was a totally different place,” said co-founder Jason Jones. Rents were cheap, and there were plenty of abandoned factories whose landlords were happy to rent them out as studios, production spaces and loft dwellings.
Beginning in the 1990s and continuing through much of the 2000s, the possibility inherent in these gritty conditions drew a wave of artists like Jones and his associates.
That wave has all but rolled back. The artistic community that forged the cultural identity of the new Brooklyn is largely gone, pushed from Williamsburg by the very thing that drove its members from Manhattan to Brooklyn in the first place: astronomical rent prices.
The Not An Alternative team, whose most recent project involved an installation and signage for Occupy Wall Street, was hit with a 240 percent rent spike and two months ago relocated to Greenpoint. Jones and his wife and business partner, Beka Economopoulos, are among the latest group of artists to discover they can no longer afford to live and work in the place that once nurtured them.
“Same story that we’ve seen time and time again in the East Village and the LES and SoHo before that,” said Len.
Young creative types began to trickle into Williamsburg in the early 1990s, reversing decades of flight from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Their numbers quickly grew, and the neighborhood’s image was transformed.
Before long, cultural tourists, drawn by the new energy of the revitalized Williamsburg, began to transform the neighborhood from an authentic haven for artists into a place that manufactured what sociologist Sharon Zukin calls “an identifiable local product for global cultural consumption: authentic Brooklyn cool.”
With this newfound broad appeal came displacement—first of residents and manufacturing businesses that predated the influx of artists, then, increasingly, of the artists themselves.
“Displacement is central to the process of gentrification,” wrote DePaul University geography professor Winifred Curran in an Urban Studies paper that took Williamsburg as a case study. Curran and others, notably Zukin in her book Naked City, have detailed the process whereby Williamsburg’s growing cultural capital in the last decade brought financial capital in the form of big developers.
To some, the coup de grace came in 2005, when the city, with the enthusiastic support of Mayor Bloomberg himself, approved a major rezoning of North Brooklyn, converting the area from a primarily manufacturing zone to a commercial and residential district.
Now, property prices are six feet high and rising. According to a third-quarter report by The Corcoran Group, a real estate firm, average prices for Williamsburg condominiums have increased 16% per square foot from their average at this time last year.
On a recent evening at their new workshop and offices on industrial West Street near the Greenpoint waterfront, Jones was surrounded by friends and collaborators, including several members of activist design studio DSGN AGNC, which shares the space. All were refugees from Williamsburg. Their new space is unglamorous—one of their neighbors is a porn studio—but affordable.
Cinders Gallery was not so fortunate. The brainchild of young artists Sto Len and Kelie Bowman, it had operated at 103 Havemeyer St. since 2004, but closed in the face of a significant rent increase.
“It went on for six and a half years in that one space, a different exhibition each month,” said Len, a youthful Asian man with the improbable hair of a Japanese anime character. “Amazing people came through those doors.”
Bowman and Len felt the rent increase was too much, and decided to leave.
“It was a hard decision because we had so much history there, so many great memories and such a wonderful community had built up around it,” Len said.
Other Williamsburg-based art collectives and event spaces have recently moved or closed down for similar reasons. Among them are Monster Island, an arts center that shut its doors in September, and art gallery Capricious.
A number of galleries were displaced when Monster Island closed, including artist-run space Live With Animals, and have yet to find new homes. For most, it’s unlikely that their next home will be in the old neighborhood.
In their place, however, many of the retail stores and restaurants that serve cool-seekers continue to thrive—and new ones are being added all the time.
One of the latest ventures on which critics have smiled is Maison Premiere, a “barstaurant” that scrupulously recreates the ambience of the oyster and cocktail bars of fin-de-siécle Paris and old New Orleans. Despite $1.00 oysters during happy hour, it isn’t hard to run up a large bill on expensive cocktails and other scrumptious seafood dishes that are manifestly not aimed at starving artists.
In the newWilliamsburg, gentrifiers, by their very presence, have made existence impossible for the artists who made the neighborhood desirable in the first place.
Len and Bowman still haven’t found a new permanent home for Cinders, but, since leaving Havemeyer Street, they have experimented with temporary spaces and other projects, including a pop-up restaurant with a friend who is a traveling cook from Japan. Their events are grassroots and low-profile in contrast with Maison Premiere’s slick branding and promotion.
So what does the future hold? At least one new business is trying to sustain Williamsburg’s artistic identity. Paper Box, a 5,000-square-foot performance and studio space, will be opening soon at 17 Meadow St. According to marketing director Corrie Zaccaria, the landlords, who only rent to artists and musicians, are giving Paper Box a break on the rent. “They’re really cool, and we just ended up in a great situation,” she said.
It seems unlikely, however, that other art businesses will find equally sweet deals in today’s Williamsburg. Moreover, the Paper Box team is planning to install a café, making their business a hybrid foreign to artists like Jones, Len and Bowman.
With most artists gone, Len foresees a loss of cultural memory.
“We’ve all known that it was only a matter of time before the rents were going to get too exaggerated for most artists and art spaces to be able to afford. Once everyone’s lease is up, most of the exciting things will be gone,” he said.
Asked whether he has considered what he’ll do if rent prices in Greenpoint reach Williamsburg levels, Jones is unperturbed.
“I’m sure they will,” he said. “I’m happy to move to the next center of gentrification, because I think it’s actually a good place to organize from. I’m happy to ride on the crest of that wave.”
Leave a Reply