Brooklyn Dreaming
Reading Andrea Rosen’s post about a ‘Drano bomb’ in Williamsburg was the first time in years I’d thought much about ‘South Williamsburg,’ as Gothamist called it in a 2008 article on machete attacks. I’d passed it on the BQE and on the bridge approaches, dipped into it on the way to Diner, but all my friends in the ’burg lived further north and have since moved to Greenpoint or Queens, and I never lived there. But I nearly did.
In May 1996 I was finally earning enough that my 12 x 6’ bedroom in SoHo was starting to seem less of a lucky find I’d considered it a year and a half before. Also my delightful, wild, sweet-tempered English roommate—there were three of us in a four room apartment—was moving in with her boyfriend.
So when a graphic designer at work, whom I enjoyed a lot, though she was a bit of a raver, mentioned lofts in Williamsburg, it seemed like a great idea. Plus, no broker’s fee. I took a long lunch, headed off on the L, and came up into a neighborhood of vinyl-sided houses that rapidly gave way to turn of the last century factories, old men on folding chairs in front of bodegas and kids on bikes at the corners. It was too early in the day for school to be out.
The apartment was five floors up in an eight or nine story factory, midway down a short block that dead-ended at the BQE retaining wall. There were more kids on bikes at the end of the block. I felt rude ignoring them. The factory was entered by a staircase of steel grating, freshly painted a park bench green, suspended over a derelict courtyard. The woman who opened the double steel doors on the fifth floor—and who turned out to be, with her husband, one of the building’s owners—was very proud of how solidly they’d rebuilt that staircase.
“You just have to be careful in winter,” she said.
The apartment was enormous, maybe 30 x 50’. The current residents had set up a sink and two-burner camping stove in an inner corner.
“You can build whatever walls you want, or not,” the woman said. “It’s a great space for parties the way it is.”
And it was, with a full wall of windows onto Manhattan, from the World Trade Center up past the Citicorp building. We were lucky, the woman said, to be getting in when we were. The neighborhood was going to be heating up.
Back at the office, my co-worker agreed. She had a slow, sleepy smile. She was going to be in Baltimore for a rave that weekend; we could go put money down on Monday.
I could afford this. It was little more than I was paying in SoHo. But I knew, going back to my desk, that I was going to continue looking. I thought about summer on those treeless streets, the kids on bikes watching us come and go. I thought about the little kick inside I’d gotten, picturing myself saying I lived there, and I felt petty and fake, and alarmingly capable of launching myself with energy and determination towards disaster, and being unable to turn aside once I was on my way. I didn’t care about having a big enough space for a rave. I didn’t know enough people and couldn’t afford the furniture to fill such a space. What I cared about—and still do, in different permutations—was what I would find outside my door when I went out in the morning. It didn’t have to be pretty; it didn’t have to be safe. But it had to feel connected. A street dead-ending at the BQE suited my desires as poorly as a suburban cul-de-sac would have. I didn’t want a place to invite people into; I wanted a place that rewarded me for going out.
But I felt my decision had been made the moment I agreed to look with my co-worker. What if she was unable to find someone else to go in with and lost out on the space?
The story seeps into the next chapter without consternation. If you’re going to renege on someone at the last minute, an E-popping raver is a good victim to choose.
I ended up moving to Prospect Heights, at that time, I was told, the “wrong side” of Flatbush Avenue. But my street was beautiful, a joy to walk down, and I was a few minutes’ walk from Prospect Park and the amazing green market at Grand Army Plaza, all for a few hundred more each month than the factory space would have been to share. A few months after I moved in, a woman was shot and killed on the next block while walking home from work, and for a while I felt like a medieval castle dweller, secure only once inside my barred and dead-bolted redoubt, with enough food to hold out until the next lovely Saturday when the tables of Long Island and upstate fruits and vegetables were again set up in the Plaza. Most things look better on Saturday mornings. More and more of my friends began moving to Brooklyn; more and more people I met turned out to be Brooklynites, and for the remainder of the 90s I, too, referred to Manhattan as “the city,” and rarely thought of troubling with it on weekends.
