The Quadrangle

Issue date: 2/16/05 Section: Features

During New York City's fiscal crisis in the mid-Seventies, many artists took advantage of the low-rent studios of Greenwich Village. As the area became more tame than tumultuous, more and more studio spaces changed from artistic workplaces to apartments, and the bohemian Village became the hottest neighborhood in Manhattan. The artists evicted from the Village jumped across the water, took the L, or drove across the Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn, and found the area right across the water as a suitable replacement.

Williamsburg, Brooklyn is considered by many to be the next posh New York City Neighborhood. Established as an independent city in the antebellum period of American history, the small city was used as a shipping port early in its history, and became a haven of Manhattan's wealthy families. When the tenements of Manhattan's Lower East Side overflowed, many residents with some mobility traveled across the river for the promise of low rent and open space. As conditions declined upon the completion of the Williamsburg Bridge, the wealthier population of Williamsburg moved east, leaving the neighborhood to ruin. As the Great Depression hit the country, Williamsburg became the site of the first Project Housing Complex under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.

Throughout the 1950s and 60s, the neighborhood swelled with Polish, Dominican, Hasidic Jew, and Puerto Rican immigrants, and fell under the same ruin with the rest of the City throughout the 1970s. As Williamsburg's neighbor to the west, Manhattan's Greenwich Village, became gentrified in the 1980s, many of the neighborhood's former residents flocked to Brooklyn in order to seize the new commercial studio space in what became known by some as "Billyburg." The neighborhood gained recognition for both its art and music communities. People began to see Williamsburg as a low-key, down-to-earth alternative to the increasingly pretentious Village; with rent within the low thousands, the area became even more appealing.

Today, Williamsburg is home to many of New York City's emerging artists, bands, and authors. With reasonable prices all-around, many of the City's younger population call Billyburg their home. While not wholly gentrified, the area is becoming safer yearly. Unlike many other areas of New York City that experienced a wave of immigrants, the neighborhood still houses many of the original groups that settled the area after World War II: Hasidim, Puerto Ricans, and Hipster all coexist in a neighborhood peppered with Polish delicatessens, Hasidic temples, Hispanic Bodegas, and Art galleries. Accessible by the 14th street "L" subway line, the neighborhood gained the moniker "Greenwich Village East," as it is one stop away from Union Square.

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