Salon.com > Williamsburg

Enough with the hipster-bashing

Sun, 12 May 2013 14:00:00 +0000

“It’s the Hotel Altamont,” according to a New York Post article detailing one Bushwick landlord’s efforts to evict his tenants. Forward thinking rentier Andy Chau apparently hired the Forbidden Ones Motorcycle Club to “terrorize the residents” of two buildings on Thames Street in Bushwick — a well-known “hipster” enclave — who are living in illegally converted industrial spaces under the protection of the 1982 New York City loft law.

Two gang members assaulted the woman who was later evicted by Chau in order to make way for the Forbidden Ones and their biker parties. Although the building once housed an Occupy Wall Street film collective who documented the Zuccotti Park evictions, the Post’s two writers reassure their readership that all of this is simply the latest chapter in the place’s “colorful history.”

Colonial Williamsburg: Where the Tea Party gets schooled

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 16:00:00 +0000

So I just got back from a family vacation at Colonial Williamsburg, the Virginia granddaddy of all American “living history” museums. (They hate the term “theme park,” and those people in 18th-century costume are “actor-interpreters,” not characters.) The first thing to say is that we all had a great time: My kids studied up on Revolutionary War spycraft, watched several terrific programs of 18th-century theater, and delivered orations from the Declaration of Independence late at night in our hotel room. We learned how bricks and barrels were made in that pre-industrial age, and my nine-year-old daughter signed up in the Virginia militia to fight the British. (Historical accuracy be damned: One of her drill sergeants was female too.)

Hasidic counselor accused of molesting teen to testify

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 17:41:00 +0000

Nechemya Weberman, accused of orally raping and sexually abusing a teenage girl from 2007 to 2010, is expected to take the stand in the New York State Supreme Court in Brooklyn this week. His accuser, now 17 years old, testified last week against Weberman, a pillar and renowned “counselor” in the Satmar Hasidic community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Weberman is accused of 88 accounts of sexual abuse of a minor from the time the girl was 12 until she was 15.

If you haven’t followed this case, one of the few sexual abuse cases in the ultra-orthodox community to be exposed to secular justice, here is a brief timeline. (Allison Yarrow has a thorough run-down of the case at The Daily Beast.)

2007: The accuser, a 12-year-old at the time, begins questioning authority at United Talmudical Academy, her ultra-religious school. Her parents are forced to send her to counseling for her “heretic” behavior.

The horrors of aging

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 21:00:00 +0000

‘Tis the season of horror and fear, along with sweets and disguises. On Halloween, kids get to assume for one night the outward forms of their innermost dread, and they’re also allowed to take candy from strangers, the scariest thing of all. Grownups, likewise, get to unleash their Ids – women dress as sluts and tarts without fearing judgment, strutting around in push-up bustiers and hanky miniskirts and stilettos, while men, gay and straight alike, can go in drag or let their inner Village People macho man out in a mustache, cowboy hat and tight pleather vest. It’s a communal bacchanal of campy, ritualized spookiness before the onset of winter, when we all retreat to our couches in elastic-waist PJs to hibernate and wait for Mardi Gras.

I haven’t worn a Halloween costume since way back in my 30s, when we hipster chicks all marched in the Greenwich Village Halloween parade dressed in our sluttiest, fishnettiest attire, a cabal of blood-red-lipped medieval serving wenches, Mad Maxine dystopian sci-fi wet dreams, and Morticia-vampiras in satiny black slip dresses with glow-in-the-dark fangs (I plead extra-guilty to the latter). Back then, my chief fear was that I would fail to achieve and do and be all the things I wanted; I frequently lay awake in bed in a wee-hour welter of panic, imagining obscurity, failure, and thwarted ambition.

Can bohemia be saved?

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Of all the enviously coveted urban baubles, nothing compares with bohemia. Its allure drove cash-poor artists to crime-infested Williamsburg in Brooklyn decades ago. Others soon followed, drawn by magazine articles announcing that a new, artsy neighborhood had been discovered -- until the place was saturated with people and bars and high-end retail and everyone was asking, "Where's the new Williamsburg?"

There may not be one -- at least, that's the sentiment that underpins a new book by Robert Anasi, "The Last Bohemia: Scenes From the Life of Williamsburg," in which the author chronicles his time there: Fourteen years, from 1994, when it was a lawless artists' enclave, until 2008, when its transition to ultra-trendy destination was complete. "What made Williamsburg and other post-World War II bohemias unique was that they took place in these abandoned cities and let people form utopias," says Anasi. "You could have an idyllic life for almost no money."

An urban utopia for almost no money -- old-timers wax nostalgic about it, and newcomers curse their luck for being too late. But is Anasi right? Are urban bohemias, you know, so over?

A little room to write

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

When I walk into the room, I don't know any details aside from these: They are all women, they have all been incarcerated and they have all chosen to be here, at this writing workshop, one evening a week, in this balmy conference room with plush faux-leather chairs.

I am a 26-year-old white woman. Their ages are staggered – maybe one woman is in her 30s, but the rest are in their 40s and 50s. They are various ethnicities, all people of color. One writer has a Puerto-Rican accent; another’s voice reveals a Brooklyn upbringing. Another has a slow drawl from I don't know where. She is so self-possessed, her speech so measured, her voice is like a soft metronome, setting the pace for the whole workshop.

You’re leading a writing workshop, not group therapy, said the woman who hired me a couple of months earlier. She warned me about how easy it could be for these sessions to slip into just that. All the workshop participants have suffered in various ways—some with mental illness, others from intimate partner violence, and many solely at the hands of the system. They are poverty-stricken and have been abused for precisely that. "The criminalization of poverty" is the phrase that keeps coming to mind.