Twenty-one years ago last month, New York ran a cover story titled “The New Bohemia,” about Williamsburg’s burgeoning artist community. Today, revisiting the eight-page spread – which we’ve embedded for you below – is like opening a time capsule from a moment when the neighborhood was on the precipice of change. “In the seventies, it was SoHo. In the eighties, the East Village. In the nineties, it will be Williamsburg,” said one interviewee. Here now are 10 things we learned about the Billyburg of 1992.
1. The neighborhood looked a heck of a lot different.
It resembled “the Lower East Side of yesterday,” to be exact. Photographer Collier Shorr compared it to “a working-class hick town.” Others described its aesthetic as “the land that time forgot,” where buildings “rarely rise higher than four stories.” That changed when the city rezoned the area in 2005, leading to the high-rise condos of today.
2. Rent was cheap. Real cheap.
Schorr paid $425 per month for a two-bedroom apartment and kept a $250-per-month studio next-door. Compare that to the Craigslist ad asking $1,350 for 60 square feet.
3. The waterfront used to be kind of spooky.
The waterfront — with its “disheveled wharves,” where “abandoned cars stick up from the East River” — was “Williamsburg’s spookiest area.” Now it’s the home of Smorgasburg and “hipster Olympics.”
Madea De Vyse (no longer in Williamsburg) at Teddy’s (still there).
3. Good coffee was a lot harder (and cross-dressers a lot easier) to find.
“My most burning project is to bring a decent cappuccino west of the BQE,” said Madea De Vyse, the cross-dressing alterego of composer Billy Basinki (who eventually moved to California).
4. The bomber jacket wasn’t always the Williamsburger’s attire of choice.
The late Lori Ledis recalled the moment she and her husband Robert Flam knew change had come: “I remember Robert coming back from the train and saying, ‘I’m noticing all these used overcoats. The used overcoats are moving in.'” At the time, “Williamsburg style” meant “a sort of Blade Runner Industrial Gothic.”
5. A lot of fun-sounding spots were doomed.
Clubs like Keep Refrigerated (“a Berlin-style underground club where the temperatures hovered above freezing”) and Game Room (“featuring roulette tables, chess and board games”) closed long ago, as did Arcadia (the setting of a New Year’s Eve Surrealist Ball), the , Comfort Zone (located on Grand Street, “one of Williamsburg’s empty boulevards”), and the late Annie Herron’s Test Site gallery. Coyote Recording Studios closed due to what it described as “the gentrification of Williamsburg and a non-negotiable lease with exorbitant rent.”
6. The ethnic boundaries used to be a bit different.
The ethnic communities of Williamsburg are the same today as they were in the ‘90s, though you don’t see many Asians moving there from Chinatown anymore. In 1992, Poles were moving south from Greenpoint, from 15th Street to Grand Street, and many of the Hasidim lived south of Division. Artists were “interlopers” on the Hispanic South Side.
8. The parties were way more fun.
750 people celebrated Bastille Day at the Old Dutch Mustard Factory before the organizers of the so-called Cat’s Head parties moved to Berlin. Back when ’80s art stars McDermott and McGough kept a studio in the bank that now houses the Williamsburg Art & Historical Center, they threw a costume party “fastidiously modeled after Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Egyptian Fete of 1913.” The duo subsequently moved on to Dublin and the West Village. But hey, at least Bushwick raves on?
9. There have always been haters.
Even 21 years ago, there were accusations of inauthenticity. “It’s like an army,” one person said of the newcomers. “They march off the train in their thrift-store clothing carrying their art-supply bags and stretchers on their way to the health food store.” Another interviewee described McDermott and McGough as “total Manhattanites” who “just moved out here to exploit the low rents, but they’re not really connected to the community.”
10. Some predicted the changes to come.
A member of the community board said of developers, “They want to gentrify the area with condos, which would lead to a domino effect, changing the neighborhood.” Er, Domino effect indeed. Just last month a Williamsburg penthouse sold for $3 million.
Great piece!
Very interesting! Thanks!
Wow, i can’t believe it’s been 21 years since i’ve been shitting on Billyburg. It still smells like ass.
3. Good coffee was a lot harder (and cross-dressers a lot easier) to find.
“My most burning project is to bring a decent cappuccino west of the BQE,” said Madea De Vyse, the cross-dressing alterego of composer Billy Basinki (who eventually moved to California).
Etahn Pettit (Medea) got his/her dream. Fabulous. Too bad fame has eluded him? He is still desperately hammering home that vision for a Brooklyn-free Brooklyn over at The Brooklyn Paper with pseudonymity (Chooch, plus about 10 different avatars) He along with Vincent (likely the above commenter that found this article interesting) Bambini, still work very hard to convince that the “progress” has been good.
The jury has returned, and they are wrong.
It’s Medea, not “Madea” De Vyse, (Think Greek mythology, not Tyler Perry), and Medea is the alter ego of Ethan Pettit, not William Basinski.
Ethan and William are two very different people.
Also, the reference to “750 people celebrated Bastille Day at the Old Dutch Mustard Factory,” conflates several events into one.
I went to art school in NYC from ’92 through ’96. A friend of a friend, who was a painter, lived in Williamsburg. It was a scary place to visit. Dark as hell at night, with lots of boarded-up warehouse buildings and shady characters milling around in the shadows. I lived there, on Bedford, in the early 2000s and watched the towers fall from the garbage- and junk-strewn wharves off of Kent Ave. I used to dig through the heaps to find crap for art projects. I left in ’05 when the hipsters started to become unbearable. Haven’t visited the place since.
Wow. Prices went up following gentrification?! I would have never guessed that flooding the area with trust-fund jackasses would have that effect.
Why didn’t you post the cover? I wish I still fit in the dress I am wearing (on the cover). Let’s see. I guess coffee is better–got pushed out by the prices. Parties were better, but I enjoyed parties and stayed up all night in those days. You forgot to mention that we paid our own way and now it is all trust fund kids.
I feel like that’s the great myth of Williamsburg. I know about 50 people who live there. 0 are paid for by any sort of trust fund. All pay they’re own way. Including me.
Good Lord, that’s not Billy Basinski. That’s our own little trucker’s delight, Ethan; who didn’t move to Cali, but Park Slope. Fact check, kiddos.
This was a terrifying moment actually for me. I was in a dress, with a different name, and my cousin in Alaska called me up and said, “Is that you?” My mother told me she actually saw the story at her hairdresser’s in Boston. How classic is that. There was barely an Internet you see. A story like this was a pretty big deal in those days. When it came out, I had already been in Williamsburg for 8 years, and had just recently moved to Park Slope. The character Medea went on to be active in the scene you see here, which lasted through the 90s. But Ethan had been active in Williamsburg since 1983, in rather a different sort of scene. The author of this story, Brad Gooch, is actually quite a heavyweight on the literary and social history of New York, with a biography of Frank O’Hara and other books. His “New Bohemia” piece lands right on a turning point in Williamsburg history. This is where Williamsburg transforms from an outer borough artists colony, into an urban subculture. With other centers such as London, Williamsburg launches all kinds of global trends such as “electronica,” “trance music”, “ambient,” “illbient,” indoor waterfalls, “Immersionism,” etc. etc. And in the arts it was right where analog was going digital. But yes, it was awkward. Suddenly I was getting invitations from professional drag queen clubs in Manhattan and Montreal. I would meet with these fabulous women, and I had never heard of Barbette and they had never heard of Robert Smithson.