WeWork Co-Working Drops Down Next to Future Williamsburg Whole Foods

WeWork‘s expanding co-working empire has touched down in Williamsburg at 24o Bedford Ave, around the corner from the future Whole Foods and hovering over Scotch & Soda and Levi’s. (These days, North 4th Street would feel like a mall in the ‘burbs, except we don’t think there are any WeWorks out there– yet.)

In any case, the new members-only hive brings more creative marketing and promotion types to North Brooklyn, like AGW Group, The Wild Honey Pie, and Mash + Studio, plus creative product experiments like Flatev, an at-home tortilla-making machine, and WonderWoof (it’s like a Fitbit for your doggie). There’s even a mobile lottery app, Jackpocket.

WeWork’s common area has plenty of desks, booths and couches so you can hang out with other cool professionals (er…should we be using the moniker ‘yuccie‘?) and scroll through your Facebook feed get important shit done. You can hover by the kitchen stocked with free coffee, tea and beer or hole up in the cute little phone booths for private calls (and, apparently, sometimes naps). The offices themselves are set in claustrophobic mazes of glass wall-to-ceiling windows, but sharing-economy types should feel right at home in fishbowl transparency. There are also a couple of different styles of conference/brainstorming rooms for group meetings.

The Williamsburg location is already pretty popular – its current capacity for office space (472 desks and 76 common space memberships) is about 75-percent full on opening week. Prices range from around $800 per month for a single-person office space to $5,600 for eight (there’s also a few larger spaces but most are already spoken for. Or you could just grab a $350 per month commons membership and drink up as much free coffee and beer as possible to make it worth your measly freelance dollars. (Keep telling yourself the networking opportunities are totally worth it as you hover by the beer taps trying to catch the eye of that entrepreneur behind the latest on-demand shoelaces app, or whatever).

According to DNA Info, some of the controversy over WeWork’s contracted cleaners, who were fired after tying to unionize last year, still hasn’t been cleared up. Some of the former cleaners complained they are still waiting for new jobs from WeWork that they expected based on an agreement back in October. A rep for their union, SEIU32BJ, said that at least 26 former cleaners are expected to be back working with union contract soon and the lag was standard timing in the industry. A WeWork rep added “In anticipation of this to taking a number of months, we calculated our severance agreements based on that timeline so that the workers would be covered.”

We took a peek inside: