Where does your allegiance lie? In the lofts and warehouses of the DIY scene or the dark, horny rooms of the indie club nights? Hear from a man who swings both ways
Where does your allegiance lie? In the lofts and warehouses of the DIY scene or the dark, horny rooms of the indie club nights? Hear from a man who swings both ways.
You’re listening to listening to Fletcher C Johnson. I’m Fletcher C Johnson.
Well, after season two of this podcast came out, and everyone loved the complete history of fashion episode, I figured, for season 3, I should do another complete history but I didn’t know about what. Fashion was something that I had been into for the better part of 30 years, and that episode ran about an hour, so I figured, if I wanted another full episode, I should come up with something else that had interested me for a couple decades and then I realized that I was coming up on the twenty year anniversary of me living in Brooklyn. So I started writing down notes and then more notes and then more notes and then I said, well fuck me, this thing looks like it’s going to be a double episode. And then I talked to my Brooklyn friends, you know, comparing stories, trying to get the dates straight, trying to get it right and there were more notes and then more notes, and the thing, it just got away from me. So now, three episodes of this five episode season are going to be dedicated to everything I know about williamsburg.
In 2002, the artist Ward Shelley created a timeline of the williamsburg art scene, he actually turned this timeline into a beautiful piece of artwork itself. And in Shelley’s recollection, the golden age of williamsburg, as he calls it, is from 1991 through 1994. Now, I don’t know anything about that. I wasn’t here. During those years I was just a we lad pushing my first skateboard around the dirt roads of Vermont.
I am not a historian, I’m a storyteller. And what I’m here to tell are the things I saw in my time. Because I’ve been reading some old articles about williamsburg and they never get it right. Either they are trying to make it sound too cool or the author is completely disconnected from the scene or, worse yet, the author is from manhattan.
Now, I’m going to warn you, I’m going to get things wrong… and I’m going to miss some stuff. Brooklyn is a busy, busy place and I couldn't be here for everything, although I tried. By god, you’ll see, I tried.
I might not have been here in ’91 but what I was here for was a time of almost unthinkably rapid change which you’ll learn all about in the next three episodes.
So, without further ado, I present part one of the complete history of williamsburg as I know it
I spent the summer of 2001 living in Ben Bronfman’s mom’s basement on the upper West side. Ben and I were college friends and his mom, Sherri, she agreed I could live with them if I promised to go to the movies with her once a week, because none of her kids would go with her anymore, and this seemed reasonable to me.
Ben and I were close but, you know, he had his own life in New York and he had shit that he had to take care of during the day so I spent most of that summer wandering around the east village by myself. I would eat Sherri’s food in the morning, bicycle downtown around noon, stay out until after midnight, and then eat Sherri’s food again when I got home.
Ben took me to some parties that summer and occasionally we’d go out to bars but he always had to pay for everything because I had no money and I wasn’t even trying to find a job.
One Sunday Ben took me to Bar 13 on 13th street and University where they had a weekly soul music night named Shout. The crowd was all these young rock n rollers.
I had just transitioned out of punk and I had a bad indie rock haircut, that was made worse by my thinning hair, and I had a new tan corduroy jacket that I had stolen from the Levi’s store and honestly I kind of looked like a mess but I was obsessed with these rock guys and going to Shout on Sundays became the complete focal point of my week. It was the only cool thing I knew about in New York City. The rest of my time I spent reading books with the homeless people in Tompkins Square Park.
Bar 13 was a medium sided club with a lot of room for dancing, which people always did. You’d see the same faces every Sunday and they all looked like people I wanted to know. Karen O came every week and she was the fucking mayor of that place. She knew everyone and she danced a lot and people generally gravitated to what she was doing. She seemed very powerful. But I didn’t know her name. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs had not taken off yet, they hadn’t recorded anything, and the only reason I knew she was a musician at all was because she would sometimes walk around with flyers for her their upcoming shows and try to convince people to go which I never did because I literally had zero dollars. But, in any case, Karen O was not my main focus. I was in love with this girl with short bleach blonde hair who wore black horn rimmed glasses and she basically looked like a blonde Paul from the wonder years. Every week the DJs played the song Surfin Bird and blonde Paul was the only one who could dance to it. She would make surfin bird seem graceful and sexy and I was in love. But I never met her. or any of the regulars. I would go every week from midnight to 4am. I never bought a single drink. I’d just hang by myself all night and dance occasionally when the dance floor really got going.
It took until the end of the summer for someone to finally approach me. I was in no way confident enough to begin talking to someone myself. I was 20 years old at the time, but I was still a small town boy, you know, using my fake ID to get into this club. But one night I found myself dancing with a woman named Christina who was a little older than me. Soon we were against a wall talking, and, next thing I knew I was telling her how I was sleeping in my friend’s mom’s basement, you know, not a very sexy thing to bring up, but then I immediately went on this fictional tangent about how the mom didn’t want me coming home late, which is something Sherri didn’t care about at all, but I was telling Christina how it would be better if I could stay with her, how it would save both me and Sherri a lot of trouble. This was the best pick up move I could come up with. Basically guilting Christina into bringing me home with her. And it worked. Soon enough Christina is driving me over the Williamsburg bridge to her apartment on the south side of Williamsburg. I had heard of Williamsburg. I knew it was supposed to be a cool place. I even made some snide remark about it being hip which I was immediately embarrassed about because that’s not my attitude about anything.
Well the whole thing ended as you might expect. Upon arriving at Christina’s apartment she handed me like a pool floatation raft to sleep on. She didn’t own a couch. The entire place was basically empty. Christina then immediately went to sleep. Obviously I was not invited to join her.
I woke the next day trapped in Williamsburg. I didn’t have enough money for a subway ride. Plus I didn’t even know where the subway stop was if I wanted it. My bicycle was still locked in front of Bar 13. After a lot of wrong turns I eventually found the Williamsburg bridge and walked my way back to Manhattan. Little did I know I had just spent my first night in the place that would eventually become my home and my entire world.
*
During the summer of 2002 I did a trip to Brooklyn to visit my little brother Matt. Matt had already been living in New York for a couple years, he was attending the art school Pratt Institute. And While l was in town, Matt’s friend BJ, he had set up a massive block party in Williamsburg.
Williamsburg had already gained notoriety for it’s art music scene and this block party was a pretty good cross section of what was going on. It took place in a parking lot behind an already long running residential loft building located at 151 Kent Avenue.
Kent Ave is the last street before you hit the enormous East River which separates Brooklyn from Manhattan. Kent runs parallel to the East River although you can’t see much of Manhattan from the street because there are looming factories that block your view. By 2002 half of these factories were long out of business, they were just decaying along the water. You know, weeds overran their parking lots. But you could easily sneak through holes cut in chain link fences and walk down to the dirty water and you’d have a view of Manhattan basically all to yourself.
This show featured local New York heroes Les Savy Fav, !!!, and the French Kicks as well as Providence art weirdos Lightning Bolt, who I had seen a number of times in Boston, and then more than half a dozen other bands as well. It was a whole day event with hundreds of people in attendance and it was just about the best show I had ever been to in my life. I had never seen so many outcasts gathered together outside during the daylight hours. If you collected every weirdo in Boston, where I lived at the time, it wouldn’t be half this many people.
Well, a couple hours into the festival one of my brother’s friends comes up to us and asks if we wanted to go check out the other block party. You know, I was like “Other block party? I don’t think so. What’s happening right here is amazing.” But this friend insisted that we come along. They said they had just come from the other party and that it was only five blocks away and that it was even bigger than the one we were at.
So we’re walking south on Kent passing closed factory after closed factory but the streets themselves are like an indie rock Mardi gras. It’s a river of like a hundred and fifty people overflowing from the sidewalks and spilling out into the road just walking between these two parties.
Eventually we arrived at an empty lot on Wythe Ave near the Williamsburg bridge. There were a number of undeveloped blocks in Williamsburg at this time. Places where buildings had once existed but had been condemned and torn down. Or parking lots next to abandoned factories where people had been discarding broken down cars and other scraps over the years. Well this lot was not developed but it was absolutely full. It was overflowing with hundreds of people. They spilled out on the sidewalk and they gathered in the streets, blocking traffic just to get a look at the bands. And I looked up and there, on the stage was the mayor of Soul night herself, Karen O. This was the first time I had seen her band. Up to this point the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, to me, were just a name that existed on the flyers that Karen would hand out at Bar 13. But now here they were, headlining this huge party along with another New York band The Liars.
I turned to my brother and asked how was this possible. Who had fucked up so bad that there was two competing block parties on the same day in the same neighborhood that could easily draw the same crowd. And how were there enough artists and freaks and weirdos in this city that both parties could be at capacity at the same time with a hundred additional people in transit between them. But, what I didn’t realize, is that it wasn’t exactly the same crowd. Similar but not the same. The first block party represented a piece of the Williamsburg art scene that had been incubating in Williamsburg since the 80s. It was people who had come up in a small community with a lot of space amongst these abandoned factories and the empty lots. And the second block party. This was the long running Manhattan nightlife scene. Also full or artist and weirdos but of a slightly different ilk. The kind of people that would go to a club on 13th street for a weekly soul music night. But the two worlds were converging and not just on this day. Manhattan artist were flooding into Brooklyn, the look and feel of Williamsburg could not have been changing faster, and me, a man from a tiny town in Vermont, I was going to play my own small part in merging these two groups into one and then watching them all get bulldozed by what was to come.
*
I moved to Brooklyn in 2003 and began living with my brother in an apartment in Bed Stuy, over near Pratt. The entire building was Pratt students and it was initially my plan to live in the stairwell of the building for free, like a fucking troll or something. There was a cubby hole that I had noticed on a previous visit and it seemed large enough for me and my stuff. In Boston, most recently, I had been living in a panty so this was not out of character.
I pulled into town around midnight in a Honda Civic which was stuffed to the roof with all my belongings but, when my brother let me into his building, I noticed that the cubby hole was now overflowing with canvases and cardboard boxes and other people’s shit. It had become a storage space. Which is what it was probably meant for in the first place. I didn’t know what to do so I left my stuff in the car and decided to sleep on it. Sleep on Matt’s couch. The next day Matt’s roommate Anita she took pity on me and said I could live in her room with her for 150 dollars a month which was perfect. The room was tiny, definitely it was too small for both of our stuff, but it turned out that this was not going to be a problem because when I walked back to the Honda Civic I found that the side window was smashed and everything I owned had been stolen. Everything except for this tiny little bed that I had been sleeping on in the panty. So that’s how I ended up living on a tiny bed at the foot of Anita’s bed.
When I graduated college my aunt and uncle, they unexpectedly gave me 1000 dollars as a graduation present so, instead of getting a job, I just managed to live on that money for six months. No one is better than me at living on nothing. So basically my whole world revolved around spending as little money as possible but having infinite free time on my hands.
Some days I would just sit on Pratt campus and pretend I was a student and try to meet people. Ask them, you know, what classes they were taking or whatever. Occasionally someone would walk up to me and confuse me for my brother and I’d just go with it. They’d say, “Hey Matt how was your summer?” and I’d be like “Really good. Do you know about any parties tonight?”
Like I said, I had already spent that summer of 2001 bumming around the east village so I felt like I had a pretty good handle on what was happening in Manhattan. So this time around I decided to focus my energy on Brooklyn and Williamsburg was supposedly the place.
When I am talking about Williamsburg in this story, the Williamsburg of my world, I’m largely referring to the north western corner of the neighborhood.
Williamsburg itself is located in the north western corner of Brooklyn, with the east river running along its western border and there’s only one other neighborhood to the north separating it from queens.
Williamsburg itself can be separated into a number of mini neighborhoods. The 40 or so blocks that make up North eastern Williamsburg, they house a long running Italian community. South eastern Williamsburg this is largely made up of Puerto Rican and Dominican families, and this community also continues east, all the way to the east river, filling in an additional 30 blocks between Grand street and Broadway. When I talk about Broadway here I’m talking about the Broadway in Brooklyn, not the famous Manhattan Broadway with all the musicals and strip clubs and shit. Below broadway, in South western Williamsburg we have the largest Hasidic Jewish community in our country. They have their own grocery stores and hospitals and clothing stores and their own police force.
One time my friend’s apartment was robbed in this Hasidic neighborhood and he soon found himself in an SUV navigated by men in Hasidic garb with shotguns. These men chain smoked cigarettes and frantically cruised around the neighborhood with like a Kojak light on the roof of their car trying to find the culprits. Ultimately they were successful but that’s another story
Aaaaand, this all brings us back to north western Williamsburg, my williamsburg. These 50 or so blocks running along the east river were the industrial section of Williamsburg where, at one time, most of the people who lived in these other sections of the neighborhood came to work. As many of these factories closed through the 70s, 80s, and 90s, the buildings were being turned into studios and lofts and art galleries and this is where the Williamsburg art scene began.
All of this is miraculously close to Manhattan. If you take the L subway line one stop from the east village you will end up on the north side of williamsburg and if you take the JMZ train one stop from the lower east side, or you walk over the williamsburg bridge, you will arrive in the south side of williamsburg.
Now the south side by the 70s, was considered one of, if not the most dangerous neighborhood in New York City. And maybe this is what kept Williamsburg unchanged for so many years as Manhattanites where flooding over the bridges into lower Brooklyn. Into Cobble hill and Boerum hill and park slope.
But certainly, by the time I showed up in 2003, the north side of williamsburg was no longer a hidden place. Although it was still a pretty quiet neighborhood.
Loitering outside, in a central location, this has been my favorite hobby since middle school. In Vermont me and the outcasts I knew, we spent our time in a parking lot downtown named Harmony parking lot. We’d be out there all summer and straight through the super brutal Vermont winters.
Once I moved to Boston I found myself loitering with the other punks in Harvard Square and then, later, sitting around with the bike messengers on a slab of concrete near the corner of Newbury street and Massachusetts Ave. These two places represented the busiest pedestrian intersections in Boston so that’s where we spent our time. We wanted to be in the action.
Now Williamsburg in 2003. Even when compared to the quaint Vermont parking lot, Williamsburg at this time didn’t look like much, at least if your main goal was people watching. You’d see people getting off the subway to head home after work and occasionally there was someone actually walking to a job in the neighborhood but the streets were pretty quiet for New York standards. But, of course, I had to loiter outside, because that is what I do for fun, and in order to do that, I had to pick a place to sit.
At this time there was no notable main hub of activity in north Williamsburg. Like I said, to see the most possible people the only thing you could really do was catch them getting off the subway and the L train drops you off on the corner of north 7th street and Bedford Ave. Bedford is the long running main thoroughfare of industrial Williamsburg. So what I needed was a place to sit on bedford near the train stop.
There was, and still is, a lone stoop on Bedford between north 7th and north 8th street which would have been perfect but the people who lived there, they were quick to yell at anyone who took a seat on their stoop so that wasn’t going to work.
Between north 8th and north 9th there are almost a dozen stoops attached to brownstones along the eastern side of Bedford. I tried these out for a little while but the number of people passing by was low, even for quiet Williamsburg standards. Everyone who was exiting the train seemed to be walking south. And it’s true that there was a smaller number of businesses above north 8th street. You had two bars, one coffee shop, a hardware store, and a Polish diner. Meanwhile, Bedford below north 8th street you had two bars, one Polish restaurant, one Mexican restaurant, a pizza place, a coffee shop, a bookstore, a record store, a great video rental shop, a salvation army, a pharmacy and a bagel store. But the stoops in this direction were limited. There were only three. They were right next to each other on the block between north 5th and north 6th street and, like Goldilocks I had to try them all.
207 bedford was too skinny. If someone wanted to enter or exit the building you had to leave the stoop and walk down to the sidewalk to let them by. The stoop at 203 bedford was beautiful. It had smooth wide steps. But there were a bunch of people living in that building and, while they didn’t verbally kick me off the stoop there was regular sour looks when they were coming and going. So this left 201 bedford and this became my home away from home.
The stoop was tiny. It was only 4 steps tall. The railings were rusted and the cement that made up the steps was either so old or so poorly constructed that rain had eaten away large chunks. The stairs lead to a Hasidic real estate office and these Jewish men who worked there, they wanted nothing to do with me. They didn’t say hello. They didn’t say get off my stoop. They didn’t even look at me when they entered and exited the building. And this relationship worked just fine for me.
If I am any authority on williamsburg at all it is for one reason and one reason only. I spent ten years sitting on this stoop. Every day. For hours at a time. It is safe to say that I have never felt closer to any other location in my entire life.
Now I was living in my brother’s world. I was hanging with the friends he introduced me to. Going to shows and parties that my brother knew about, which were all based in the Brooklyn art scene and, in many ways they were centered around one man Todd Patrick, or as he was more commonly known Todd P.
At this time there was an explosion of DIY culture in America. The kids who had been raised on grunge music were becoming adults and grunge had an open reverie for punk and it’s DIY teachings. This was escalated in the mid 90s when punk bands like Green Day and Rancid became mainstream music, they were selling multi platinum albums, and while it’s certainly not true of every Green Day fan, enough of them took the time look into more authentic punk culture and learn that they themselves could start their own band, or own their own record label, or book shows in their hometowns, and eventually they could move to the big cities and join other people who were doing the same shit.
In 2003 Brooklyn had a strong community of people making high energy, danceable art rock and Todd P was a show organizer and promoter who took it upon himself to find places for these bands to play. This was lofts and warehouses and factories, closed factories but sometimes also like working factories that, for some reason, let a bunch of highly energetic weirdos play music in some dangerous room they weren’t using.
I don’t know what Todd P’s system was. Maybe he just literally asked every person he came into contact with if they would host a show. Every week there was a new location. And these shows would be packed with sweaty people bouncing off each other, dancing and going crazy to the music.
It wasn’t necessarily a safe place, not that it was violent, but the kind of excitement we were having could only take place in an unstable environment. Shit would get broken, and light fixtures would get ripped out of the ceiling, and people would get trampled in the audience, and walls would get spray painted when they definitely should not have but, no matter how bad the audience fucked up, Todd P always found a new venue for everyone to perform in.
This scene was not new to me. In Boston we were putting on similar types of shows in people’s basements or in VFW halls. But it was smaller. Brooklyn had hundreds of places to play and a seemingly endless supply of energetic twenty somethings ready to come out for every event.
This isn’t to say that everyone in Williamsburg was in their twenties, by any means. My brother’s crew of friends, they were a new generation arriving in this neighborhood with a whole new way of doing things.
The Williamsburg artists of the 80s and 90s were still around. They still owned loft, still owned galleries. Still had parties but it was a different aesthetic.
Like, when I think of the Brooklyn artist that came before me I’m picturing, large sculptures made out of old rusty scrap metal. Or dolls heads nailed on to things. Experimental theater. If you went to the amazing, long running parties that took place in Williamsburg at Rubulad, you’re going to see clowns. Not like clown toys but like full on clown people. And circus performers. There’d be bands and then performance art pieces and then a puppet show and the only thing I can kind of compare it to now is like a burning man vibe or something. And it was really fun. I’m not putting it down. But this was different than the shows and the scene that me and my friends were creating.
For better or worse, my generation had a real urgency. Prices were going up. I hear about these times when you could live in New York on nothing, you know just scrape by, but that was gone. And not just in New York City but everywhere. By 2003 I had traveled around the united states a few times and, everywhere I went, they seemed to tell me that I had just missed the carefree days, you know, rents were going up.
A part of this change, I think, goes back to the rise of DIY culture at the turn of the century and the invention of social media. The number of people who wanted to be artists was ballooning. So the number of people that weren’t looking for high paying jobs and instead wanted to live in a cheap neighborhood and focus on art, the number of those people was increasing. And, as a result, the greater number of people looking for cheap apartments was pushing up the prices of cheap apartments everywhere. You could still live cheap but you were going to have like 10 roommates and that’s how I ended up living in a pantry. Or on a little bed at the foot a Anita’s bed.
I’m not even complaining about this. I’m just saying it happened. I want more artists. I want everyone to be a freak. That’s the only people I like. And I love people. and I want to be surrounded by them. Tons of them. and I want them to all be weirdos. And that’s exactly what was happening in williamsburg
But these higher prices and smaller spaces were something you could feel at the shows we were doing. The urgency to get out there. High speed chaos. You know, you couldn’t take your time and lounge around because you couldn’t afford to, financially, and maybe that’s why audience members had a crash and burn attitude.
At the same time you could see the reverse of this by going to ABC No Rio in the lower east side. ABC no Rio was a long running collective of punks putting on shows and trying to build a conscious community of respect and trust. Then you’d bike back over the bridge to Brooklyn, pop into a show in someone’s loft, someone’s home, and see a person pissing on the floor in the corner of the living room because the bathroom line was too long. People were filthy in Brooklyn. The danger was exciting. Maybe that’s why Todd P had to find so many venues. And that’s why we were lucky that Brooklyn had so many empty factories.
Certainly not all the factories in Williamsburg were closed. Some were running as they had been for 50 years. Many of them had changed hands and now instead of making something, they had become storage spaces or warehouses for businesses. But this was a time when many people who owned these buildings didn’t know what to do with them. Rents were going up. They saw that the buildings were going to be worth something big in the future but they weren’t selling them yet and, in the meantime, random things were going in.
Practice spaces. Because the living quarters in New York City are so tight you rarely have a situation where musicians can practice in their own home without the neighbors calling the cops on them. So bands rent practice spaces. These are small, hopefully somewhat soundproofed rooms in a building with a shit load of small rooms and usually one shared bathroom. The rooms are a few hundreds dollars a month and each practice space is usually shared by a number of bands. You can leave all your equipment there and hope no one breaks in and steals everything or that the building floods which has happened to a number of bands I know.
In 2003 there were enough bands in Brooklyn that these practice spaces were everywhere. Each block in Williamsburg had like two fucking buildings full of them. There wasn’t a clothing store or a movie theater or a fast food restaurant in industrial Williamsburg but there were like 1000 practice rooms.
Still, even with all these rooms for bands there wasn’t a lot of spaces or businesses in the neighborhood that catered to this young artist crowd. Williamsburg was a place where people lived but everyone went to work in Manhattan. Even retail and service industry jobs in Williamsburg were slim. There were bars like Turkeys nest, and Rosemary’s, and the Charleston but they’d been around for 50 plus years and the bartenders were more likely to be in their sixties than in their twenties.
The big news when I arrived in williamsburg was the opening of a massive Thai food restaurant in one of these factory buildings on North 7th street. The place was named Planet Thai and it had a small boat suspended from the ceiling that dripped water into a pool in the middle of the room and no one could believe something like this existed in Williamsburg. It seemed like a crazy novelty at the time.
Now, a block away, north 6th street was kind of a secondary thoroughfare for industrial Williamsburg. You had Sweetwater, which was a dive bar where the skaters hung out, then there was Galapagos, which was an art and performance space that had been around since the mid 90s, and then at the end of north 6th street there was a small venue that was simply named North six.
About the only other thing you could do in the north side of the neighborhood was go to Beacon’s closet which was a warehouse sized used clothing store on north 11th street. Beacon’s had been around since the mid 90s in a smaller location but… So I’d be sitting on the stoop. This seemed to happen regularly. I’d be sitting on the stoop in the middle of the afternoon and a group of tourists would come up to me and say they came to Williamsburg because everyone said it was cool and they’d ask me what they should do, what they should see, and I’d tell them that if they’d already walked up bedford and seen the 4 old man bars, two polish restaurants, two coffee shops and the book store that they had pretty much already done it all. But then I’d be like, actually go walk to north 11th street and stop in beacon’s closet. It’s a big ass vintage clothing store. And later I’d see the same tourists walking around with the pink plastic bag that beacon’s put your shit in after you bought it and the tourists still look kind of lost but at least they were able to come to williamsburg and buy something.
Okay. Let’s talk buildings. The Williamsburg bridge was completed in 1903. This connected Brooklyn to the lower east side and it allowed thousands of immigrants to move out of the overcrowded manhattan tenements and begin living in some soon to be overcrowded Brooklyn tenements. As a result of the completion of this bridge, most of the buildings in Williamsburg were built around the same time so, by the time I arrived, they were all just about 100 years old. It’s interesting to me that the second major influx of people, and second wave of williamsburg construction, came almost exactly 100 years after the first. Its just another coincidental round number in this world.
In any case, all of the buildings in williamsburg were made of brick. The brick factory buildings were usually three to six stories tall while the brick tenement buildings were 3 to 4 stories tall, shorter than your average manhattan tenement.
At some point in time, a lot of people in the Italian section covered the outside of their brick buildings in like vinyl siding, I don’t know why, I guess that was the style for a time. It’s still just a normal brick building underneath. Meanwhile, on the south side, most of the buildings have left the bricks exposed.
I mentioned there were a few brownstones between north 8th and north 9th streets but this was not the standard williamsburg residential building. Mostly what you had were simple row houses. No stoops. Ahhh they were always intended to be apartments, not single family houses, and the apartments were always going to be for the poor workers of these factories. Of course the construction of the apartment buildings reflected this. The walls were thin. You know, you could hear your neighbor talking through the wall. the windows were drafty. and 100 years of existence had not been kind to these buildings so the floors and doorways were now slanted and each building had it’s own unique set of problems some of which I will describe when I start living in williamsburg, but that’s not for a few years to come. No, by the beginning of 2004 I was heading in a different direction. I packed up my little bed, left Anita’s room, and moved into the Seigel street lofts in Bushwick.
If you take the L train from Manhattan and continue past Bedford the train then stops in the Italian neighborhood and then the Puerto Rican neighborhood and then around the projects, and then, five stops after bedford, you arrive at another industrial section of Brooklyn at the end of the Newtown creek. This is Bushwick.
If Williamsburg was slow paced in 2004, it still looked like times square compared to the Morgan stop in Bushwick. When I arrived there were already four large factories that had been turned into residential lofts but there was almost no businesses catering to this crowd. We had one bodega, one coffee shop, and a diner named Life Cafe. Other than that, most of the factories out there were still working. The Boar’s head deli meat factory is right there. Ahhh, there was an Arizona Ice Tea warehouse. Also, the place where the dump trucks dump their trash at the end of the night is right at the end of the Newtown creek. So, a couple blocks from my loft is where they loaded the city’s trash onto barges and floated it away.
When I moved in the loft had already been built out by a couple friends of mine and it was totally fucked. None of the rooms had sound insulation. None of the rooms had doors! Their was no place to install an air conditioner in the summer and the heat hardly worked in the winter. A band was always practicing at full volume in the loft next door to ours and the one wall of our apartment that had windows was absolutely covered in black mold. The ceiling in my room was just over 4 feet tall and I was paying 250 dollars a month.
If you look at a movie like Scorsese’s After Hours, which came out in 85, you see artists in these beautiful Soho lofts with big arching windows and elaborate tin exteriors. By the 2000s this is not what was happening. I had friends that were living in an old car repair shop with permanent oil stains on the ground. I had friends that lived above an active loading dock where mac trucks ran continuously and poisoned the air. You were lucky to have a window. You were lucky to have heat. I didn’t know anyone who had a loft with even one single fucking room that you could fart in without every one of your roommates hearing you.
So I sat on the stoop. I slept in the loft and the moment I woke up I rode my bicycle to bedford and sat on the stoop. All day. That was my living room. It had about as much privacy as my loft did. I’d people watch all day and, even though there were far fewer people walking around then there were in Manhattan, the quality of weirdo was higher. Everyone who passed me in williamsburg was someone I knew I wanted to be friends with.
Of course, now that I’m paying that whopping 250 dollars a month in rent my savings quickly ran out so it was time to find a job. In Boston I had been working at a coffee shop so I cruised to every coffee place in Manhattan and dropped off a resume but I didn’t have any luck. I tried some juice places and then someone I knew took me to like a high end clothing store where if you worked there you got a commission but, again, no one wanted me. Later I’m back in brooklyn and I’m sitting on the stoop and someone points out that they had just opened an American Apparel on north 6th street, a block and a half from bedford. This was a big deal. People were not happy about it. Not only did industrial williamsburg have no major chain stores, no dunking donuts, no Macdonald’s, but also, as best as I know it didn’t have a single business that even had a second location. Everything was a completely local business. But American apparel was about to break this. Of course, they advertised themselves as like an alternative business, with a whole different corporate structure, or whatever, but the local’s didn’t buy this. But, all the same, American apparel would hire anybody. They were opening about a store a week in New York City and they needed all the employee’s that they could get so I soon found myself working the floor three days a week at williamsburg’s first chain store.
Humorously, this became another main stop for confused tourists. American apparel was well lit, it looked like it belonged in Soho, it was open to midnight. So tourists were drawn in, aaand, they’d get all excited that there was going to be more shopping in williamsburg. Then when they asked me what else they could do I’d tell them the exact same thing I told them before. Walk over the north 11th street and check out the only other store in town, Beacon's closet.
American apparel was good because everyone quit all the time, it was a huge turnover rate and, you know, I was new to the city and I was trying to meet everyone I could so every week there was some new employee that might become my friend. I was still hanging with my brother’s friends most nights but there was something in my social world that I was missing. To explain this I have to go back to Boston.
Like I mentioned before, the DIY punk and art scenes were not new to me. Since the mid 90s I had been putting on my own shows or going to see bands play all over New England. In Boston we had basement shows and house parties and we had a strong social community for weirdos by weirdos but, around the turn of the century, another element was added.
Gibby Miller, who I was familiar with as the singer of the Boston punk band the Trouble, he started an early, early social media site named Make out Club. Certainly, before this, outcasts were already using the internet to meet other outcasts, usually on message boards but Gibby’s website added profile pictures and bios, it added likes and dislikes and other shit like that years before other social media sites existed and it was gaining popularity.
I am not now, and never have been, much of an internet guy but the world of this website became important to me in 2001 when Gibby started throwing a weekly dance party in Boston where all of these people who knew each other from the internet could come meet up in real life. Gibby named this party Start.
At this same time, Electroclash had arrived in America and New York was building a scene around this. Disco back beats were showing up in indie songs as well as more sexual lyrics. Sometimes subversively sexual like Le Tigre but then with someone like fucking Peaches it was just overtly sexual. This was absolutely a new sexual awakening for my generation of outcasts.
Up to this point, not only had my punk and indie community not embraced sexuality, they were frightened of it. or they shunned it. To say you were asexual at this time was something to be proud of. You were a hero for escaping sexuality, whether you were lying about actually feeling this way or not.
You have to understand, if you found yourself in our culture it was probably because you hated or were bullied by masculinity, toxic masculinity or otherwise. That’s a lot of what being a nerd is, which at it’s core is what we all were. And being horny was associated with this masculinity. But, with the rise of things like electroclash, that idea was changing.
So, when Gibby started Start. This was going to be a weekly club night, with sexuality, that was full of people who were afraid of this macho energy. A horny little club night for losers and nerds. And this idea was very exciting to me who was someone that had come out of the indie scene basically terrified of sex.
When I moved out of Boston I was looking for another city that embraced this new movement. First I went to Portland Oregon but the only place there that you could find sexuality mixed with outsiderness was at the gay club, which I would go to, but there was nothing yet like this for straight people.
In other towns you could find a goth night or an 80s night which almost had this dynamic. There would be a mix of normal people who just dressed up wildly for the night mixed in with actual full time weirdos and everyone would be dancing and sometimes hooking up but this whole party was almost a novelty. Also, looking back it’s crazy to realize how popular 80s nights were in the year 2000. We were barely 10 years away from the 80s themselves, but I think the sexuality had something to do with the popularity. Basically gays and goths were way ahead of us indie kids when It came to club nights.
So I arrive in Brooklyn but the williamsburg art scene that my brother introduced me to, they did not embrace this sexuality, I would say they even had an animosity toward the people that were involved in this new indie club scene.
Williamsburg had been a home for Electroclash, specifically the club Luxx, and I had gone to a few dance punk shows at Luxx before it shut down but, by 2004, the electroclash scene had basically dried up and it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for anyway.
Going all the way back to 2001, people from New York City had regularly driven to Boston just to attend Start so I knew the people I was looking for were around, I just needed to find them AND I was going to keep going to the diy punk shows as well because I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I-wanted to-swing both-ways.
Things in New York started coming together for me when I met Lauren Brown, a born and raised New Yorker who was living in williamsburg and working at Reel Life which was a terrific video store on the same block as my stoop. In fact, Lauren and I had already met once before in Boston outside of Start when she ran up to me and started hitting me. Not hitting on me, hitting me. Lauren and some of her friends had driven from new York to Boston just for the night and the two of us had shown up wearing almost the same jacket, which was a thin black windbreaker that happened to be both of our favorite item of clothing. At the end of the night I was drunk enough that I accidentally exited the club wearing her jacket instead of my own. Lauren ran outside in a panic, saw me in her jacket and started slapping me. When I explained that this all was a mistake and that I didn’t want her jacket she then hugged me, basically with tears of relief that her jacket wasn’t gone, and then she started slapping me again while repeating over and over “you stupid boy.”
Lauren had a lot of energy, she loved drinking, she loved going out, she knew about the art scene and the punk scene and I started hanging with her in Brooklyn every day. She immediately became my closest friend.
During one of our first day’s together Lauren brought me to her friend’s apartment where I met Stefan Neufeld and Pete Elwell. These guys were throwing a party every Tuesday at a bar in Manhattan named happy endings. This was a breakthrough for me. Their party was called We Bite and, while it was smaller than Start, it was exactly what I was looking for. A room full of outcasts and nerds who had never been invited to a party growing up, who came up through the punk, or indie, or goth, or metal scene, and now they were crammed in a dark basement trying to figure out how to socialize, usually with the help of booze and cocaine. The DJs were playing the new dance punk or fucking disco indie songs mixed with Brit-pop and the darker side of 80s music. All these parties had a reverence for the 80s British club scene and the factory records crowd. A lot of the look and attitude was a throwback to that.
Something important I immediately started to pick out of the crowd at We Bite was the few people that I’d also seen at the Todd P shows as well. The people I would become closest with, the people that would become long term friends, they were always, like me, involved in both these worlds. I found the diy show scene and the indie club scene both so exciting and, if you weren't able to see this, then I don’t think you could truly understand me as a person at that time.
It is funny to me that punks get angry when their friends turn to indie and indie kids get angry when their friends turn into club kids. And everyone got fucking pissed at me when I gave up on all of this shit for a time and turned to hip hop. The people who are upset always say, “Oh you’re trying to be cool now.” But none of these people are cool. No one at the indie club night is cool. They are the exact same nervous nerd that was at the fucking punk show. These changes, trying these different identities, that’s just something else to do if you’re a weirdo. And indie kids still worship punk. and club kids still listen to indie. I don’t know.
I love the chameleons. I love the David Bowies. I love people that are always changing themselves and trying new things. But, you know, outcasts in general are a sensitive bunch and if you change anything in their world it’s pretty easy to frighten them. Maybe everyone is like this. I have no idea how normal people behave.
So, through Stefan’s Tuesday night party it was easy to make friends and learn about other indie club nights that were happening all over Manhattan and soon enough I was coming to Manhattan 7 nights a week. I’d sleep in Bushwick. Wake up and roll straight to williamsburg either to sit on the stoop all day or work at American Apparel. I’d hang at Lauren Brown’s apartment in the evening, pregame with some beers, and then we’d head over the bridge around midnight and stay out in Manhattan until the clubs closed at 4am. I’d do this every night of the week for the next couple years, unless Todd P had a really good show happening in Brooklyn.
Most of my nights in Manhattan were spent crossing the street between Max Fish and the Darkroom or in the basement of Lit lounge, or the cock or the hole or Beauty Bar or a dozen other places that became hot for a minute and then disappeared. But, while I was going to Misshapes or the Motherfucker parties which had enormous crowds, nothing was ever as fun or as important to me personally as Stefan’s party Tuesday nights at Happy Endings
Okay let’s explain the williamsburg bar scene in 2004, as seen through the eyes of a person in their early twenties. As I mentioned before, on Bedford you had the Turkey’s nest, the Charleston, and Rosemary’s, three bars that had each been around for over 50 years. The staff at these places was older, you know, the Charleston had a guy in his 70s bartending, and the clientele was a bit of everyone and the drinks were very reasonably priced. If you got a shot of whiskey at Turkey’s nest they’d pour you a triple. Also on Bedford you had Mugs which opened in 1992 and it was a hang for that early williamsburg artist crowd although by the time I got to williamsburg mugs seemed like a place where 40 year olds went to drink craft beer so I didn’t go much.
A block from Bedford, on Driggs, there was The Abbey which opened in the 90s as a gay bar but straight people just would not stop coming in so eventually it became a place for everyone. It was pretty filthy by the time I got there and had a good crowd of hard drinkers. I lived behind the Abbey for 5 years in a little house that you had to basically go through the Abbey to get to so I was very friendly with the drunks that hovered outside. In 2002, five years after the Abbey opened, the same owners would open another gay bar in williamsburg named Metropolitan and Metropolitan has successfully stayed a gay bar to this day.
Grand street is the dividing line between north and south williamsburg and bars and restaurants have lined this street going back to the beginning of the neighborhood. Iona opened on Grand in 2000 as a traditional pub. I don’t go there much. They think they are Scottish and they sell a lot of Guinness. This isn’t to say that I haven’t gotten black out drunk at Iona before but that is only because they opened earlier than all the other bars in the neighborhood.
In the early 2000s the owner of Beauty Bar, which is a fine bar in manhattan, they had a short lived spot on Grand street named the Tainted Lady which had velvet paintings of naked women adorning all of it’s walls.
Longtime williamsburg sculpture artist John Clement opened Clem’s in 2003. This is the place I have worked for the last decade and it has a huge place in my heart although, when I first moved to williamsburg Clem's had just opened and it was shinny and clean and it just looked too new to interest me so I didn’t go there for the first couple of years. Two doors down from Clem’s was Luxx, which was an art freak hangout and a show space that I mentioned before. Luxx closed in 2004 and was replaced by the filthy tater tote hole Trash Bar.
Stinger Bar was around for a couple years on Grand. Written on the wall below Stinger’s beer list was the words, get naked free shot. fuck on the bar, free bottle. If you know anything about me you know I love to get naked when I’m drunk so I was quick to take them up on the first offer but, before I even got to the bar in my birthday suit a bouncer grabbed me and dragged me outside. This was problematic because it was the middle of the fucking winter and all my clothing was in one of the booths. Just as I started to plead with the bouncer for my life the bartender popped out the door and directed the bouncer toward the get naked free shot sign. The bouncer looked at me, then looked at the sign and then looked at naked me and said, “I did not think they were serious.”
Elsewhere in the neighborhood you had Black Betty which opened in 99 and Zebulon which started in 2002. These were homes to live jazz and world music and performance art and the old guard williamsburg art scene with their large rusty metal sculptures and doll heads glued to things and circus people and all that shit. (I played a show in black Betty once where I bought matching sunglasses for all of our band members but the bar was so dark and the sunglasses were so dark that none of us could see our instruments and we all played like shit.)
Anyway, Pete’s candy store was also around at this time and kind of had that same old williamsburg artist vibe to me although I didn’t go their very much and may be way off about that. Pete’s candy store definitely has the smallest venue in Williamsburg, designed to look like an old train car. I’ve had some of my best intimate performances there.
In the Italian part of williamsburg, on Graham Avenue, you had two bars, Daddy’s and Sweet ups. But, these Italians were not going to let a bunch of art freaks smash up their neighborhood so, to drink out at these bars, you had to keep it at a residential volume, at least as you were coming and going. Apartment line every block in this part of the neighborhood and it wasn’t the same kind of lawlessness that took place in industrial williamsburg.
Back over near the McCarren park, which we’ll get to later, Enid’s opened in 99 and then Bar Matchless arrived across the street in 2003. When I moved to Brooklyn this was still a pretty sleepy area, a little ways from everything else, but a few years later these two bar’s proximity to each other will help make this a very hot corner.
Okay, on Kent, along the east river where still nothing was happening, Duffs opened in 2004. Duffs played all metal music all the time and… metalheads love brooklyn. I grew up in New England in an impressively large punk scene and, running parallel to us was an equally large hardcore scene. There was like one kid who was into metal that hung with us. It wasn’t until I got to williamsburg that I saw metal dudes everywhere. Adult metalheads. Enough metal heads to keep Duffs open to this day. Enough metalheads that another all metal bar opened a few years later in Greenpoint named Saint Vitus. Enough metalheads that, at one point, Matchless had an all metal karaoke night that was really popular. And… I understand that metal is huge, as a genre. Rednecks and townies and meatheads blast it in their trucks. Metal festivals draw enormous crowds. But with these Brooklyn metal ladies and gentlemen, I’m again really talking about a bunch of nerds and outcasts. I mean, in Williamsburg you could be a metal dude that rides a bicycle everywhere and still get laid you know. That’s my kind of metal head. I don’t give a fuck about metal music but I love weirdos of any variety and I’ve been happy to be surrounded by these black clad, long haired freaks for my entire time here in Brooklyn. But two metal bars. Who needs that? We fucking do I guess.
Okay, I’m not going to get into the bike messenger hangout East River Bar, where we once threw a 90s-wresting themed party complete with our own homemade wresting ring, and I’m not going to get into south williamsburg’s Don Pedro’s which was already kicking in the early 2000s but I wouldn’t find it for a few more years but there’s no way to explain this time in Williamsburg without talking about Union Pool.
Union Pool opened in 2000 right on the line between the Italian neighborhood and industrial williamsburg. In this location you could be as loud as you wanted because a big fucking highway runs right over you. Union Pool was the first bar I was taken to when I moved to Brooklyn.
Now, I should start off by saying, in my early 20s I was not a bar guy. Boston had been all house parties for me and New York was diy shows and Manhattan clubs. From what I could tell about bars, girls didn’t seem to hang out there. Plus, I couldn’t afford the drinks. I was working three days a week at American Apparel. I was making 200 dollars a week. I couldn’t afford shit. I never ever ever bought a drink at a club. My system for the clubs was to drink a number of 24 ounce cans of beer on the street before I went in or, if it was the winter, I’d figure out what beer they sold at the club and sneak a few of those in under my coat. But these bars in williamsburg were intimate, it was a small crowd of people, and if you snuck a beer in you were going to get caught for sure so I hardly went to bars at all.
But Union Pool, union pool was a place I would sometimes go to because, in the early aughts, it was the only bar in williamsburg that felt like it was catering to me in my early 20s. And there were occasionally girls there. Around this time someone wrote an article that claimed that people who went to union pool got laid. I don’t know if this was true before the article came out but it certainly would become true after.
The layout of Union pool was, and still is, basically just one large room with a bar against one wall and booths lining the other. Between these two things there is a decent amount of open space for dancing. Union Pool is now famous for its expansive backyard but, in 2004, the yard was occupied by the owners collection of vintage cars, most of which I don’t think even ran, and the patrons were only given like a 10 foot by 10 foot square out back for smoking cigarettes.
If you pass through the yard you can enter a second room that union pool uses as a medium sized venue although I don’t recall any bands playing back there in those early days. I played a show there at union pool in 2005 and we needed to bring our own PA because they didn’t have one at that time, I don’t know why, they already had a stage.
In any case, soon Union pool will be the most popular bar in the neighborhood. Soon I will live in an apartment where every one of my roommates but me works at Union pool. But in 2004 Union pool was a place that was mellow compared to the manhattan clubs but it did feel like something could happen to you there and it was the only spot in Williamsburg at that time where I didn’t feel like I was completely surrounded by people in their 30s and 40s.
Of course, all this was about to change. Williamsburg was about to be full of horny little indie club nights. Young bars were opening up in the neighborhood and hiring young bartenders. Williamsburg nightlife would soon take almost all my time away from manhattan. These changes were already taking place by the end of 2004. But, let’s take a break here and, when I come back with episode two we will jump into 2005 and circle back around to this williamsburg nightlife that was growing.