What brought so many metalheads to Brooklyn? Who’s painting all this graffiti? Are a dozen punk scenes too many punk scenes for one city? Why do people from Atlanta do so much cocaine?
What brought so many metalheads to Brooklyn? Who’s painting all this graffiti? Are a dozen punk scenes too many punk scenes for one city? Why do people from Atlanta do so much cocaine?
You’re listening to listening to Fletcher C Johnson. I’m Fletcher C Johnson.
Here we go with part 2 of the complete history of williamsburg. If you are playing this episode before listening to part 1 than you are doing it wrong. Please scroll back and start with the previous episode
Williamsburg 2005. Maybe I should start out by mentioning that I did not like dance punk, or disco indie, or dark 80s music or basically anything that was happening around me in Brooklyn. I loved the parties. I loved the energy. I loved the people. I did not care for the art itself. The aughts were all about dance everything and I can’t say that I particularly like dance music. Unless you count hip hop.
I had grown up with punk and then I spent a couple years obsessed with indie rock but, in 2001, I turned all my attention to music from the 60s and 70s and then blues and folk from the the 30s and 40s. This would take all my time and all my love for 8 years. That’s what I was into. I’d like to say for better or worse but I think it’s clearly for the worse to not be excited about, and involved in, what is already happening around you. But I couldn’t help it. I just liked what I liked. So, in 2005, I started a folk band with a couple of friends that I actually met through my brother. I sang and played guitar. J Perera sang and played banjo, and Ryan Crozier played lead guitar and mandolin and we were called Poor Boy Johnson and the Goddamn Rattlesnake.
Now folk music had had a resurgence at the beginning of the aughts, which I loved, but by 2005 this had fizzled out. I guess there were people around in folk bands that we occasionally played with but I had one big problem with this group of artists, they did not party and partying was all I wanted to do. This was, and still is, one of the most conflicting (contradictory) aspects of my life. I love soft music and I love writing but I love loud behavior and extremely social people. The art I’m into doesn’t match the personalities I’m into. Still, me and the other guys in the band could throw a pretty energetic folk show and we knew enough people around Brooklyn that Poor boy Johnson and the goddamn rattlesnake managed to play 53 shows that first year, all in New York, more than one show a week. We played art openings and loft parties and Todd P shows and a Super Bowl halftime show at someone’s apartment and it was fun and our friends knew us and they came out.
That same year, my little brother and his girlfriend also started a band in Brooklyn which they named Matt and Kim. They were obviously very involved in the Todd P world, I mean, they had already been fans and audience members of this scene for years and… they went on to be one of the most successful bands to ever come out of williamsburg. Which is so amazing that I basically can’t see them play anymore without crying at some point during their performance just because it’s so strange and wonderful how this little diy band became so loved.
But anyway, this first year both our bands were small and new, playing for our friends and sometimes playing together.
In 2004, an art collective was started on the south side of williamsburg named Glass house and we played there a few times. Again, doll heads everywhere and circus people walking around doing aerial ribbon performances and shit. Ahh. Doodles on the walls. All the furniture had clearly been found in the trash and dragged in from the street and then painted weird colors. The walls were built as poorly as the ones in the loft I was living in. It was everything I love about an art space.
By 2006 Glass house would move down to Kent avenue and become a full time venue named glass lands, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves.
In 2005 some artists leased a collapsing factory on Kent ave and brought it back to life with art studios, an art gallery, a surf shop, a venue, and of course more practice spaces but these new practice spaces were run by Todd P. The building was called Monster Island and the venue was named Secret project robot and I don’t know exactly what Todd P’s involvement was with the venue itself but this place felt like Todd had a home base for the first time. Not that this stopped him from booking shows all over town as well.
The venue was a cement warehouse basement. It was freezing in the winter. I have a vague memory of the most dangerous freestanding heater I’ve ever seen being just plopped down in the middle of the audience during a Kyp Malone show.
What I’ll never forget were the secret project robot bathrooms which were built on a ten foot by five foot platform on one side of the room. This platform was probably raised two feet off the ground and, for all I know, the shit and piss just fell into a bucket below this platform but maybe there was some kind of plumbing, I don’t know. What there definitely wasn’t was walls. Someone had closed off each stall only using shower curtains and, during one show, Kim and I saw a girl lose her balance while sitting on the toilet and come toppling out of one of the curtains with her pants down and fall two feet onto the cold cement floor while she was still peeing. This absolutely makes it on my list of top ten williamsburg moments. If you know Kim’s laugh, which sounds like a squeaky wheel, she was going off.
Okay, I have to admit, I’m giving Todd P a lot of credit for the brooklyn diy scene. Of course, there were a ton of people in williamsburg putting on shows.
If we were to zoom in on just two blocks next to williamsburg bridge, even in this tiny area you’d find three lofts that regularly did shows. Dead Herring and Woodser on south 5th street and, later, wild kingdom on south sixth. All three of these spaces were primarily just people’s homes, you know this is where they lived full time, but that didn’t stop them from regularly moving all their shit out of their living room to make space for bands to play, or other events to happen, and allowing a hundred people to invade their medium sized loft and party their dicks off. This kind of behavior was happening all over town
The sock hop at Dead herring was one of the best dance parties I ever went to in my life.
Well, on the stoop I now had competition. Some days I showed up to find a small group of people already sitting there which meant I now either had to sit on the skinny stoop or on a bench out front of a muffin shop that had just opened up on the corner of north 6th and bedford. A few years later these other stoop sitters would become my friends but there was a time when they were sworn enemies and I had to start waking up early on the weekend if I wanted to get my normal spot.
Across the street from the stoop had mostly been fully residential buildings when I started hanging there. There was one vintage furniture store named ugly luggage but that was about it but, in 2005 they started gutting the first floor of all these apartment buildings and turning them into store fronts. Two Thai food restaurants went in on that block. Suddenly there was four Thai restaurants in industrial Williamsburg alone. And there wasn’t any other food. I have no idea why williamsburg became Thai food central.
I’m going to spend a lot of time in this story talking about the coming and going of bars and how that influences the neighborhood. That’s what I know about. The same tale that I’m telling could definitely be told using the opening and closing of williamsburg restaurants but I don’t really know anything about that. I was always too broke to eat at a restaurant and I don’t know shit about food anyway.
My first seven years in Williamsburg I was vegetarian and I basically lived on 4 things. Pasta that I cooked at home. One dollar bean and cheese tacos from Loco Burrito which is the worst burrito place in the world but the only one in the neighborhood that had one dollar tacos. I’d eat dollar twenty-five hot and sour soup from the Chinese food restaurant across from Lauren Brown’s apartment. And finally I’d get Cheese sandwiches from Super deli grocery, which is a bodega on the corner of Nassau and Manhattan Avenue. Super deli grocery did not understand vegetarianism, although they didn’t oppose it, but they just couldn’t figure out why someone would want to eat a sandwich without meat on it so they only charged me a dollar fifty for my cheese sandwiches, which was loaded with cheese, and I went there every day, every single day.
Okay, a few bars that arrived in williamsburg in 2005. The Levee opened on the corner of north 3rd and berry in the former location of Kokie’s which was a legendary Puerto Rican bar in williamsburg but Kokie's was gone before I arrived so I’m not going to tell that story, you got to look it up yourself. If you were wondering it does involve a lot of cocaine. K O K I E S.
Then, this same year Legion opened in the Italian section of williamsburg and Spike hill opened on bedford. Spike hill was a bar, restaurant, and venue that had the feel of lower east side venues like the living room and pianos which are kind of uptight clubs that I never cared for.
Later that year, Bushwick country club opened on the east side of Grand street, which is basically the dividing line between the Italian section and the projects, and this bar began bridging the gap for me between Williamsburg and Bushwick.
Now I remember… Okay, although I’m going out 7 nights a week at this point and have this super sexy folk band, ahhh, I’m not having a lot of luck with the ladies yet. One night I convince a girl from Union pool to come to Bushwick country club with me. You know, it was a new bar, it was exotic, and this got us half way closer to my place, to my loft. I was broke, duh, and I had already spent most of my money at union pool but, by the time we got to bushwick country club, it was getting close to 4am, last call, and I thought I just had enough money to make it. I get a couple drinks and soon enough all the lights come up. The bouncer approaches us, looks at me and says, “you got to go,” and, just before I tell the girl how close I live, invite her over, the bouncer turns to her and says, “you can stay.” And she stays! And I have to walk my ass back to union pool to get my fucking bicycle to ride home by myself. Fuck my stupid fucking life.
In 2005 Savalas opens on Bedford, on the south side. This will market itself as a club and have fun parties, with dancing, and sex. But Savalas does not have the same indie club, brit-pop, dark 80s, indie disco dynamic that I was talking about before. It was not a home for boys who were terrified of gym class. It was not headquarters for girls who had never kissed anyone in their lives but were called a slut for coming to school in a plaid miniskirt. When I look for the seed of this new club scene in williamsburg, at least my generation’s version of it, two places come to mind.
On north 8th street there was an empty warehouse which hosted a number of shows in 2004. It called itself Volume. It was not up to code, I mean basically it was just an untouched, uncleaned warehouse, and the space was soon shut down by the city but the parties there were great and Volume put on shows for local acts as well as a few big bands who were basically excited about the idea of williamsburg.
By the end of 2004 this space was cleaned and built out to have multiple rooms existing on different levels of the warehouse as well as a large yard and was renamed Supreme trading. Nothing to do with the skateboard brand supreme. This was the first space in williamsburg I remember pulling in the same DJs that hosted the manhattan club nights I was going to every day.
Supreme Trading had art shows, bands and club nights and drew the full range of punks, artists, metal heads, skaters, and graffiti kids. I swear half the graffiti up in the neighborhood was being done by people I met who went to Pratt. It was all fucking art school students. Graffiti art was getting hot in the main steam culture at this time, maybe it still is, I don’t know, but, during these years, I was always going to some big art opening where the artist was wearing a mask to hide their fucking identity or whatever. But I like graffiti and that’s how everyone I know ended up becoming a graphic designer.
Anyway, about the same time that supreme trading arrived in williamsburg, the owner of Sweet ups opened a second bar on Union, four blocks down the street from Union pool. It was named Royal oak. Royal Oak had a large room in the front with the bar and some booths, a large room in the back for dancing and a little hidden room in the middle that was perfect for doing drugs and, for a time, this became the epicenter of the horny little indie club night in williamsburg.
It was divisive. You either loved royal oak or you hated it. People like my brother found this club vibe super uncomfortable. But for us who lived in Brooklyn but had been building this scene in Manhattan it was fun to bring it back home. Same shit. People dancing to Joy division. People going into the bathroom in 2s and 3s to do cocaine. People who had never been invited to a party before going too hard, overdoing it, and acting like a complete mess. It was fun. Plus, when the bars kicked you out at 4am it was now easy to move the party to someone’s loft because you were already in the neighborhood.
So now, on any given week, one of my nights was taken by my folk band playing a show somewhere, 4 to 5 nights were spent going to clubs in manhattan, and 1 to 2 nights were set aside for shows or clubs in williamsburg. But those numbers were about to flip. Williamsburg was ramping up. And, to accelerate this, at the end of 2005 Stefan died. His parents told us he had killed himself and then later I learned that that was a lie and that he had actually overdosed. But certainly this would be the beginning of the end of my Manhattan nightlife.
2006. Okay I can’t do 2006 yet because I’m skipping over too much shit. Because, you can’t talk about Williamsburg without talking about Vice. In 2001 vice magazine, they moved their headquarters from Canada to Williamsburg, with a short stop in Manhattan. This would be one of the first media companies to break ground in the williamsburg, setting up their office basically across the street from Beacon’s closet. That same year, issues of Vice magazine started appearing around Boston, where I lived at the time.
If you’ve listened to any other episodes of this podcast you’ve probably noticed that I have a fondness for people behaving badly. I had learned from the punks to destroy public and private property, consume different poisons, and basically to cause a disturbance any time I was bored so vice magazine appealed to me. It seemed like the same bored kids that I was hanging out with coming up with the same kind of idiotic behavior to amuse themselves.
By the time I moved to New York vice was regularly throwing events but, similar to everything else in 2003, most of these parties took place in Manhattan. But still, Vice media was a rapidly expanding business in Williamsburg that was hiring people in the twenties, and that just didn’t really exist here at the time. Everyone I knew still worked in Manhattan. So, along with the ever changing staff of American Apparel, vice served as a pipeline for me to meet new friends, it was new young people who had a reason to walk by the stoop because they were on their way to work. Ummm, as the years went on my friends and my generation of young people would take over running most of the content in the magazine and then later their videos and everything else that vice does.
This new generation of vice employees were people like me who read vice magazine when they were younger and then moved to New York and tried to live like vice magazine which was easy to do because those early articles were mostly about small groups of people hanging out and coming up with creative ways to be stupid which anyone can do anywhere and it’s always fun. You just need imagination and enough drugs or alcohol to justify your actions to yourself.
Vice became an ever present williamsburg institution, loved by some, hated by a lot, including the people that worked there. Everyone has loved to talk shit about vice for as long as I’ve been in Brooklyn but that doesn’t mean that the parties weren’t fun and that doesn't mean that they didn’t employ a lot of people even if they are notorious for paying their employees almost nothing.
In a 100 percent selfish way, Vice paying their employees so little was good for me because I was always broke and they were always broke so we were all on the same level.
Now, in the last ten years, all my friends that still work for vice stopped writing articles about being little shit heads and they stopped throwing constant parties and now they all make documentaries which I hear are pretty good but, if I’m being totally honest, I’ve basically have never watched a single documentary in my life so I don’t know.
When I first met my wife she worked for vice so I’ve got to thank them for that I guess.
Okay let’s jump back into 2006.
In 2006 a bar opens up across from my loft in Bushwick. So now on the Morgan stop we have a coffee shop, a bodega, a cafe, and a bar. The bar is named Kings country and I won’t go there that much because I’m still not really going to bars but I have one important memory about that bar in it’s first year.
I want to start off by saying that, by the time I got to New York in 2003, New York felt safe. Like, the gritty New York I heard about in stories, where you couldn’t look anyone in the eye without getting into a fight, I don’t know anything about that. In fact, by the turn of the century everywhere I went felt safe to me, coast to coast. In the same way that all the cheap housing disappeared before I got to every city, so did the crime as best I could tell.
In Boston I saw a lot of fights because their was a bunch of townies that hung out in the punk scene and they really liked to punch each other but, when I got to New York, there basically were no more townies. Williamsburg was a world of transplants. Everyone I met was from somewhere else. Actually, there were native new Yorkers in our scene but, like the rest us, they were pretty disconnected from their home, even if it was just a mile away. We were a group of people who didn’t like the world we grew up in and we ran away and tried to create something different and a part of this change was removing anyone from our social circle who wanted to be intimidating. In williamsburg, if you wanted to use physical intimidation as part of your personality we were going to cut you off. Which, living in Boston, I didn’t even know this was an option.
But also the city itself felt safe. Sure you’d see some prostitutes working the streets in williamsburg but the prostitutes never seemed dangerous to me. I mean, I could sit on the stoop in williamsburg 'til 4am and no one paid any attention to me.Everywhere I went in Manhattan, from 106th street down, seemed totally safe. I could walk from williamsburg to my loft in Bushwick, passing the projects, and no one fucked with me.
Now I’m from a very small town in Vermont and honestly I may just be too fucking naive to see the danger that is all around me but I never heard about anyone getting fucked with, hardly ever for such a big city, unless they were like buying drugs from someone who was really sketchy or something. But, if you didn't go looking for trouble, New York was pretty cool. Of course, in my 19 years in brooklyn I got mugged a couple times. But the muggings were pretty mellow.
So one night in 2006 I got home to my loft building around 2am. I was hammered. As I approached my building on my bicycle I saw a number of police officers kicking a hoard of people out the front door. And this was a pretty common sight. There were parties every weekend in the Seigel street lofts, in someone’s apartment or on our gigantic roof. And you could always just walk in to the party if you wanted, if you didn’t have anything else going on that night. But, if the party got too big, too loud, someone might call the cops and they’d stop by and clear everyone out.
One time me and my roommates threw a huge fucking party on our roof and some asshole walked around and cut the cables running to every satellite dish in the building. And everyone knew it was our loft that threw the party and we had to avoid angry neighbors in the halls for the next two fucking months.
But, in any case, on this night cops are ushering people out and I decide I am too wasted to deal with this. I lock up my bike and figure I’ll take a stroll around the block, see if the cops are gone when I get back. I pass the bodega, pass the closed coffee shop. turn a corner and I’m in front of what is now the famous Roberta’s pizza but, at this time it was nothing, just another abandoned warehouse. Well, I’m walking down this empty block, mid stride, when two men appear out of nowhere. They each grab one of my arms and lift me in the air but I am still moving. They are walking me down the block while holding me straight upright by both of my arms. Then a third man arrives, pats down my pockets and grabs my wallet.
That wallet, that fucking wallet, was still the first wallet I ever got, which was a velcro alien workshop wallet that my parents bought me when I was a kid. I didn’t have much in the wallet, just my drivers license, my debit card, and my social security card because no one ever told me that that wasn’t something you were supposed to carry around with you.
Eventually the guys put me down and walk away with my wallet and I’m just going. Awwwww. Come on guys… and eventually they take the cash out of the wallet, which was probably like 7 dollars, and then they throw the wallet behind them and I run over and grab it. Still got my drivers license, still got my debit card, still got my social security.
Now, I walk back to my building but the police are still at my front door and, even though I just got mugged, I still did not even think about interacting with them at all so I go into Kings County bar instead. Once inside, I tell them I have no money, I just got mugged, and everyone in the bar buys me beers and shots and I get even more fucked up, which I definitely didn’t need at this point and basically I come out ahead, I get way more than 7 dollars worth of booze. So, you see, it was a mellow mugging.
In 2006 I met a man named Joseph Plunket and he started introducing me to Atlanta people. Atlanta people Atlanta people. Every day there was another load of people arriving in williamsburg from Atlanta.
In the 90s Atlanta had a similar punk and hardcore scene to what I experienced in Boston. But, where all of us Bostonians transitioned into mods or indie rockers, these Atlanta folks just kept being punk. Adult punks. Which I do not approve of. But, in any case, they were piping these Atlantans up to brooklyn by the van load to join the already burgeoning Brooklyn power pop and garage rock scene.
These garage rock shows could in no way compete with the pure number of people going to the Todd P art rock, dance punk shows but there was still enough Brooklyn garage rock kids to fill a house party wall to wall or sell out a small venue, you know, it was a scene.
While this music was by no means similar to the folk stuff I was doing, I still really appreciated these power pop guys because they were obsessed with 70s music, just like I was. And, unlike the folk musicians I met, Atlanta people loved to party. Booze and cocaine. Just like the club scene.
Joseph Plunket had a country rock band named the Weight, that mostly consisted of people from Atlanta, and soon I joined their band as the lead guitarist. While the weight was clearly not a power pop band we still spent most of our time with this crowd of Atlanta people and they would become many of my closest friends. And… they started dragging me to Motor City and Mars bar which were some older rock dives in Manhattan.
The Weight scheduled our band practices on Mondays because, for well over a decade, every Monday was country night at Union pool, they had a DJ that played only country music, so that became another night of the week when I consistently wasn’t going to Manhattan.
The weight guys would tape notes to my stoop, to the rusty handrail of the stoop, to let me know if band practice was moved or canceled because, in 2006, I still didn’t own a cellphone. I didn’t have a cellphone or a computer. I didn’t have any money.
Ah, there is something about me that you may need to know to understand my financial situation. Since high school, I have never worked more than three days a week. Everything in my whole life is based on what I can do with the money I make in three days of work, which is usually not that much. I think I got 8 dollars an hour at American Apparel. Ah, you know, I kept my quality of life really shitty so I would have plenty of time to make art and be social. That’s what was important to me and still is. That’s still how I live.
But in 2006, I didn’t have a cell phone because I didn’t have any money. I didn’t have any money because I hardly ever worked. But, because I hardly ever worked, I had lots of time to sit on the stoop and hear about parties and, as a result, I didn’t need a cell phone. It was a vicious fucking circle.
Really in New York you don’t need money to have fun because there is more free events happening every day than one person could possibly go to if they tried and I did try. I tried to go to every one of them.
Okay, a couple of short lived bars popped up in 2006. Red and Black opened on North 5th street just off of Bedford. They basically tried to do what Royal Oak was doing, bring in some of the DJs that were doing nights in Manhattan, but it never caught on and the bar didn’t last long.
Umm, then another bar also opened on north 5th street where it concludes at Metropolitan Ave. This spot was named BQE bar and I believe it was just set up in the second floor of someone’s apartment and I can’t imagine they had a liquor license. And it disappeared just about as quickly as it arrived.
Okay. Fuck. McCarren park. I haven’t even talked about the park yet!
At the top of industrial williamsburg there is a pretty substantial 36 acre park. It has a running track, a soccer field, handball courts, tennis courts, dog parks for both large and small animals, a play ground, a bocce court, bbq pits, an enormous swimming pool, a tiny skate park, two soft ball fields, and a baseball diamond that I have only ever seen used for kickball. Although not all these things existed at the beginning of the aughts.
Since the day I moved to Brooklyn people have regularly used all of these courts, and fields, and diamonds for sports. There are definitely sports people playing sports in Williamsburg. Softball leagues run consistently through the spring, summer, and fall. There’s a kickball league, which is just as popular as soft ball, and also runs nearly year round. Ah, Mexican people are regularly playing soccer in that soccer field although I don’t know where any Mexican people live in large numbers in williamsburg or even really anywhere in New York City for that matter.
I don’t play sports. I don’t watch sports. I don’t care about sports. But there is a strip of grass when you enter Mccarren park from the south west corner, and on a nice summer day in the early slash mid 2000s artist and degenerates, people who seemed like they probably hadn’t seen the sun in years, they would lounge about on this strip of grass, in the shade of a few trees, and drink beer all day and people watch and be watched by other people.
McCarren park was interesting because, compared to New York’s many other parks, no one really hung out there. Families didn’t sit in the grass. College kids didn’t gather around blankets and throw frisbees. No one, who wasn’t actively playing a sport, hung out there. There were some old Polish drunks who loitered around the top of the park, on the Greenpoint edge. Uhh, they’d pass around bottles of vodka and eventually you’d see half a dozen of them sleeping in a pile, which we called a bum pile although I think most of these guys had homes they could go to if they wanted to.
Uhh, Puerto Rican and Dominican families did bbq near the playground in the North eastern corner of the park but the park was mostly empty. Still with all this grass available for sitting, our young art crowd really confined themselves to that one 500 foot strip of land. I think it just made it feel more exciting if we all sat together. Not that we all new each other or ever discussed this or anything. It just happened.
Our corner was next to the bar turkey’s nest which sold beers and margaritas in gigantic styrofoam cups that you could take to go. Of course, you didn’t need to go to turkey’s nest to drink alcohol in Mccarren park. Any can of beer poured into any cup would do or, if you wanted to risk it, you could just drink your beer from a brown paper bag.
The cops did cruise through every once in a while and hand out drinking tickets but they were pretty obvious because they drove their police cars right down the pedestrian walking path so to get caught you really had to not be paying attention or be a total drunken mess.
Now, I preferred the stoop. My back preferred the stoop. I am not flexible and I don’t last very long sitting on the ground but, during the summer, it was nice to take the 7 block walk from the stoop to the park. I’d cruise through, see if I knew anyone, and sit with whomever I found for a bit before meandering my way back to the street.
Later, when I had a cell phone, if someone wanted to direct me to exactly where they were sitting they usually used the vagina tree as a marker. Were they north of the vagina tree or south of the vagina tree. The vagina tree sat in the center of our 500 foot strip and it had a large laceration on it’s side that looked like, you guessed it, a spread vagina. It was a funny landmark resting comfortably in a park that seemed to belong to our small art community.
But, in 2006, there was about to be a lot more people coming to Mccarren every weekend.
Mccarren pool was an enormous, 55000 square foot rectangular swimming pool that was constructed in Mccarren park in 1935. It was one of eleven similar pools that opened in New York city that year. The pool, along with most of New York City, fell on hard times in the 70s and Mccarren pool was closed in the 1983 due to gang activity and basically because the Italians of North williamsburg didn’t want the Puerto Ricans of south williamsburg coming up to their side of the neighborhood.
The pool remained closed through the 90s and the aughts. It had a large brick building blocking you from entering the pool from the south side and then chain link fence surrounding the rest of this cracked, spray painted, overgrown empty gigantic rectangular hole.
The mccarren park playground butted up against one side of the chain link fence and, right where the playground and the pool meet, the city constructed this giant cement turtle, maybe 20 feet by 20 feet, for kids to play on. And, for me and my friends, this turtle was a great place to go at night and smoke weed and drink beer and basically sit on a giant fucking turtle and look at the stars or whatever. Ahh, from the turtle’s back you could easily hop over the fence and wander around in the empty pool which had a very post-apocalyptic feel to it. I mean it truly was a ruin.
Then, in 2005, an avant-garde dance company asked to put on a performance in the decaying mccarren pool and this put the idea in the heads of a small production company to begin doing concerts there. So, for the summers of 2006 through 2008, there were free concerts in Mccarren pool every Saturday afternoon and this brought out thousands of people every week. Thousands of people walking down bedford, stopping in these new bars and restaurants. Thousands of people passing the stoop. Thousands of people sitting in the park before and after the performances. Now, if you love people watching, which you know I do, this was an explosion.
The concerts themselves sounded like shit. I mean, they were in a giant cement box. But they got really big bands to play. From sonic youth to MGMT to the Beastie Boys, the no sleep til brooklyn Beastie Boys, who, in 2007, played their first ever brooklyn show in that pool.
The audience stood in the pool’s deep end and the band played up on the edge of the pool deck. There was no shade anywhere and New York is quite hot in the summer. For some reason the production company built a dodgeball course in the pool, I mean there was tons and tons of room no matter how many people came out, the pool is enormous. They also installed some slip and slides, which… I don’t approve of these games but it was fun watching drunk people fall on their ass while trying to navigate the wet cracked cement floor of mccarren pool. Still, in spite of these flaws, the shows were really fun and I basically went to every one of them. I’d wander back and forth between the heat of Mccarren pool and the shade of our little strip of the park, which was now overrun with music lovers.
Around this time I started doing my birthday in Mccarren park every year. My birthday is right in the middle of summer. So, on the day I would head straight to the park when I woke up and I would stay there until I was too fucked up to be there any more. That way, even without a phone, my friends knew where to find me and they could stop by at any time with whatever drugs or alcohol they had.
One year my brother brought a mini keg to Mccarren park for my birthday which we eventually carried over to royal oak. I guess, by that point, I was going to royal oak enough that they didn’t care if I brought my own keg into the bar. I basically ended up pouring it everywhere and made a really big fucking mess and then, when it was empty, we threw it out the door and rolled it down the street.
In the summer of 2006 Todd P put on an outdoor festival in a park at the foot of Rosevelt island, which is a weird island in the middle of the east river that no one ever goes to. It was a pretty big event, at least 30 bands played, but there was no power and no stages, everyone just played in this sprawling, overgrown field. Art rock bands and dance punk bands, they were forced to play acoustic sets or find weird workarounds. Ahh, I remember Matt and Kim performed with my brother playing a battery powered keyboard and Kim drumming on a cardboard box.
Later in 2006 Todd P started booking shows on the edge of greenpoint in a plywood shack named Uncle Pauly’s. This was near the city's sewage treatment plant. The sewage plant rises from the ground in these gigantic silver cones and looks like an enormous pair of iron tits. Todd had me on one of these shows and, when it started raining that night, I thought the whole plywood building was going to collapse. Water was coming in from everywhere.
Later, at the end of the night, as we dried off our equipment, a crew came in with tarps to cover this shack's poorly constructed windows. Then some more people arrived with this thick metal pole rising from like a strangely small stage. In New York City the strip clubs require the women to wear thongs if alcohol is being served, the strip clubs are topless only, but the following evening, this same plywood shack was hosting an illegal, fully nude event for the truckers that parked their vehicle in this otherwise desolate part of greenpoint. So we got a taste of what else was going on in this weird space that Todd P had found.
By 2006 there were a few more things opening in Bushwick. New spots run by young artists were popping up deeper into Brooklyn.
Actually, when I moved into the Seigel street loft in 2004 there was already a diy venue a couple blocks away named Asterisk. It had a pretty pro looking stage built in the front room of this gigantic loft on Johnson Avenue. Some of the Black label bike club guys lived there and they’d throw big parties as well as having semi-regular concerts, sometimes with notable bands.
Black label bike club is basically a bunch of dirty punk nerds who love bicycles and drinking. Ahh, I had first seen them in Minneapolis some years earlier but, by the time I got to Brooklyn they were all over the place. They’re probably most known for hosting a yearly event in New York named bike kill, during which people joust each other, like medieval horse jousting, but they do it while riding on top of six or seven foot tall bicycles, bikes built with two bike frames welded on top of each other and, you know, they do it right on the street so people get fucked up when they come falling off those tall bikes onto the pavement. Bike Kill still happens every year and it’s worth going to if you’ve never been.
By 2006, or I guess 2005 Goodbye Blue Monday had opened a little deeper into bushwick, past woodhull hospital, where you hope you never end up. I know more than one person who has checked themselves out of wood hull hospital, bleeding, and taken a cab to another hospital because the service at wood hull is so totally fucked. That’s why you don’t ever want to get hurt in Bushwick. Anyway, goodbye blue Monday opened on Broadway in bushwick and it was another classic, classic doll heads attached to rusty metal sculptures, circus people hub for avant-garde art and music.
I played an acoustic set there once and I brought my own smoke machine, which was just kind of a joke because the place was really small. I put the promoter in charge of the smoke and he would not stop gassing that thing during my set until I couldn’t see the audience and the audience couldn’t see me even though we were only three feet from one another and I was loving it. I went to some really weird parties at Goodbye blue Monday with like witches and ouija boards and… and once I went home from there with a girl who was dressed as a panda, complete with face paint, whole body panda. And she was dressed this way for no good reason, no reason I could ever figure out. Whatever happened to my sweet lady panda, I don't know.
During this time there were other scattered house shows creeping deeper into Brooklyn. They mostly seemed centered around Broadway, below the JMZ train. I remember seeing rock bands opening to Klezmer band in someone's demented looking apartment around there. But, in any case, Bushwick was about to break wide open and basically take the wind out of the sail’s of williamsburg. Ahh, The diy venue Silent Barn was just getting their start on the Bushwick/Ridgewood line. And, enormous changes were haunting the williamsburg waterfront, changes that were going to make leaving Williamsburg a necessity for most of the people who lived there.
Now, two big, big things happen for me in 2007. Number one. I start bartending at a bar in Greenpoint, a recently opened bar named Lulus. This is my first bartending gig and, in fact, this is the first bartending job for almost all of the employees of this bar. One of my many, many American Apparel coworkers, a guy named Tom O’Brien, he quit American Apparel to join the construction team building Lulus and somehow, when the construction was complete, he found himself managing the place. He had no management experience. At American Apparel, Tom stole clothing from our store daily and sold it to Beacon's closet for cigarette money. I don’t know what that says about his character but Tom soon became my closest friend. Anyway, Tom hires everyone he knows to work at Lulus, friends with bartending experience or not, and Lulus suddenly becomes a clubhouse for our group of 20 somethings. Lulus will close seven years later, over a million dollars in debt, which maybe shows what happens when you give a bunch of kids the keys to the castle but, in any case, we had our fun.
I’ve mentioned greenpoint before but maybe I should go into a little more detail. Greenpoint is the northernmost neighborhood of Brooklyn, with Williamsburg bordering it to the south and the inlet for the newtown creek to it’s north. It has long been a Polish neighborhood and is said to have the second largest concentration of Polish people in all of the United States. Much like the Italian people of North east williamsburg, these Polish families did not want a bunch of freaky artists coming in and setting up loud bars and venues all over their neighborhood so change to Greenpoint was a slower trickle. They already had their chain restaurants, their Starbucks and McDonalds that were on their main thoroughfares. They already had countless Polish restaurants and Polish clubs and small Polish bars and, for me, a guy always looking for the freaks, Greenpoint seemed like a pretty adult place where a few artists in their thirties and forties lived in apartments here and there while quietly going about their business. There were loft buildings skirting the edge of the neighborhood that housed a few of my friends but I didn’t go to greenpoint all that often considering how close it was.
Just like williamsburg, the east river runs along the west side of greenpoint and this was again a collection of mostly abandoned factory buildings, set up during a time when New York was still a thriving port city.
In Greenpoint there were a few of these abandoned factories that you could break into and run around. Strangely, one of these factories had a room with like tens of thousands of items of discarded clothing stacked in this enormous filthy pile. I have no idea how the clothing got there. Then, almost next door to the clothing pile factory was another factory containing the Autumn bowl. The autumn bowl was a decent sized skateboard ramp. Someone else would have to tell the story of how the autumn bowl came to exist because I have no idea, I don’t know how skaters could afford rent on such a huge building and I can’t imagine that the building was up to code in anyway but they threw shows and parties there from time to time and I always knew someone who was passing around a key to let people in to skate the bowl although I, myself, had quite skateboarding by that point in my life.
But, anyway, besides stopping by a few friends' lofts and occasionally breaking into these abandoned factories, Lulus gave me my first real reason to spend any time in greenpoint.
In 2007, Lulus only had two greenpoint bars as competition. Mark Bar which sat six blocks away on Manhattan Avenue and the pencil factory which sat catty corner to Lulus on Franklin street. I was 26 years old when I started working at Lulus and the rest of the staff was my age or younger. Both Mark bar and the pencil factory definitely catered to this older greenpoint artist crowd. Those bars seemed absolutely adult to me, which was the opposite of the behavior we displayed at Lulus. It was a fucking free for all in there.
Lulus was one large open room, with 30 foot tall ceilings, but it had three different levels you could hang out on. The bar was on the ground level, the large back area was five feet above that, and then there was a balcony to the right, probably 20 feet up, from which we rigged a 15 foot long beer bong that you could drink from while sitting at one of the bar stools down below.
Soon we built a stage in the back and started throwing shows there pretty regularly. The shows were always free, no cover charge. We’d pay the bands with money from the bar's register while also giving away all the drinks for free to our friends. This free show, free beer system really appealed to the punks so we ended up having a lot of punk shows.
Now, in New York, there is like a dozen different punk scenes all circling each other. New York is big enough that some of these punk circles don't even overlap. Like the punks playing at Lulus had no association with the Atlanta power pop adult punks. This was a different crew that, to the best of my knowledge, originated on Long Island in the 90s.
I had actually stumbled into their world in 2001 when I randomly ended up at a basement show on Long island at a spot simply named Ren's house. Ren put on shows in his parents basement and... the best part was, as the bands and audience members passed through the house to get down into the basement, Ren's grandmother hovered at the door telling everyone to go home, she was yelling "Get out of here. You're not allowed in my house," while Ren stood by her side ushering everyone through and asking them to ignore his grandmother.
I had known some of these long island punks when I lived in Boston. And, I actually lived with a few of them in the Seigel street lofts. And I had met them all over the country. I mean, there was an exchange between Brooklyn and Gainesville and Bloomington and Portland and Oakland and the punks moved all around and had a nationwide community. I associate this group with Long Island but really it was bigger than that. But, in any case, I was happy to get to know these particular punks better as they drank free beer and played free shows at Lulus.
There were, and I'm sure still are, many many many punk houses in Brooklyn. From the Chicken Hut in williamsburg to the Tompkins house and the Bent house in Bed Stuy. Tompkins did two floors of punk shows for years and years, allowing countless bands to destroy their living room and sleep on their couch.
When I moved to New York I had just reached a breaking point with punk. I kept demanding that punk give me eight years of my life back. I had completely burnt out while living in a punk house in Oakland, had a mental breakdown, couldn't stop crying every day, and I had so little understanding about what was happening to me, which was just extreme depression, but I didn't even know depression could fuck you up that much so I thought that I was going crazy, like I thought I would have to go live in an insane asylum or something, which made me even more depressed and even more scared and even more crazy. Anyway, I'm not going into that story now but this is just to say that the punks were around in Brooklyn, I knew peripherally what they were up to but you'd have to talk to someone else to get the whole story.
Anyway, (I’m going off the rails here.) Okay, let's go back. We haven’t even talked about my second big, big change of 2007.
Well, okay spoiler alert. Industrial Williamsburg is about to get leveled. All the factory buildings and warehouses will get demolished and turned into condos, we’ll get to that soon. But, Bedford Ave. Bedford and a few blocks of brownstones that are scattered throughout industrial williamsburg, they will remain largely the same.
Like I mentioned, the first floor apartments on bedford were renovated and turned into storefronts, and then, over time, most of these stores will morph from independently owned businesses to chain stores, but the buildings themselves will remain. If you walk down bedford today and look at the buildings on either side of the street from the second story up, they basically look the same as they did 50 or even 100 years ago. The salvation army on the corner of north 7th will be torn down in 2014 and turned into a large bank. Later one entire block between north 3rd and north 4th will be leveled and resurrected as a whole foods. But besides these two outliers, the buildings on Bedford, the buildings themselves, have not changed. That is every building except for 201 bedford, also known as my stoop.
One morning in 2007 I showed up to find a construction crew walking the guts of the building out the front door, down the stoop, and tossing them into a huge dumpster in the street. And no one told me. Granted, the Hasidic real estate agents and I never spoke to one another on any other occasion, but they did see me there literally every day and they couldn’t even say goodbye.
I told you at the beginning of this story that I spent ten years sitting on the stoop. What it didn’t mention was that for the first four years the stoop was at 201 Bedford and for the next six years the stoop moved to 151 bedford, between North 8th and north 9th street. And there were some advantages to this move.
In 2003 I had assessed that the majority of the foot traffic leaving the Bedford subway stop was traveling south, past the first stoop, but with the new popularity of mccarren park, this flow of traffic was turning north. Also, the new stoop was easily ten times the size of the original, it had plenty of room for passing friends to stop and sit with me for a while. Not to mention, the new stoop had a street lamp just at its base which allowed for better people watching after the sun went down.
The resident of 151 bedford was an elderly woman. She had the four story brownstone all to herself. She never had a single visitor that I ever saw although every day she left her home, walked to the corner store and returned with a black plastic bag full of something to cook. As she entered or exited the building I’d walk down to the sidewalk to give her room to pass and every time I did this she’d say, “don’t get up, I have plenty of room.” but I always got up and she always told me not to. She never complained about me and my friends, never asked us to leave and, as a favor, I always tried to keep the stoop tidy, free of leaves and trash. And this was our relationship.
As I mentioned, in 2006 the glass house art space moves onto Kent ave between south 1st and south second and becomes the Glasslands music venue. Then, by 2007 another independent show space opens up around the corner from Glasslands. It opens in a warehouse where people had been living and building guitar effects pedals for quite some time. They give the venue the same name as the pedals, death by audio. Both of these spaces are just down the street from secret project robot. So now williamsburg has three independent show venues within a couple blocks of each other and what emerges from this is an entire ecosystem. This is miraculous because, for this ecosystem to work you need a number of things to come together.
First you need enough small bands passing through town to fill all three venues most nights of the week. These are local or touring bands that are not making mainstream music. They are most likely not making enough money off of their music to survive and quite probably losing money every day by being a band. They are doing it because they love music and are willing to take artistic risks.
Second, to have this ecosystem, you need enough audience members who are interested in this alternative music music and willing to come to the shows, enough people paying money at the door to cover the venue’s rent, which is not cheap, and put money in the pockets of the bands. And this is really tough. These fucking artists and weirdos who are coming to the diy show are not paying 20 dollars to get in. Tickets are cheap. You try to charge 7 dollars at the door and everyone is freaking out, trying to give you five.
So, to make ends meet, the venue has to cut corners. They work with a small staff who are probably simultaneously doing sound, doing the door, bartending, and being the janitor. The bathrooms in the venues are always fucked up. Not usually as impressive as the secret project robot bathroom with the shower curtain walls but, most likely, the venue bathroom is out of toilet paper or soap or both. There are always holes punched through the bathroom walls for no good reason and these holes are filled with like wads of paper towels. Everything on stage is broken. The mic stands are duct taped together. The bars only sell the cheapest beer because that’s the only thing anyone buys anyway, and the beer is probably cooled using ice that has been purchased at the closest corner store.
Liquor licenses in New York are really expensive and impossible to get so most venues at least start with some kind of like prohibition era illegal setup until they inevitably get busted by the state liquor authority and then they try to figure out where to go from there.
The people who run these venues are doing god's work so independent artists have a place to exist. Without them this music would have nowhere to go. And it is a fucking thankless job. I can't even begin to tell you how many people hated Todd P.
But death by audio:
Once, a friend’s band was touring through town, playing at death by audio, and I stopped by before the show to hang with them. My friends weren’t answering their phones but I had been to some parties in the back loft, where the people who ran the venue lived, so I knew how to get back there. There were a couple locked doors that you needed to get through but, for some reason they were all open. I had just raced over from work and I was starving so I grabbed a banana on the way. When I opened the final door and entered the loft one of the people who lived there, and ran the venue, was on the other side and he just started screaming at me. What are you doing? How did you get back here? Who let you in? You can’t just walk into a person’s house without being invited. This was a dude who, over the years, had had too many mother fuckers up in his business and he’d had enough of it which I understood. I could see my friends kind of cowering behind him. But I was eating the banana. The whole time he was yelling at me I was eating the banana. And there’s only so much anger a person can exude at someone who is eating a banana. So eventually he let me in.
In 2010 another diy venue will join this same block, simply using its address as its name, 285 Kent. 4 diy venues surviving together in one little corner of industrial williamsburg, an ecosystem all of itself, although, by 2014 they will all be gone.
But back to 2007. 2007 also marks the year that the small independent venue north six was bought by the bowery ballroom people and renovated into a 650 person capacity theater renamed music hall of williamsburg.
I guess I’ll talk about a couple bars in the neighborhood that are hardly worth mentioning but here they are. By 2007 a guy named Rocky, who was an asshole, had opened three bars in williamsburg. Rockstar bar on Kent, Subway bar next to the Lorimer subway stop, and Sin lounge, spelled C Y N on bedford. These bars employed a few of the Atlanta people I knew and Rockstar bar is notable for housing the original Pies and Thighs location, Pies and thighs served food out of rock star bar's back alley for a couple of years, but overall Rocky's bars were dark and trashy in an uncomfortable way. Fights broke out regularly. There was always someone eying you and hoping you’d looked back at them in just the wrong way so they had an excuse to knock your teeth out. Rocky’s bars were as if you could turn GG Allen fans into a bar and I mean this only in the worst possible way, none of the fun stuff.
I think around this time K and M bar opened on Roebling which was a bar I liked. They struggled along for a number of years, employing some of my friends and occasionally having bands play on the floor in the rear of the bar. K and M was never a main haunt for me but there were good parties from time to time.
In 2013 K and M became a sports bar named Roebling sporting club which became really popular. I had seen a couple of other sports bars open and close in williamsburg leading up to 2013 but nobody could make one stick. Too many artists in the neighborhood, not enough jocks. No one wanted to go anywhere with TVs on the wall. Ahh, of course, that was about to change.
By 2007 Enids, which had started as a friendly neighborhood restaurant slash bar, had become a full on club on the weekends. Particularly saturday nights. I've heard this party referred to as skater night. I've heard it simply called hip hop night. I saw some old flyers that said ballers eve. I have no recollection of anyone using that name but I guess that’s what it was called. That’s a great name actually, but, whatever you called it, in 2007/2008 Enids had the best party on saturday nights. There was no way I was going to go to manhattan on a saturday anymore and miss what was happening right here at Enids, which was simply a large room, packed with people dancing and drinking.
So far in this story I don't know if I've placed enough importance on the skateboarders in New York. Along with the punks and the metalheads and the art kids, the graffiti writers and the indie club kids, skateboarders have a huge say in what's worth going to in New York. I don't think dimes square would have had this renaissance in the last few years if it wasn't for it's proximity to the LES skatepark. So, skateboarders were going to Enids in 2007, so everyone was going to Enids.
And this gave a big push for bar Matchless as well, which was right across the street. Ahh, if for no other reason than, Enids only had two bathrooms, which were always full of people doing cocaine, and, you know, you had to piss somewhere.
I mentioned this in my pleurisy story but once at Enids I saw a woman in high heels leaping from table to table with a full beer in her hand while everyone on the dance floor was cheering her on. At Enids you were always dancing with the restaurant tables awkwardly around you until the night went on and they slowly got bumped closer to the corners of the room.
Okay, I’ll close 2007 by saying that this was the year that the subway sandwich franchise put a store on bedford ave, right next to my original stoop actually. This was the first fast food chain to hit industrial williamsburg. It's strange that it was sandwiches because that was the one thing you could already get on every corner in williamsburg at the bodegas. At this time I was still religiously eating my dollar fifty cheese sandwiches from super deli on Nassau.
In, what I find to be a beautiful twist, this subway sandwich location would go out of business within a couple years. The condos hadn't been constructed yet and the locals weren't giving them enough business, which is great. I guess Subway was just a little too early for what was about to come.
But we’re going to have to get into all that next time, on the third and final installment of the complete history of williamsburg