Stealing drinks from expensive clubs. Smashing glasses in your favorite bar. Getting a gun pulled on you. Clubs that don’t open until 4am. Public parks that aren’t owned by the city. You heard the rise now watch the fall
Stealing drinks from expensive clubs. Smashing glasses in your favorite bar. Getting a gun pulled on you. Clubs that don’t open until 4am. Public parks that aren’t owned by the city. You heard the rise now watch the fall.
You’re listening to listening to Fletcher C Johnson. I’m Fletcher C Johnson.
This is part three of the complete history of williamsburg. If you are playing this episode before listening to parts 1 and 2 then you are doing it wrong. Please scroll back and start with those previous episodes
2008 finds me, for the first time, living and working in williamsburg. My brother and Kim decide I can not live in that fucked up loft anymore. My lungs had been destroyed by pleurisy and the fact that the loft had a full wall of black mold wasn't helping that problem. Matt and Kim have me move into their apartment, which is a 4th floor walk up on the corner of Grand street and Marcy, just about the geological center of williamsburg. I'm in the middle room of a railroad apartment which means that every time Matt or Kim want to go from the kitchen to their bedroom they have to walk straight through my tiny bedroom to get there, I have zero privacy, but, by this point, their band is doing pretty well so they are on tour almost six months out of the year. This means, for half of the year, I have a place to live all to myself, which is something I had never experienced before in my life. Then, for the six months out of the year when Matt and Kim are home I'd just go back to what I was doing when I lived in the loft. I head to the stoop right when I wake up and stay out until the bars close so that they too can largely have the place to themselves. It's a pretty nice trade off.
While this apartment is a definite step up from the Seigel street lofts, uhh it still has its problems. The heat again hardly works. This building has stream heat but the water in the radiators does not seem to make it to the fourth floor. Our neighbors across the hall are a Puerto Rican family that easily has ten people living in the same sized apartment that holds the three of us. They blast reggaeton day and night. This actually works out okay because my brother and I are both regularly recording music in our apartment, which the neighbors can definitely hear, but they never complain about. The real problem is the rats. Rats in the walls, rats in the halls, and lots of rats living in our drop ceiling. This might not have been so bad but the beds in both my room and my brother's room were lofted to increase space on the floor. They were lofted within two feet of the ceiling so the rats are running around just above us as we sleep. But, these problems aside, I am so happy to not be living in bushwick anymore. Although, humorously, this is the same year that Roberta's pizza opened a block away from the Seigel street lofts and began really reshaping that whole neighborhood.
Now, as far as working in williamsburg goes. The owner of Lulus was John McGillion. By 2008 John owned 9 bars in brooklyn, 8 in williamsburg and lulus in greenpoint. These included trash bar, and the abbey, and Alligator lounge which offered a free personal pizza with the purchase of a drink. John also owned the gay bars Metropolitan and Sugarland and was about to open Macri park which later would also become a gay bar. John McGillion's number one rule was, if business is bad turn it into a gay bar.
John himself was an Irishman in his 60s who only trusted Irish people. He'd hire random Irish guys to come in and fix plumbing and electric problems at his bars even if these people had no experience with these trades. John believed that Irish people could do anything. Which is possibly why he made my good friend Tom O'Brien manager of Lulus and let him run the place into the ground.
One day John calls me up and says “Fletcher you're working at the charleston now on tuesdays and Saturdays.” John McGillion had recently bought the charleston from an older man who had been running the bar himself for ages.
In fact, years earlier I had seen a band play at the charleston, on the floor in the back of the bar, and this same previous owner, who was probably in his 70s, he spent the band's entire set turning the bar's lights on and off and waving around a flashlight to put on a quote unquote light show for the performance. It. Was. Great.
The charleston had a completely different feel from Lulus. The bar is within 100 feet of the bedford subway stop so it had a lot of tourists stopping in. By this point, innumerable retail stores and restaurants were popping up all over williamsburg and bringing in floods of people who were all too happy to stop in at this conveniently located bar, so we were busy all the time. At Lulus you could go a whole shift with the only customers being like a couple of your friends. But still, mixed in with the charleston's tourists there were a bunch of neighborhood regulars as well.
After John McGillion bought the Charleston, he put my friend Sean Kraft in charge of booking shows in the basement. This was mostly punk and metal bands due to Sean's tastes and the fact that the basement in the charleston was disgusting. In fact the entire bar was, and probably still is, legally condemnable.
The charleston has been a bar dating back to before prohibition and the years of spilt beer have rotted it's insides. I mean, every year the bar failed its yearly health inspection and got shut down by the health department. There was just no way it could pass. It was too fucked up and disgusting. And, every year, John would force all us bartenders to spend a couple days hopelessly cleaning the interior of the bar while John himself greased the palms of some Irishman in the health department to get us open again. But these filthy conditions made perfect ambiance for yet another separate faction of brooklyn punks to play music downstairs and drink upstairs. And these regulars were happy to mingle with the tourists and start trouble and get too drunk with us bartenders and make a scene, all of us together right there on Bedford.
So for me, personally, this is peak williamsburg, this is the golden age. I'm living and working here. Lots of my friends work in the neighborhood. If I'm sitting on the stoop I'm bound to know someone who walks by every fifteen minutes or less. There's that block with all the diy show spaces as well as some nice independent art galleries in the neighborhood, cinders being my favorite. Nightlife in williamsburg is now every night although I'm still going to manhattan one or two nights a week. The park is constantly packed with degenerates and on saturdays in the summer they are still having those free shows in mccarren pool. In fact, the shows have gotten so popular by this point, and the headlining acts so big, that there is now sometimes a line stretching for blocks to get in but, conveniently, this same year Matt and Kim play one of the pool shows and, for every show after that one, I am able to use their artist pass to skip the line, and go back stage, and get free beer.
Not only can I say that 2008 was williamsburg's peak year, for me, I can also vividly remember the peak day, my ultimate williamsburg day.
On the 4th of July, New York City sets off fireworks from boats situated in a number of locations along the East river and one of the locations is just in front of williamsburg. Every year I would watch them set off this display from the roof of 151 Kent, on the corner of Kent and north 5th street.
Now, July 4th, 2008. I worked the day shift at Lulus in Greenpoint. After work I'm walking down Kent from it's northern most point on my way to my usual spot on north 5th. Remember Kent ave runs parallel to the east river right along the water so, of course, there's always other people throwing firework parties on independence day as well. But this year is different. Kent is all old factory buildings and warehouses that have now been converted into lofts and the first warehouse I pass is having an absolute blowout and someone I know is outside so I stop in to that party for a while before continuing my journey. But the next warehouse I get to is having an even bigger party, and there's even more people I know outside so I go have a couple drinks in there as well. I eventually make it back to the street but, guess what, the next warehouse I pass has like five lofts that have joined together to have the biggest fucking house party I've ever seen. I don't recognize anyone out front but no one is stopping me from entering and, sure enough, there's a bunch of people I know inside. This happens on every single block. And these lofts I'm going into are beautiful. Every one has been carefully constructed over many years by the artists that live there and each loft is unique and they have art hanging everywhere and you're passing from someone's art studio to their beautiful bedroom and then up onto their enormous roof which maybe has an elaborate roof garden. It is spectacular. I'm going from party to party and they are all so packed that it feels like every artist and weirdo and outcast in the whole world is partying on Kent Avenue this evening. I've never experienced anything else like it. I don't know if I ever even made it to my original destination.
On July 4th, 2008, it feels like all the stars have aligned in this magical place and that everyone is free and everyone is having the time of their lives. In my mind, williamsburg is unstoppable. What I don't realize is that I am at, basically, one enormous, neighborhood wide eviction party. The waterfront property is being bought up and soon will be converted into condos. Everyone is getting kicked out of their homes, and their homes are basically pieces of art themselves but they are about to be bulldozed.
It is not that they had to leave on July 5th or anything but they know that this is their final independence day in williamsburg and, because of their proximity to the fireworks, independence day is kind of Kent avenues big day. It's their final big day. So these are go for broke, tear the building down, eviction party ragers.
And that would have been it. I think williamsburg could have been gutted and overrun within a year or two but, also in 2008, williamsburg received the most unlikely of lifeline.
The great recession they call it. The financial crisis. Predatory banking practices left the exact people who were building these new condos with no money to work on them so construction was halted. Yes a lot of artists were removed from the neighborhood, which really hurt the community but it is nothing compared to what happens when you replace a loft with a thirty or forty story high-rise full of wealthy people. These legions of new people with large bank accounts are what really incentivize Starbucks to push out Verb cafe. And CVS to topple kings pharmacy. So, while the banks were getting their money back in order, Williamsburg had a few more years to play.
I'm going to mention a few more bars here because that's what I do.
In 2008, Galapagos music and art space closed on north 6th street and was replaced by Public Assembly. And public assembly did a pretty good job of keeping the Galapagos ascetic alive. You still had circus people. You still had burlesque. You still had performance art pieces mixed in with some rock bands. Although, Public assembly wasn't long for this world either and in 2014 the space became the bar Black Bear. Black Bear was a bar probably most famous for having a big skate ramp in their front room.
North 6th street had been the skateboarder hangout in the early aughts because of the bar Sweet Water, a place where Kim notoriously once pissed her pants while sitting on a bar stool and was then allowed to have another beer. But in 2003 or 4 Sweet water changed from a skater bar to an upscale restaurant while still retaining the same name. Similarly, although not totally comparable, after having a few good parties, black bear would disappear as well, having last less than two years.
In 2008 we saw the opening of another great punk bar, The second chance saloon, which opened on grand street. Ahh, grand street on the east side of williamsburg, across from Bushwick country club. In the next couple years a few more bars would open in this area and soon this would become another little center for nightlife bridging the gap between industrial williamsburg and bushwick.
So, by 2009 you really felt the scene spreading out. The art community of williamsburg was forced to flee to bushwick or bed stuy or Ridgewood queens and they were taking their bars and show spaces and restaurants with them.
Market hotel opened in Bushwick in 2008. This was another space that Todd P was involved in, an enormous show space five blocks down from goodbye blue Monday. Of course, within a year and a half Market hotel would be shut down by the fire inspectors and remain closed for half a decade. Maybe it was just too big to succeed on the diy level.
After the initial closing of Market Hotel I didn’t hear much from Todd P. Was it possible that he had finally burnt through every warehouse in town? I don’t know. In any case, there was a new generation of show promoters coming in to take his place.
The torch was almost handed off literally. Market Hotel was not physically built by Todd P. It was constructed by three brothers, three born and raised New Yorkers who had a falling out with Todd P early on in the life of Market Hotel. After separating from Todd, these brothers immediately started another diy show space in the southeastern corner of williamsburg, right on the bushwick line. They named this new venue after the recently closed Mets ballpark, they called it Shea Stadium. These three brothers, Zach, Ryan, and Alex, also had a band together named the so so glows. And I love these guys. I had known them all since they were teenagers. And they are a perfect example of people who were passionately involved in the diy community while also simultaneously being absolute animals in the club and nightlife scene.
I remember playing at Shea stadium once and, after my set, the Shea guys convinced me to leave my equipment in their venue and run off to Manhattan with them to go to the club Le Bain. Le Bain is this trashy, horny club on the top floor of the standard hotel which is pretty fun. Le Bain would sometimes have our friends DJ on the roof, I guess to gain some underground cred or something, although, on this particular night, no one we knew was DJing. Anyway, the Shea Stadium guys tell me, “we’re friends with the door guy. We can get right in. We’ve been going every day this week.” So I say okay. We show up and sure enough the door guy lets us straight up the elevator while dozens of other people are waiting on the street hoping to get inside.
When we get upstairs I say, “Alright guys. Thanks for having my band at your venue, thanks for getting me into this club. Let me buy you each a drink.” and they look at me like I’m crazy. “Buy a drink,” they say. “Do you know how much drinks here cost? We just steal them.” The three of them then proceeded to prowl around the room. They’d sneak up behind paying customers and grab their 10 dollar beers and 20 dollar cocktails off the tables beside them, then the Shea stadium boys walked away sipping on these drinks as if they had bought them themselves. And they had been doing this all week.
These are the kind of hustlers that ran the diy scene. Their band was on tour half of the year so they didn’t have homes. They were crashing on couches. Their venue was not up to fire code, had no liquor license yet Shea stadium remained open for eight years providing countless bands of all styles and all levels of popularity with a great place to play. You couldn’t run a club like that in New York city without having the same type of balls that it took to keep stealing drinks from the same trashy club night after night.
Where Shea opened, in the southeastern corner of williamsburg, this was another mostly untapped industrial area, again due to it's proximity to the Newtown creek. A year later a great punk bar and venue would join Shea, just down the street. This was another business owned and operated by young people who came from our small art community. The bar was called The Anchored Inn and the adjoining venue named the Acheron.
Meanwhile in the old industrial williamsburg a different kind of bar was showing up. Lucky Dog opened on bedford in 2009 and soon it's owners would open two more bars in the neighborhood, Skinny Dennis and rock a rolla. While these bars looked similar to the dive bars that currently existed in williamsburg, they had the same simple no nonsense layout, they had no TVs on the walls but instead nick knacks and photographs could be found behind the bar, they played rock music on the jukebox, they had beer and shot specials that lowered the prices of some drinks, but there was something funny about a bar coming into existence as a dive, fully formed, almost prefabricated.
I mentioned in the beginning of this piece that I moved to williamsburg the same year that the bar Clem's opened. In 2003 Clem's was new, and neat, and shinny. It looked so clean that I didn't even think about drinking there but it earned it's grime over the years and later became one of my favorite haunts. Similarly it took the Charleston almost 100 years to become an absolute filthy cesspool with punks puking in the basement. Now there were these new places being built but with the grime already intact, as if they'd come off a dive bar conveyor belt.
But did this matter? I mean, both Lucky dog and skinny Dennis started hiring all my friends as bartenders. Occasionally bands I knew performed at these locations, even if the bands were forced to play music that was more entertainment then art, you know, cover sets and what have you. But the real difference was with the clientele. Ad agencies were popping up all over williamsburg. Internet startups and smaller tech companies started taking over the warehouses that once housed a million practice spaces. And, from the get go, these new people gravitated to these new bars. They found a comfort in them that the older neighborhood dives couldn't provide. I don't know how they could tell the difference but they could. And, as one after another of the old bars began to be priced out of the neighborhood, these cookie cutter dive bars strived and survived.
This same year the small jazz, soul, and world music venue Black Betty would close after a rent dispute with their landlord and quickly be replaced by a bar named the commodore. Now here's where it gets tricky for someone like me because, like The Anchored inn, the commodore was owned by people from my generation of williamsburg, people from my friend group, and they were commandeering a space that was currently owned by artist from the generation before us. We're talking multi-generational, gentrifier on gentrifier crime here. Ahh, where black betty had middle eastern food the commodore now had burgers and chicken sandwiches. Where black betty had live world music the commodore now had DJs. And, again, these modifications were a huge hit with the new people moving into williamsburg. They did not have any interest in the circus people and the rusty metal sculptures and the way the previous generation had entertained the neighborhood.
Maybe the most striking change to the 2009 williamsburg bar scene came when the owners of Royal Oak and Savalas decided to open a club larger than anything they had done before. They found a massive space on south 4th, just around the corner from rockstar bar, and named this new venture the woods. The woods is a 300 capacity dance club shit show. I'll start by saying that, in concept, this is an idea that I love, I love big parties, but that collection of weirdos and outcasts that had found a community dancing to brit pop and joy division at royal oak, they did not stand a chance at The Woods. This club certainly did not have the art world cache of the motherfucker parties or even misshapes. As soon as it opened, the woods was overrun by these newly arriving tech bros and the bridge and tunnel club crowd. It shined its beacon and bros followed that light. Which is not to say that I didn't spend some nights there as a single man, in spite of this clientele. I mean, I've always been up for anything.
So this was a time when everyone wanted me to go to bushwick for this party or that party. My friends Andy and Ed had started a completely lawless venue in Bushwick named Bodega and they were having events four nights a week. The diy space Cheap Storage popped up in a loft on Wyckoff Avenue and began doing shows. So-quickly had the tide turned from everything, for me, being in williamsburg to the city spreading wider than ever before. But there was one party that was bringing my friends back to williamsburg, bringing them back long after the sun went down.
The Shank was an illegal after hours club that opened at 4 am and ran until well after daybreak. It happened once a week, late Saturday night or, more accurately, early sunday morning. There were DJs and bands and a full bar and, uniquely, it became a hit with everyone. The metalheads and the skaters and the graffiti kids were there. The bands from the Todd P scene were performing. The Atlanta power pop adult punks were there. Obviously the indie club kids were in heaven.
I was already bartending saturday nights so it was easy for me to jump on my bicycle and cruise over to the shank after my shift. Initially the party took place at an enormous warehouse on Bayard Street, not far from mccarren park. They had off duty cops checking IDs at the door and a huge balcony where you could look down on coked up zombies dancing and having a good time.
Some of my friends bartended these nights and the clubs policy, should it get raided, was for the bartenders to grab all the money as quickly as possible and walk out the door as if they were just another customer. And, of course, it did get raided, multiple times. (quiet) If there was one dead give away that something big was happening on this otherwise sleepy block it was the line of taxi cabs that stretched around the corner. Nothing else was going on between 4 and 8am so the taxi drivers quickly learned to camp out in front of the Shank and wait to take home people who had run out of drugs.
After getting raided a couple of times the Shank tried a new location just off of Union Ave in an old car repair shop. This space was smaller, but still fun and, what I remember the most about this location was the bathrooms. The repair shop was just a garage and, instead of having a wall between the inside and the street it just had a big metal roll down gate, so you could open the whole front if you wanted to. The entire floor sloped toward this gate. In lieu of having a bathroom with toilets, the people who ran the shank just crudely leaned a couple of large pieces of plywood against this gate and let people slip behind the plywood and piss right on the floor. Gravity then allowed the urine the flow under the gate and out onto the sidewalk and into the street. Of course, this location got busted as well and the entire shank adventure lasted less than a year.
Once I started working as a bartender this after hours culture became pretty familiar to me, but usually on a much smaller scale. Everyone knew a few bars, with coke head bartenders, that would roll down their own gates after 4am and let customers keep drinking until the sun came up.
Humorously, New York city allows corner stores to sell alcohol 24 hours a day, 7 days a week except for two hours between 4am and 6am sunday morning. They keep this small prohibition to stay in good graces with god I guess. When I lived in Boston they didn't allow alcohol to be sold at all on sundays so, on god's day, all the alcoholic homeless people walked around drinking Listerine and you could smell the mint gushing out of their pours. In any case, I worked saturday nights in New York for years and always got off work right in the middle of this no alcohol window. This was obviously fine for me, I had already had my fill, but I usually stopped by a bodega on my way home and grab a sandwich and, almost every week, there was somebody arguing with the guy behind the counter, demanding to be sold a six pack of beer when clearly they were already hammered and definitely didn't need it. It was impossible to convince them that they just had to wait until 6am.
So, in 2009 they stopped doing the free concerts in mccarren pool and the city began plans to turn that space back into a working public swimming pool. But that didn't mean that the free shows were done.
When the city rezoned williamsburg to allow these monstrous high rises to consume it's waterfront, part of the deal was that they also provide 30 acres of new public park along the east river. The first of these new parks appeared in 2009, on Kent ave between north 7th and north 9th streets. But, for those who knew, this area had already been the best park in williamsburg it just wasn't regulated by the city or anyone else for that matter.
Whatever factory or warehouse occupied these two blocks, it had been torn down long before I got to Brooklyn. Tall reeds grew everywhere in this empty space and chunks of cement foundation poked out of this brush here and there like ancient ruins. The area was fenced off but people had cut large holes in the chain links and skateboarders had poured cement ramps on some of these ruins, and you could walk down paths that passed through the reeds, stepping over trash and broken bottles and find yourself looking out over manhattan from your own private beach. No one stopped you from drinking beer. No one stopped you from doing anything. No one regulated this area.
Some of the foundations actually continued out into the east river. There were full buildings completely surrounded by water, and you could walk along crumbling walls looking down into the dirty river and you could even sit in rusted metal chairs that hung over the water. These chairs were still stable after being poured into the original cement foundation. This was probably my favorite place in all of williamsburg.
Well, they cut down the reeds and replaced them with grass. And they took out the broken bottles and put in benches. They demolished the all skate ramps but left one large cement foundation where they set up a stage and now you could see Wiz Khalifa or the Dirty Projectors perform free shows in this park on saturdays with the manhattan skyline as their backdrop.
If there was one great thing about 2009, for me, it was releases from the local brooklyn record labels Woodsist and captured tracks. As I mentioned before, from 2001 to 2009 I really only cared about music from the past, I was trapped there, and the dance punk brooklyn sound definitely wasn’t going to change this.
But, by 2009, I don't know if my tastes had become more modern or if modern music found itself more rooted in the past but, either way, I was excited about some of the new brooklyn bands and this was the time I started working on the first Fletcher C Johnson record.
So, in 2010! I move out of my brother's place and begin living, for the first time, in the Italian section of williamsburg. This is the apartment where all my roommates are from Atlanta and they all work at Union pool. The apartment is great, I have functional heat for the first time, I can walk to the stoop, and my basement room is huge but, unfortunately, it is also very humid down there and I start developing sinus infection after sinus infection.
This turns into a dark period for me. I'm sick all the time. I contract an std that is ultimately curable but I have to be celibate while it's being treated. One of my closest friends becomes very ill and I'm taking care of him. And eventually I just burn out. I had been going out 7 nights a week, as late as I possibly could, for about a decade. It had unquestionably become a compulsion. Like I could not. Take. a night off. Until one day, it was a thursday and I remember because thursday had good TV shows at this time. I was usually watching these shows after they aired on this brand new thing called Hulu. But, on this very thursday, I started watching the 8 o'clock program live on TV with a couple of my roommates. "I'm going to head over to Legion bar after this episode" I told everyone in the room. But then the 8:30 show came on and suddenly I was watching that as well. Then the 9pm program. Then we're all smoking weed. And, next thing I know, it's 3am, my roommates are heading to bed, and so I decide I'm just going to go to sleep as well. I remember walking downstairs to my basement and feeling like I was breaking the rules, like I was doing something that was not allowed. But I guess I needed it. So, if I seem a little out of touch for the rest of this williamsburg history know it's because, after this point, I am only going out 340 nights a year and not all 365.
In 2010 everyone in williamsburg is talking about the Apple store. That is the neighborhood joke. Claiming that every building is about to become an Apple store or a whole foods. As one warehouse after another is leveled in the neighborhood the peanut gallery can't help but say, "that's where the new apple store is going." When two buildings get torn down across the street from one another they say. "Well I guess they're putting in two apple stores over here." This goes on and on for years, with no actual confirmation from apple that a store is coming. It's just rumors.
At this point the condo people still haven't moved in so chain stores have yet to pop up but there's a lot of construction going on. Eventually urban outfitters puts in a location on north 6th street, in a building that recently housed the legendary coyote recording studio, but what urban outfitters does that is weird is they don't call themselves urban outfitters. It doesn't say that anywhere on the storefront. They just use the building's address as their name but you can still find all their shit inside.
I'm working at the charleston which is next door to the salvation army. This salvation army is located in one of the only single story buildings in the neighborhood that is not a factory or a garage. The salvation army building is kind of falling apart, it's right at the subway stop which is prime real estate, and everyone knows this salvation army is not long for this world. So people are coming into the bar every day and telling me, with complete confidence, that is going to be the apple store. But they're wrong, everyone is wrong. We have to wait until 2016 but, sure as shit, an apple store shows up just where no one expected it, on the corner of bedford and north 3rd where the bagel store had always been.
2010 is a big year for my brother and Kim. After years of touring the country, just the two of them in a small van, their band is now big enough that they are about to embark on their first tour in a tour bus. They're bringing an elaborate stage set up. They've got a whole crew that's coming with them and it's pretty fucking exciting.
The bus is scheduled to leave at midnight from in front of their practice space on north 14th street and I go down there to grab a key to their apartment and just to check out the bus. You know, I've never been on a tour bus before. But, just as I leave my apartment to head that way, someone runs up to me on the street and points a gun at me. It's a man in hi... it's a kid really. They're probably in high school. They point the gun at me and say give me your wallet, which I promptly do. It's still the same fucking velcro alien workshop wallet. And I still have my fucking social security card in it. This kid takes the wallet and then says give me your phone. Now, the first time I was robbed the muggers went through my pockets looking for a phone but, of course, I didn't have one yet. This time around I hand the guy my phone but it is not a black berry and it is not an iPhone, which had just come out. I still had the flip phone that came free with my phone plan. The guy looks at my phone, turns it over in his hand, and then he says "I don't want this," and hands it back to me. I'm silent. I have never had someone point a gun at me before. But, without me saying anything, the kid pulls the cash out of my wallet and hands the wallet back to me as well. Then he goes running up the street to where a group of his friends are waiting on the corner.
I am rattled. I walk down to north 14th street shaking. I'm ready to tell Matt and Kim what happened but, when I get down to their practice space the scene is chaotic. Their musical equipment is all over the street. They don't have an order for where everything goes in the bus' trailer because they've never done this before. They are meeting some of their crew members for the first time. They are busy and this just doesn't seem like the right situation to make the moment about me so I don't even mention the gun and I don't mention the mugging. I grab their apartment key. I sit on the bus for a little while, I wish them good luck on the tour, and then I head to a bar. I'll bring up the mugging with my brother and Kim when they get back from tour.
In 2011 I meet and start dating the woman who will eventually become my wife. She works for Vice and we meet through mutual friends who also work for the company. Vice has been expanding and expanding this whole time and they now employ a ton of people.
As time goes on and a few more years pass, almost everyone I know will be pushed out of williamsburg, but vice's office will remain and, eventually the people I recognize on the street will almost come full circle.
In 2003 I would sit on the stoop and the only young people I saw walking by were the ones heading to work at vice. And, ten years later in 2013, I would sit on the stoop and, while now there's infinitely more people walking down bedford, still the only people I recognized were the ones heading to work at vice. If my friends didn't work in williamsburg they probably weren't coming here anymore.
But 2011 actually I was still doing all right. I still knew people in the neighborhood.
After one too many sinus infections I left those Atlanta people and moved in with Tom O'Brien in a rear house behind the bar the Abbey. Rear houses are little houses that people sometimes build in the backyard of their apartment buildings. So now, instead of having a backyard, your brick apartment building butts up against a little wooden house.
If the Seigel street loft was fucked it was nothing compared to this rear house. John McGillion was in charge of the Abbey and the rear house. He had had different bartenders living back there for years. Basically the idea was, you don't complain about the noise of the bar, you don't complain that the building is not up to code, and he keeps the rent real low.
So, you better believe I didn't have heat again. Our pipes were always freezing. We'd unplug our refrigerator in the winter to add another space heater to the apartment without blowing the electrical breaker. Sometimes I would just keep the shower running for hours to heat the apartment with steam. Uhh, the ceiling in the rear house poured water down into the living room when it rained. My bedroom was almost exactly the size as my bed, so much so that I could only open my bedroom door half way because it bumped right into the bed frame. But, we lived half a block from the bedford subway stop, two blocks from the stoop, two blocks from the Charleston, and I was only paying 250 dollars a month rent.
We also had an old school New York pidgin coop on our roof. When I first moved to williamsburg you could regularly see the neighborhood guys flying pidgins. They somehow trained them so 100 pidgins were all circling the sky in perfect formation. It was beautiful but it was also freaky. The first time I saw it I thought the world was ending. We never had any pidgins in our coop but our friend Doug almost lived up there one summer.
In 2012 my band went on tour and, when I got back, John McGillion had fired everyone that worked at the charleston. Everyone but me because I was out of town at just the right time.
If John McGillion's number one rule was turn it into a gay bar. His number two rule, if business was going bad, was fire everybody. He did this time and time again at all of his different bars, always with no warning and usually with no explanation but, in this particular case he did have his reasons.
John told Sean Kraft he wasn't doing punk shows in the basement anymore, he wasn't doing any shows. In fact, he was trying to figure out how to turn that room into, drum roll please, a gay bar.
Sean and the rest of the regulars, they didn't take the news lightly. They threw one last show, got all their friend's bands to play, and tore the basement apart. All the light fixtures and other wiring was ripped out of the ceiling. Holes were kicked through the walls and the entire sound system was stolen. People brought cases of their own beer to the show and then smashed all the beer bottles on the floor when they were empty. Afterwards I’m sure it looked like a total wreck down there, but there was no way to know because all the lights were smashed and so you couldn’t actually see it.
John put a new manager in charge of the charleston and he wasn't fun at all. He made us charge everyone for everything and scared off the last of the regulars.
And just when you thought 2012 couldn't get any worse, we had a natural disaster to deal with. Hurricane Sandy ripped up the east coast and demolished Rockaway beach. The boardwalk disappeared and house after house was buried under sand. Literally devastating.
Williamsburg got blown around a bit but it came out mostly unscathed. That is, everything except for one special tree in one special park. When I walked through the neighborhood the next day I found caution tape surrounding the vagina tree. It lay on its side. The gaping vagina ripped right down the middle. This was the last summer I did my birthday in mccarren park, not because the vagina tree was gone but because it was getting harder and harder to get my friends to come back to williamsburg.
For all of these reasons and more I started thinking maybe my time in New York city was up. I'd lived here for a decade. I had been exploring other places by touring regularly with my band but it was time to actually live in a new city.
And I was thinking Los Angeles. I had a number of friends there. I had lived in a few cities on the west coast but los Angeles was somewhere I had only visited. I hardly knew anything about the city and that was exciting to me. So, in the beginning of 2013, I quit my job at both bars, booked a coast to coast tour for my band, put all my belongings in the van, toured to California, and then bought my bandmates plane tickets home when we got to Los Angeles, where I stayed.
Right away things were looking good. I started subletting a room from a friend, I was going to Cha Cha Lounge a couple times a week, people invited me to this party or that party but it became clear within a couple of months that there was one big problem. No stoops. No fucking stoops anywhere. So now I’m standing around on York boulevard all day like a fucking idiot.
As you already know, I love people watching. And in Los Angeles, I’m going to shows and parties, and there’s cool diy venues and there’s a ton of people at these events and the people watching is good, while I’m at the event. But in New York. In New York you got an event. Like say you got the art book fair at Moma PS1. You can people watch from the moment you get out the front door of your apartment all the way to the subway. You can people watch on the subway. You can people watch from where you get off the subway all the way to PS1. You people watch at the event. You people watch on the way to the after party, at the after party, and on the way home. It. Never. Stops. There are so many people shoved into every square mile of new York city and they are all on foot.
Like, there is some random street in Queens. Some street I’ve never heard of and I’ve never been to and I will probably never go to and it has more people walking on it every day than the busiest street in Los Angeles. That’s just how it is. Maybe the greatest weirdos on the planet live in LA but I don’t know because I can’t see them. So, after 3 months in Los Angeles, I called up my bandmates, flew them back to California, and we did another US tour on our way home to Brooklyn.
So I get home, I’m broke, and I have no job. But this turns out to be a good thing because of two new opportunities.
First I get hired at the bar Clem’s which had been a favorite bar of mine for a long time. Clem’s has an unstoppable group of regulars and, in the next couple years we are going to have a williamsburg bar apocalypse which will send even more regulars our way. As bar after bar closes in the neighborhood, people struggle to find some place they recognize to drink and, for the people that have been in williamsburg for 20 years, Clem’s will become one of the last surviving places they know.
The second great thing that happens to me is I start bartending at a restaurant in bushwick named Montana’s. Now, the last time I saw Montana, one of the owners of the restaurant, he was bartending at the Shank so it surprised me that, four years later, he has opened a fine dining restaurant but I take the job and I love it, mostly because I can’t get enough of what is happening in bushwick.
Montana’s was off of the Jefferson stop on the L train, one stop past where I lived on Seigel street, and this neighborhood, in 2013, reminded me so much of williamsburg in 2003. There were restaurants and bars scattered around but, between these businesses you’d find large patches of working warehouses and boarded up factories and art studios and lofts. This was again in an industrial area bordering a hispanic community. And there’s freaks on the streets. And there’s young artists. And this seems like a place I should have been spending my days for a long time so I start coming out to bushwick when I can.
What I see happen to the Jefferson stop over the next 9 years is also changes similar to those early williamsburg days. Clothing stores flood in. Bars and restaurants flood in. Blocks that were nothing but factories turn into blocks that are nothing but nightlife. And these changes seem to take place very rapidly, faster than anything I’ve seen before.
It’s not until I started researching this williamsburg history that I really looked at the time lines and realized that it took about a decade for both the jefferson stop and industrial williamsburg to make these same changes, it’s just that, when it happened in williamsburg I was in my 20s and ten years felt like a lifetime, and for bushwick I was in my thirties and ten years felt like an instant.
Now, will the jefferson stop continue-developing like williamsburg, until it is overrun with chain stores and banks and fast food restaurants, I don’t know. Small condos are being built here and there but nothing, nothing like the enormous waterfront developments in williamsburg. You know, a view of the trash boats floating down the newtown creek just doesn’t hold the same cachet as a view of the manhattan skyline. So maybe bushwick will be spared from this final blow. We’ll have to wait to see. All I know is the jefferson stop is the neighborhood that has excited me most for the last ten years.
Of course, that is being challenged by clubs and bars that have opened in bushwick along Myrtle Avenue or broadway and a whole world of activity that is happening in ridgewood queens. New York city is continuously pushing everything farther out.
Ridgewood will be interesting because all the new bars that I’ve seen are nestled right into the residential areas. It’s like opening something in the Italian section of williamsburg, you’re completely surrounded by families. And even the new clubs on broadway in bushwick, they have like a foot locker on one side of them and a taco bell cantina on the other. You can be loud there because the subway runs above ground in that neighborhood but you’re still completely surrounded by residential housing. (There is a freedom you find in the industrial areas that doesn’t exist anywhere else)
In any case, I am not doing the complete history of bushwick or ridgewood, that’s someone else’s story. So let’s get back to williamsburg.
The big williamsburg news in 2014 is vice, which is still growing bigger and bigger, they decide they need a whole new building to expand their business, in fact they are basically going to buy an entire block in williamsburg and turn that into their offices. And you’ll never guess what block they choose. You’ll never fucking guess this shit. They decide they want the exact block that houses death by audio, glasslands, and 285 Kent. They buy the block with all the diy spaces in williamsburg and kick them out. If you want to piss off every artist that still lives in the neighborhood, vice found the absolute, peak way to do it. Everyone is furious.
The last month on that block, this was a situation I had become pretty familiar with. We have another rules out the door, fuck the fire codes, go for broke, eviction party scenario and, over the course of a couple weeks worth of shows, brooklyn bands from the last 15 years all came out to play on the block one last time and my band was lucky enough to play one of these parties at death by audio, which was actually the first time I ever played there because I was always too busy running my own shows at Lulus.
And speaking of Lulus. In 2014 the bar finally reaches it’s million dollar mark in money that it has lost since opening so you know what John McGillion is thinking, gotta make this place a gay bar. But, the crazy thing is, John didn’t own the building, he rented it and, in the lease agreement, the landlord added a stipulation that the space never become a gay bar, specifically. Fucking crazy. I have no idea what the landlord thought those gays were going to get into that was more reprehensible than the fucked up shit that me and my friends were doing but, anyway, John takes this lease to court and tries to fight it but, that doesn’t work, so by the end of the summer I’m at another big closing party. We’re smashing all the bar glasses, and they’re giving everything away for free, like usual. Ahh, a few bands played and we wished Lulus farewell.
But none of this prepares me, none of this prepares me for what’s coming next. For seven years I sat on the second stoop, every day. And every day I walked to the bottom of the steps when the woman who lived there exited to buy her food, and every day she told me not to bother, and every day I didn’t listen to her. But, one day, she doesn’t go out to buy something to cook. And the next day I don’t see her as well. And then a week goes by with more of the same. And that was it. I never saw her again. If the house went up for sale, they never bothered to put up one of those realtor signs. All of her furniture was eventually removed but it happened when I wasn’t around, maybe I was in bushwick. I don’t know if she died or if she went to a home or if she went to live with one of her family members that never came to visit her. Much like when the first stoop disappeared, no one bothered telling me anything.
After a couple months someone put a gate at the bottom of the building’s steps, a gate to prevent people who didn’t live in the building from sitting on the stoop.
In 2015 my soon to be wife and I moved in together. It should surprise no one that she did not want to live in my rear house with no heat and a leaky ceiling and a tiny, tiny bedroom, even if there was a cool pidgin coop on the roof, so we found a place together in the Italian section of williamsburg. My old friend already lived in this building and he got us a good deal on our apartment. But first we had to meet with our Italian landlord’s entire family. Amongst these people was our landlord who was born in one of the apartments and her father who, with his own two hands, helped build the building itself nearly a century earlier.
My wife and I were married the next year down at city hall. After the ceremony I had the wedding party come back to williamsburg to have our wedding photo taken on the stoop. We cracked the new gate open and tried to push it wide so you couldn’t see it in the shot. And my brother took a picture of my wife and I holding each other on the steps where I’d spent most of the last decade. That photo currently sits on the mantel above my parents fireplace.
By the late two thousand teens the condos were up and running and the williamsburg waterfront had been completely rebuilt from end to end, and there’s literally music classes for babies in mccarren park where a guy plays an acoustic guitar while a group of 1 year olds sit in a circle around him roughly shaking tambourins and shit like that. And we now had our apple store and our whole foods and our Starbucks and everything else they have in Soho. Williamsburg used to be all spaces for people to make things and now it is all spaces for people to buy things.
One day I took the train to manhattan to buy a new pair of vans sneakers and my wife told me that I was dumb, she said there had been a vans store in the neighborhood for years. I looked it up and sure enough she was right, it was on north 6th street, exactly where my American apparel used to be.
It’s amazing how much of the neighborhood had been torn down and rebuilt, half of it is now unrecognizable. The same factories and warehouses that made industrial williamsburg lawless and free for me in my 20s, they have also made the neighborhood lawless and free for contractors who want to tear down lofts and put up hotels. It is much easier to evict someone living in a mostly illegal factory than living in an apartment building.
I’ve already talked about a number of bars and venues that closed but I’m going to take a moment to run through a few more that I missed. And this is by no means all of them.
Zebulon closed in 2012. They later relocated to Los Angeles where they seem to be doing great.
In 2013 they tore down the entire block that sugarland was on, the entire block except for sugarland itself. You could look across this whole city block that had been flattened to dirt and see this skinny little gay bar popping up in the middle, it was like another eerie apocalyptic sight. Of course, sugarland was owned by John McGillion and eventually they offered him enough money to finally knocked the bar down as well.
In 2014 we lost spike hill on bedford and goodbye blue Monday out in bushwick.
Ahh, Kings county, where I went after my first mugging, that closed in 2015 followed by trash bar, Grand Victory, and Daddy’s in 2016. Also in 2016 the venue Acheron became just another room in the anchored inn.
In 2017 we lost Don Pedro’s which I’m sorry I didn’t talk about more. That place was awesome. One time I smoked a joint in the basement of Don Pedro’s with Misha Barton but the basement of that bar was totally unfinished, you’re just standing on dirt, or mud depending on what’s leaking down from upstairs. It definitely looked like a murder room. Sorry, I tried to leave all celebrity name dropping and band name dropping out of this piece, and I think I did a pretty good job, right? I had to throw in one. I also smoked a joint with the actress that played Anna in the OC in the basement of dark room like 5 years earlier. Those OC girls were smoking joints everywhere. Sorry that’s two names now and I was doing so good up to this point.
In 2017 Shea stadium got kicked out of their space when the son of their landlord decided he wanted to turn the whole building into a club, although that club never happened. They just got evicted for no reason basically.
2018 was the end for Bar Matchless and Legion and silent barn at their second location in bushwick.
2019 was a bad, bad year for some of the longest lasting williamsburg bars. Enids had been around since 2000, Mugs Ale House and the Abbey both opened in the 90s, and Rosemary’s Greenpoint Tavern had been on Bedford since 1955. They all closed that year. The abbey was gutted and my rear house was finally torn down.
In 2020 we lost Trophy bar on Broadway and in 2021 they decided to tear down the building that housed second chance saloon. All in all it was a lot of loss for one little neighborhood.
That being said, I want to mention something at this point in the story that you might not realize, something that doesn’t exactly match up with everything I’ve said in the last half hour. Williamsburg is fine. Like Williamsburg of today it’s fine. I’m sure it’s going to keep getting a lot worse but, currently, it’s not the best neighborhood in New York City but it’s certainly not the worst. (I mean, it’s basically just become comparable to the arts district in any other city.)
There are definitely now a ton of rich people here. And you see douchey bros everywhere, the exact guys that I came here to avoid, but alongside these bros williamsburg still has some remaining artists that are mixed in with the tourists and it still has a few Puerto Rican families mixed in with the tech bros and it still has metalheads and skaters kicking around and 90 year old Italians sitting in chairs on the sidewalk and it even still has a few people living in lofts while they wait for that one million dollar pay out to finally get them to move.
If I was in Seattle, or wherever, and I asked a local to bring me to the best neighborhood in the city and they brought me to a place exactly like williamsburg today I’d say, you guys really got a great thing going on here.
Because when all’s said and done, the neighborhoods of new York city can only truly be scrutinized against other neighborhoods in New York City. For what I love, nowhere else in the country even comes close.
Of course, if you want to have a lot of space to yourself, to do your own thing. You know, you want a big house with a big yard to host your own private events and hang with your own select group of friends, well then you can do a lot better than New York City but that is a lifestyle that has no interest to me. I mean, I’ve come a long way from the Seigel loft years, when I’d be on the streets 16 hours a day, everyday, but I still love the fun of meeting up with my friends amongst large groups of strangers where you never exactly know what’s going to happen next. Where anything can happen. And you can still find that in williamsburg every day, although, of course, the quality of strangers that surround you is now better in bushwick.
You know, it’s really this anything-can-happen dynamic that drew me to New York in the first place. Safety and stability have always bored me. That’s why I liked the venues that weren’t up to first code and the parties where someone stage dove from the second story and injured everyone they landed on and the club nights that didn’t start until 5am and regularly drinking too much and saying yes to anyone that asked me to go anywhere or do anything. This combination of excitement and danger and community was something I traveled the country looking for at the beginning of the aughts and I only truly found it in williamsburg.
I ran into Lauren Brown the other day, my first great New York friend, and she asked me what I was up to and I told her I was doing this. I was telling our story. I was telling the whole thing. Lauren looked me up and down and she laughed and she questioned me. “How do you know the whole thing?” she asked. “We all thought you were black out drunk every night.” And maybe I was. Maybe I’m getting it all wrong. Maybe the dates are off and the parties were smaller and the streets were more dangerous and the whole thing was less magical. All I’m telling here is what I saw and what it felt like for me, 19 years in one little neighborhood. And perhaps I should have been more open to living other places. Perhaps I should have given Los Angeles another 3 months. But every time I walked out the door of my Brooklyn apartment, williamsburg felt different. I didn’t need to move to another city because the city I was in was always moving, always changing, although some things here do stay the same.
For as long as I’ve lived in williamsburg, every Friday night, ten minutes before sundown, air raid sirens go off all over the neighborhood, it’s unnerving if you’ve never heard it before. These sirens warn the Hasidic community that Shabbat is coming and, if you’re orthodox Jewish it’s time to go inside. The sound has a very specific meaning to a certain group of williamsburg residents. But for me, whether I was leaning against the vagina tree or sitting on the stoop or standing on a collapsing foundation forgotten in the east river, this sound had a different meaning. The sirens scream on and on for many minutes, they are so loud it sometimes feels like they’ll never stop. It's a dozen alarms all over the neighborhood howling together, disturbing the peace and, for me, singing a sweet song to remind me that I am home.