I mentioned the book
a while back, now you can
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Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is now so synonymous with hipster culture and the very idea of urban revitalization—so well-known
from Chicago to Cambodia as the playground for the game of ironized
status-seeking and lifestyle one-upmanship—that it’s easy to forget how
just a few years ago it was a very different neighborhood: a spread of
factories, mean streets, and ratty apartments that the rest of New York
City feared.
Robert Anasi hasn’t forgotten. He moved to a
$300-a-month apartment in Williamsburg in 1994 and watched as the area
went through a series of surreal transformations: gritty industrial
district, low-rent artists’ enclave, dot-com denizens’ crash pad,
backdrop for neo-bohemian cool, playpen for stroller-pushing trendy
parents, and now a high-rise real-estate developers’ colony of brushed
aluminum and plate glass.
Tight, passionate, and provocative,
The Last Bohemia is at once a celebration of the fever dream of bohemia,
a lament for what Williamsburg has become, and a cautionary tale about
the lurching transformations of city neighborhoods. Through Anasi’s eyes
we see the warehouses become lofts, secret cocaine bars become stylized
absinthe parlors, barrooms become stage sets for indie rock careers,
and rents rise and rise—until the local artists find that their ideal of
personal creativity has served the aims of global commerce and their
neighborhood now belongs to someone else.
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