One day the official obituary of the great bar scene in my old Williamsburg (1998-2012) will be written; in the meantime, this is a bit of a morsel to dig into:
“Young men and women who were just recently out of college moved to Williamsburg because it was cheap and had relatively easy access to midtown New York City,” recalls Tony Wolf, an actor and artist who came to the area in 1996. Back then it was mostly a neighborhood composed of older Eastern Europeans, many Polish, although twenty-something artists and entrepreneurial types had begun to cram into the cheap (and often illegal) lofts lacking public utilities. They would need places to drink aside from the traditional Polish joints like Stones Tavern and old-man dives like the Turkey’s Nest.
Oh fuck you, Turkeys Nest h8rz!
If the word “hipster” has become meaningless these days, you have to
also remember, for most of the 20th century, what the word “Brooklyn”
conjured up: images of street toughs and the hard-knock life, hot dogs
and pizza joints, rappers and B-boys and beefy Italian guys saying
“fuhgeddaboudit.” Suddenly, however, there were these hipsters: skinny,
unkempt, liberal arts-educated kids in tight jeans inhabiting the north
part of the borough. Even more amusing, these non-natives had begun
cosplaying as a sort of working-class middle-American, wearing trucker
hats, playing Big Buck Hunter at bars, drinking cans of PBR. It
was ironic, until it wasn’t. They’d bring these same sensibilities and
aesthetics to the bars that began to form around McCarren Park and
beyond.
Every time I read about another bar I used to love has gone under I'm sad - even sadder, all the great places I spent countless nights are now slowly leaving my memory, to the point that I can maybe remember the name but can't picture them. Fucking sad. Where were the ubiquitous camera phones back then to capture it all? :(
One day I'll taste that warm foam again, I swear.
No comments:
Post a Comment