The Last Bohemia

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 [...]
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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 neighbourhood: 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 aluminium 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 neighbourhoods.Through Anasi's eyes we see the warehouses become lofts, secret cocaine bars become stylized absinthe parlours, 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 neighbourhood now belongs to someone else.