Brooklyn Bookbeat: Anasi’s ‘The Last Bohemia’ reveals the Williamsburg that once was

December 13, 2012 Samantha Samel Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Anasi-Robert-c-Nadia-Lesy-use-for-Last-Bohemia-300x225.jpg
Share this:
When you step off the Bedford Avenue stop on the L train, you’re in good company. In fact, you’re in annoyingly good company. Today, sections of Williamsburg are among the most overcrowded spots in New York. But just a few years ago, this now-jam-packed hipster haven was not the cultural playground it is today. In his memoir “The Last Bohemia: Scenes from the Life of Williamsburg, Brooklyn,” former Williamsburg resident Robert Anasi recalls the sprawl of uninviting factories and apartments that lined the streets. He remembers following friends’ orders to never walk alone and never look at anyone. And, to our dismay, he remembers paying just $300 per month to live on the corner of Union and Grand.  Anasi speaks to the Brooklyn Eagle about his favorite bar-café then and now, and offers his take on the Williamsburg that exists today.

You lived in Williamsburg for 15 years, beginning in the early ’90s. As you describe in your book, the neighborhood was a very different place back then. How would you feel about living in Williamsburg as it is today?

As a long-time New Yorker, I’m completely pragmatic about where I live. Give me a couple of thousand square feet, cheap rent and a waterfront view, and I’d be more than happy to live in Bburg. Of course, there are many different Williamsburgs: the Northside, the Southside, the East Williamsburg that developers and real estate agents will extend as far into Bushwick as their shamelessness takes them.  I lived on the Northside though, so if you’re offering me a penthouse at ‘The Edge,’ well, sign me up. But I wouldn’t ‘live’ there. Real life would go on somewhere else. What you have on Kent Avenue these days is a facsimile of life in a space as bland and homogenized and utterly without character as a Houston mega-mall. Fortunately in NYC, something better is still usually just a subway ride away. 

Are you still in touch with old friends and neighbors from Williamsburg? Are any of them still living there, and if so, would you say that there is any consensus about the relative cost/benefit of Williamsburg becoming so attractive?

I still have plenty of friends in Williamsburg. People who work there or who live in rent-stabilized apartments and can’t afford to leave, or both. Esther Bell, who I profile in the book, owns the West Café on Union and lives on Bushwick Ave. The reality of Williamsburg is that, as soon as you move away from the Northside and the water, it’s still a very working-class, ethnic neighborhood. So at those edges, the new Bburg of international finance and disgusting wealth rubs up against various of the old Williamsburgs – hence the conflicts over the public schools and the yelling and screaming about a couple of scuffles in McCarren Pool. Esther’s bar-café is really a beautiful spot – there’s even a beer waterfall – and a lot of her business depends on the customers from the condos they’ve built along Union. But three blocks further up Union there’s low-income housing and a solidly Dominican world. To the world at large, Williamsburg means ‘hipster,’ in the same way that LA means Hollywood. But if you wander a few blocks off the beaten path in Williamsburg, you’re in for a surprise. How does someone like Esther feel about the trade-offs? I guess she’s happy that her business is doing well, and she has a clientele. There’s also still enough left of the old neighborhood that she can go out on a Friday night to an opening or a bar and run into people she knows. It will never again be this small community with two degrees of separation, but having had that in NYC in the first place was a kind of miracle.

 

When you lived in Williamsburg, did you feel it was a particularly exciting community in which to be a writer? Do you have any sense of what it would be like for writers living/working there today?

It might be due to the fact that I’m slow-witted, but in Williamsburg in the ’90s I never found myself thinking, ‘This is a fantastic place to be a writer! There are so many interesting people here!’ I only notice things when they’re gone. Yet at the same time, I was constantly writing down fascinating details: from the waterfront, the coke bar, McCarren Park. At the L Café in 1995, I’d run into fortune-tellers, firemen, bums, Cuban exiles, and a lot of hungry artists [Note to young writers: keep those journals! More than half of my material is drawn from fifteen years of journals, stories that I would have lost or misremembered]. For young writers today I’m sure there’s plenty to write about; after all, Bedford Ave is a 24-hour freak parade. The place I loved is dead and decomposing, but that’s not to say you can’t find all kinds of material. Despite Bloomberg’s attempts to turn NYC into a gated community, it’s still one of the most fascinating and diverse places in the world.

 

Have you lived elsewhere in Brooklyn? If you returned to New York today, where would you choose to live? 

My first Brooklyn apartment was on the Bed-Stuy/Fort Greene border back in 1990, right on Myrtle and Clinton. I paid $290 a month for a little room over a yard that held some kind of chop shop. All day and night you’d heard the screech of metal as they shredded cars. In 1990 that was not an easy place to be a skinny white kid – I got jumped a couple of times and also got into a fistfight at the Clinton-Washington stop when a stoned teenager started yelling about how I killed Yusuf Hawkins. It was a different city back then. The rich want us to believe that our only options are luxury condos or ‘The Bronx is burning’ but there has to be a way to make this city affordable for working class and middle-class people. For Bloomberg ‘middle-class’ means a millionaire, but that’s not what I’m talking about.  If I came back to Brooklyn, I’d have to live a little further out. Ridgewood and Bushwick are interesting; it’s hard to say what I could afford. I’m too old to share a railroad apartment with five other people.

Subscribe to our newsletters


Leave a Comment


Leave a Comment