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