The Last Bohemia
Scenes From the Life of Williamsburg, Brooklyn
by Robert Anasi
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
It was inevitable that somebody would write a book about the two-decade cycle of change that transformed Williamsburg, Brooklyn, from a no-man’s-land of abandoned factories and boarded-up storefronts to today’s hipster mecca.
“The Last Bohemia,” by University of California- Irvine literary-journalism professor Robert Anasi, is the first book to tackle this topic and will hardly be the last. For that we should be thankful. Anasi’s book is awkwardly written and petulant — an extended, cred-mongering “hipsters ruined my neighborhood” grumble.
Anasi first moved to Williamsburg in the summer of 1994, and the book is rife with reminders of how early to the party he was: “For a change, I was the square — a colonial administrator paying a visit to a native tribe,” he writes of a bar turned “illegal performance space” called Gargoyle.
The neighborhood attracted aspiring filmmakers, artists and writers — “perfect fodder for a rough neighborhood — young and cocky and willing to live on scraps,” Anasi writes. They looked past junkies nodding off in apartment doorways, prostitutes plying their trade at truck stops and occasional gunshots in order to live cheaply and freely.
Police were nowhere to be found: “Cops didn’t show up when you got jumped. Cops didn’t investigate burglaries. This was poor, ethnic Brooklyn and you were on your own. The trade-off was that the cops didn’t bother you.”
That began to change in the late 1990s, when then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s quality of life campaign helped shut down much of Manhattan’s vibrant nightlife — most notoriously via his deployment of cabaret laws dating from the mid-1920s — moving nightlife’s cutting edge across the water. The most compelling part of “Bohemia” chronicles Napoleon, a southside Williamsburg Dominican-American house-music devotee and ex-barber who began frequenting a desultory café called The L before opening his own nightspot, Black Betty, in 1999. But outsiders moved in even faster: By the late 2000s, Anasi writes, “The neighborhood had become a parody of itself, a bohemian theme park.”
Anasi, like many a Williamsburg traditionalist, tends to overstate the neighborhood’s impact on the American psyche. He brags of the local performers, the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, “The carny tradition was nearly dead when the Bindlestiffs went looking for it. The Bindlestiffs brought geeks back.”
That’s funny: Seattle’s Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, featuring a performer who lifted weights with his, um, manhood, traveled the US with the rock festival Lollapalooza in 1991, reaching the sort of suburbanites Anasi rails against throughout the book. But apparently that didn’t count.
That’s not the only place where Anasi’s writing is weirdly blinkered. It’s one thing to give a pseudonym to an ex-girlfriend, quite another to then turn around and quote a passage from her novel.
In the aftermath of 9/11, he writes, “Americans from Christopher Hitchens to President Bush reacted to the attacks exactly like paranoid stoners.” (Setting aside the fact that Hitchens was, at the time, a British citizen, really? “Exactly?”)
At one point, he shares a joke with a landlady about a heroin-addicted mutual friend: “ ‘You can’t trust Marcin,’ I said. ‘He’s a Gypsy.’ She cackled at that: 30 years in New York but still in a Polish village, and Marcin’s shiftiness exactly evoked ‘Gypsy’ to her shrewd, paranoid, bigoted Eastern European mind.” What about the mind of the guy who made the joke in the first place?
Inevitably, Anasi’s paradise is sundered. When his semi-pseudonymous ex moved out, he decided to find a smaller place of his own: “I found sticker shock. Kenn Firpo informed me that I couldn’t get a Northside one-bedroom for under nine hundred. A year later that number was over a thousand.”
Anasi looks on, horrified, as Pabst Blue Ribbon becomes the brew of choice for the new, trucker-hat-wearing imports. His memoir instead becomes a rant against those wannabes who ruined the neighborhood. You can’t really be hip unless you’re paying dirt-cheap rent and not showering.
His professorial conclusion? Williamsburg was cool when he lived there; now it’s just lame.