Hip and happening Brooklyn

Published Jan 30, 2014

Share

Brooklyn, New York - On my first morning it only takes a split-second glance through my hotel window to realise I have not quite landed in the epicentre of hipsterville. There is a large run-down petrol station across the street, a shabby diner, surrounded by industrial buildings. It’s the wrong side of Brooklyn. I’m not completely surprised; when I travel I have a knack for ending up in the least fashionable neighbourhood. This affliction has served me well; you can tell more about a society from its least spectacular areas, where people aren’t trying as hard to live up to something.

Brooklyn is where the hipster movement – not sure it’s a movement, maybe a phenomenon – is said to have taken hold in the late Nineties-early-Noughties as this borough was turning, and industrial spaces made way for this craft-centred ethically conscientious culture that eschews industrialisation and probably ideas of progress too. They have a fetish for outdated things that industrialisation or technology has rendered obsolete. For this reason hipsters are into baking their own bread, riding bicycles, repurposing vintage clothing and, those of the male persuasion, growing very bushy beards, perhaps so that they can appear like latter-day farmers.

Hipsters might have a distinctive look but their non-ethos ethos – there is no hard-core manifesto – has infiltrated every level of society around the world in various guises, even reaching Joburg’s new burgeoning inner city trendies. Based on my initial assessment, it doesn’t appear to have had any traction in Gowanus, the suburb of Brooklyn I have found myself in. As its name crudely implies, this is the arse-end of Brooklyn; it’s mostly an industrial wasteland populated by panel beaters, empty disused buildings and storage facilities. You know you are in an undesirable neighbourhood when you spot storage companies; it’s a place where no one would live; they only store stuff here.

Gowanus is so peripheral that even booklets or magazines promoting Brooklyn, don’t include this suburb. If I was looking for a new bumper I would be in the right place. As it turns out all I want is an apple. Not the Big Apple, just a small one that I can grind between my teeth after a run through Gowanus’s concrete landscape. Freshly chopped fruit is sold in plastic containers all over Manhattan but not in Gowanus. It doesn’t look like anyone cooks in this neighbourhood; I circle it looking for a supermarket. The main road is dotted with delis and diners. Neither of which sell fruit.

At the La Quinta Inn, the budget hotel I call home, they don’t serve fruit for breakfast. In the morning, bagels, small plastic pockets of cream cheese and jam appear on a small counter hidden in a nook on the first floor. There is a waffle machine too; next to a bottle of ready-made waffle mixture that looks like cement mix.

Gowanus is a very odd location for a hotel, unless perhaps your want to sleep in close proximity to a car that is being overhauled, or you are travelling on a budget. Accommodation in New York is super expensive – even for Americans (La Quinta Inn is full of locals). Manhattan might be the ideal location for a New York stay, but it’s super expensive and you don’t get much for your money. Comments on booking.com tell of rat and cockroach-invested hovels that are so tiny visitors can’t keep their suitcases in the room. One visitor tells of a hotel room that is so small, he can’t open the door to get in it.

Fortunately, I can open the door to my room at La Quinta Inn and there is room enough for a suitcase and to roll out my yoga mat. It’s clean, tidy and tasteful, though in the last days of my stay I get eaten by bed bugs. The price you pay for staying in Brooklyn are the daily train trips across the bridge to Manhattan.

Manhattan is where it’s all at; the museums, galleries, Central Park, the towering buildings and the posh department stores. In essence. all of New York’s main attractions. Naturally, my first days in New York are spent plodding the pavements of Manhattan, chasing all these New York landmarks that Hollywood films and TV shows have fixed in my imagination.

Nevertheless, I grow more and more curious about Gowanus, Brooklyn and perhaps even travelling to the source of hipsterdom. I want to know the New York that isn’t on a tick-list and that is not readily accessible. I start with morning runs around Gowanus, so that I can cover large areas in a small amount of time while getting a good workout. I’m like Rocky Balboa during a training montage as I whip past autoshops and warehouses. The industrial and commercial thoroughfares are joined by quiet residential streets lined with terraced houses with small front yards, where carved pumpkins from Halloween are slowly rotting. The residents of Gowanus – or possibly other New Yorkers – seem reluctant to let go of this holiday; faux spider webs and spray cobwebs decorate many yards even though it’s well into November.

My attention is caught by a sign outside an unassuming shopfront that reads: “where pies come to die”. The next day I drag my travelling companion with me to discover exactly what manner of pies perish inside the establishment. It’s called Four & Twenty Blackbirds and we know we have arrived in pie heaven the moment we step in; the aroma of freshly baked pies fills the air of a modest, unpretentious interior with pressed ceilings and bare wooden tables. A blackboard filled with all manner of pie options hangs over a busy counter. We sit at the corner of a large communal table as we tuck into an impossibly delicious salted caramel and apple pie and a chocolate malted and pecan pie. These home-made pies haven’t just ushered us into a piece of nirvana reserved for all things flaky and sweet but into a hipster hotspot. A quick glance around the room, at its mostly young clientele (some with bushy beards) confirms its status. If there’s one place hipsters gravitate to, it’s to an unpretentious foodie spot that boasts its retro credentials via its products and interior.

A few days later an early morning run delivers me at another hipster hotspot; a little place called Crop to Coffee. It also has an unassuming exterior and interior – bare wooden tables and floors and over-the-counter service. One wall is decorated with photographs displaying Africans harvesting coffee beans. This is presumably in line with their ethos to be transparent about the origins of their products and, hopefully, the fair trade philosophy that underpins it. Yes, it makes me feel better about consuming their coffee and might even persuade me to buy it here rather than elsewhere, but I can’t help wondering if it is just a fashion fad, cashing in on morality. In which case morality could be the new immorality of consumerism. This marketing or business approach isn’t just rooted in the hipster movement, but the green movement too, though possibly hipsters have put a fashionable twist on green-friendly products, which used to have a sort of fuddy-duddy vibe.

Coffee culture and the rise of the barista is undoubtedly indebted to the hipster generation, according to Robert Anasi, in his book The Last Bohemia: Scenes from the life of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he traces the early beginnings of hipster culture in that suburb in the late 1990s. The establishment of a coffee shop in Williamsburg hailed the beginning phase of its gentrification cycle, but also an anti-capitalist shift, he proposes. His justification for the latter point? Coffee shops breed and encourage unproductive behaviour, without deriving any financial reward for doing so. In other words, they don’t generate an income from their patrons remaining put and drinking bottomless coffee all day.

When Anasi first arrived in Williamsburg in the early ’90s, it was a most unlikely destination for a coffee shop. A collapse in the sugar industry turned this once booming industrial area into a hub for immigrants and lowlifes looking for cheap accommodation or locales for dodgy business. Back in those days, Brooklyn was a no-go-zone; a hotbed of crime. As a young unproven writer looking to gain a foothold in the Big Apple, Anasi only gravitated towards Williamsburg because he found a cheap loft that had become available as the previous tenant wanted to leave in haste after his wife had been raped around the corner. Curiously, Williamsburg grew on Anasi; the place was full of the kind of dark characters and occurrences that writers thrive on. One of his favourite spots was a legendary bar called Koki, where peopled snorted cocaine on a counter designated for this activity – hence its irreverent name. The police apparently never disrupted the comings-and-going there because they were on the take, according to Anasi. Williamsburg was crack and smack gangland.

Anasi’s colourful Williamsburg is no longer. On the blustery cold day that I stroll along its main drag, Bedford Avenue, I struggle to reconcile his narrative with the place I encounter. It’s safe, feels semi-suburban and affluent. It reminds me of a quaint little English village high street, with all its old-school shopfronts with cutesy names like Sweet Chick – specialists in chicken and waffles – and Peter’s Since 1969 – though it seems unlikely that Peter’s existed here in 1969, if Anasi’s tale is anything to go by.

It's a bit of the old-world transplanted in the most unlikely of places: a vacated, post-industrial one. Perhaps this is the attraction; the incongruence of it. At Peter’s Since 1969 they offer home-made roast dinners. It’s like a Sunday lunch; you get to choose what roast you’d like and what sides you want. It’s easy to believe you’re in a village; everyone is super chatty and friendly. It’s so cold outside I have to resist staying put here for good.

Unfortunately, along Bedford Avenue and others, many of these cutesy old-worldly looking places, and not so cutesy, are part of chains. In this way not only has Anasi’s rough-and-ready Williamsburg disappeared but, so too, has its replacement; its gentrified hipster incarnation, which seems to have become über commercialised and is less personalised. Williamsburg is in some ways a bland middle-class setting, with a hipster veneer that seems to be cracking quickly.

Expensive glass-fronted condos apparently started springing up along the waterfront as far back as 2007, according to a report in The Washington Post. Around this time, some of its working-class and hipsters residents got together and founded Gentrifiers Against Gentrification in a bid to retain the neighbourhood’s hipstery-working-class edge. It didn’t take the group long to realise they were more of a support group rather than an activist one that was coming to terms with a changing urban landscape and the reality they would have to move out. This is what Maboneng, Joburg’s own growing little hipsterville, could look like in a few decades.

At an unassuming clothing store, In God We Trust, I have to return a cute patterned jumpsuit to the rail when I look at the price tag: $400. It’s not a designer item but a whimsical faux vintage ’80s number. Disavowing mass produced Chinese-manufactured products comes with a steep price tag. This bohemian culture, which was the product of an impoverished artistic and a working-class community, has become elitist – beyond the grasp of the man in the street or the people who initially propagated it.

Williamsburg puts Gowanus in a new light. Makes it more appealing and charming; with only small and isolated pockets of hipster culture dotted around, it’s in the early stages of its evolution – before it becomes home to full-blown commercialised hipster lifestyle. Not that this is a given. The people who brought change to Williamsburg – Anasi’s generation – have moved on… and so has the world. The folk setting up shop in Gowanus aren’t pioneers but followers. Surely, some of its residents must dream of an organic fruit and veg market or even a gourmet food market of the likes you find in Greenwich Village, which was also once an incongruous uneven suburb with potential to be something else. But perhaps they also value its awkwardness. Something that grows on me the more I explore New York.

Gowanus has the rough edges that haven’t been smoothed out or papered over. Like the deli that doesn’t advertise the origin of its products and only sells food in tins or in plastic bags. Or the group of jobless Mexicans who wait outside a U-Haul outlet, hoping that someone hiring one of the large moving vans will need a hand. - Sunday Independent

Related Topics: