Grand Ferry Park, the Williamsburg Bridge

Took a long walk through Williamsburg the other day. It’s a neighborhood that, some years ago, supplanted the Lower East Side as a haven for creative newcomers to New York. Depending on your perspective, it is either already over, or it is just coming into its own. In any case, it is now seeing expensive condos and loft conversions amidst the urban grit.

Williamsburg with Toll Brothers luxury housing rising in the background

Williamsburg

There are loft buildings, row houses, vacant lots, and pockets of ongoing industrial use. To the north is Greenpoint with its Polish population and to the south just below the Williamsburg Bridge there are enclaves of orthodox Jews. As a Manhattanite, I still feel a little like a foreigner in Williamsburg. But it’s one of the parts of the city outside my precious island that I would consider living in.

Williamsburg

Williamsburg

Despite it’s hipster reputation, Williamsburg remains a largely low income neighborhood with a significant Latino community. To the east it blends into Bushwick, a mostly African American area. There are housing projects as well as lots of single family homes. It was traditionally a blue collar place, and that aspect of it has not all together disappeared.

Williamsburg

Williamsburg