“Downtown” culture magazine Paper cautiously tip-toed into Bushwick this month and hosed the place down with their embarrassingly self-unaware trademark “edginess.” The article is by some dried-up Manhattan early-80s scenester pining for the days when Manhattan was a fucking shithole and you could get stabbed on every corner. When will it finally be considered hackneyed to whine about how cleanliness and safety and wealth — the things most sane people seek out — are eating our very souls?

more »

All the anti-gentrification fist-pumping in the world is not going to keep your rent from going up. Instead, use the most powerful and actually effective vote you have: your dollar. Several hundred thousand of them loaned to you by a bank, that is.

Agent Eve Levine of Corcoran and mortgage broker Rob Slifer of Professional Advantage present Hipster Mortgage Night, where you can find out what and where you can afford. My suggestion for hipsters just getting started in life is to team up with friends and buy a 2- or 3-family house in South Bushwick. It’s a popular arrangement in San Francisco called Tenancy in Common. This form of ownership could get a lot of young people into their first properties without a lot of up-front capital. Just make sure you have good friends.

Wednesday March 26th, 6-8pm
HUGS 108 North 6th
347-526-1383
FREE, by appointment!

Call or email to schedule a private 20 minute appointment to talk money specifics with Rob and meet with Eve to look at current listings available right now!

click to enlarge

A friend in the hood whose aunt lives in Martin County, just past the civilizational borders of South Florida — NOT a cosmopolitan area, in other words — showed me this clipping from the local paper that she sent him. We don’t know which paper it was, and none of the text comes up in a search. I knew South Floridians were already aware of the “coolness” of Bushwick — my mom tells me her friends say buying a house here is “brilliant.” But I didn’t know it was all, Miami’s equivalent of Mystic, CT sending reporters to “get the local scoop.”

Anyway, they got most of their facts right. Bushwick Car Service (718-497-7148) are the people to call when you need a car, though I suspect they were chosen for the article because of the name. They also got where to eat and drink off the Morgan stop more or less right.

The worst of the worst is the names they made up that they claim are actually used to describe Bushwick (or the Morgantown area) — Bushburg (okay, a few douches have used that), Willwick, Billwick, Buburg, and WesWick. Buburg!? The fuck. If anyone does use these alleged nicknames, I do not want to know. As you may have noticed, the focus is on the Morgan area, but then the park down on Knickerbocker is mentioned, and that’s solid Jefferson stop territory.

Props to the Stuart yahoos for making fun of hipsters, I suppose… I feel a little bad that they can’t get a break even from people who think West Palm Beach is a no-go ghetto zone.

I guess it’s a NY Mag Tuesday: This guy is the ultimate hipster douche. He moved to Bushwick in search of a mock of 1970s Soho? Ugh. And then was shocked to learn that you need to be somewhat alert — take those ipod buds out — so that people don’t use surprise attacks to mug you? UGH. And then after being mugged moved back to allegedly crime-free San Francisco the next day?

Good riddance, tard. I notice you moved to New York TWENTY years ago, which means you’re probably at least pushing 40. 40-year-olds hold down jobs and have investments, they don’t live in shithole apartments in industrial districts.

DeKalb and Cypress. Is it Bushwick? Is it Ridgewood? Is it BOTH? *head explodes*

A few people sent me this bit from the New York Times‘ insipid “City Room” blog: Is Ridgewood the New East Bushwick? Fucking gag me. Nothing could be more expressive of the Times‘ complete disconnect from most things non-Manhattan than their inability to grasp the concept of modern Bushwick. (Except maybe thinking an address in downtown Brooklyn is in East Williamsburg.)

I’m going to spell it out simply for them: a loft building that is a 3-second sprint from the Brooklyn border, filled with the same types of people who live in Bushwick proper and the part of East Williamsburg also colloquially considered to be Bushwick, is, for all intents and purposes, Bushwick. Yes, it is politically in Queens. The sum total effect of this political difference is that to pick up a package from the post office (do people still use USPS for packages?), they have to go to one in Ridgewood instead of in Bushwick. That’s about it.

But not so fast, Jennifer 8, much of Ridgewood may not be considered Bushwick. It depends on the block, and it will certainly depend on what the future holds for the neighborhood. As of right now, Ridgewooders are not all cozying up to Bushwick. It seems a neighborhood defined by the people who actually live there and not based on some arbitrary line on a plat book is too much for a proper reporter, albeit one assigned to the journalistic equivalent of latrine duty, to fathom.

Poking fun at neighborhood relabeling is tired. Will the Times think it’s just as clever when it inevitably announces Glendale to be East East East Williamsburg? Oh the smarm will be so thick, won’t it just?

There’s a new art zine on the scene called ArtCal and in it I review the new major mural that went up in Bushwick.

Incorporating the barrios’ German past, fire filled not-so-distant past, hipster present and still undecided future, there’s a lot going on in this color display that may be the first public attempt by members of the non-hipster community to comment on Bushwick then, now and tomorrow. Here’s an excerpt and check out the full post here:

A few weeks ago a new mural entitled, “Time Flies: A History of Bushwick” was unveiled at the corner of Woodbine and Knickerbocker in the heart of Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. The 400-foot painting wraps around a corner and gives the site a warm inviting presence that most street corners in the area lack.

Created by artists and students from the Academy of Urban Planning, El Puente Academy, and Groundswell Community Mural Project, the mammoth project was under the direction of muralist Joe Matunis and continues a tradition that has long been a Bushwick tradition — community murals.

In 1992, an earlier mural stood at this otherwise quiet corner and symptomatic of the time, it confronted issues of drugs, crime and social justice–which grappled this community.

Fast forward to 2007 and Bushwick has changed from the front lines of the city’s drug wars to the next up-and-coming neighborhood. While the new wave of highly-educated hipsters homestead in this north Brooklyn neighborhood, “Time Flies” is one of the first public efforts by the predominantly black and Hispanic citizens of Bushwick to articulate their own thoughts about the neighborhood’s future…

Check out the full article on ArtCal.

Bushwick Avenue brownstones. Photo from Forgotten NY

The cool folks at Reclaimed Home, a site for people renovating their houses on the cheap, gave a shout out to Bushwick today…such as it was. News flash: Bushwick is not being newly populated only by hipsters. In fact, it’s probably being evenly newly populated by whites and (non-white) Mexicans. But I already digress. Not all white people are hipsters, for christ’s sake. Gah.

It’s cool that they mentioned that yes, Bushwick has brownstones, rare as they may be. And they linked to us, so their points double.

But bathtubs in kitchens? That was never something that went on in these parts, that was for the overcrowded tenements of the Lower East Side (in which my great-grandparents slummed it after fleeing the Bolsheviks). Am I wrong?

Thirty years ago, Bushwick burned; today, it’s being slapped with a disorderly conduct summons. I know that I probably shouldn’t lambaste people in search of love but I just can’t help myself. Doing some research on Bushwick last night (yes, actual research), I stumbled upon the following Craigslist “Missed Connection”:

mckibbin lofts roof party the cops broke up - w4m - 22
NYU Philosophy student! I was talking to you on the upper roof deck Friday night. I threw a beer can before climbing down. I’m a girl (duh), shortish brown hair, recent Columbia grad, trying to be a writer. The fucking cops got me and I had to follow them downstairs to get my bullshit summons. You seemed nice and I thought you were cute. You must be smart too, cause you got away from the goddamn police. Email me!

Do I feel sorry for this young woman? Not a bit, I fear. First of all, is this the finest prose we can expect from the graduate of school that nurtured the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Langston Hughes? I might use better words than “cute,” “smart” and “nice” to describe the potential mate of my dreams. Also, how does one “try” to be a writer? I imagine that all one needs is a MacBook and the $3 requisite to score a soy latte and table space at Potion or the Archive. Last I checked, both were in ample supply around these parts.

What really piques my sense of civic pride, however, is the beer can that seems to have been tossed by our lovestruck friend as she was on the verge of an encounter with New York’s Finest. I knew guys who used to throw beer cans from apartment windows — when they were in high school. Perhaps the mysterious Casanova in question, a Philosophy student at NYU, could have discoursed on Emmanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, which stipulates that an action is moral based on whether one can imagine everyone else in the world doing it.

Now, can you imagine everyone in Bushwick (forget the entire world for now) throwing beer cans, chicken bones and other refuse on the street? If that were the case, we would live in a neighborhood with perpetually dirty streets, besotted sidewalks, and a battered housing stock that is only affordable to enterprising young “artists” because it has been neglected for so long. Oh, wait, nevermind. Scratch that last paragraph. Party on, cans away!

Welcome Molly, a student at Columbia Journalism, to the blog. She’ll be posting original stories she digs up on her new beat: Bushwick. They’ll be newsier than we’re used to here. — Jeremy

Outside her McKibbin Street loft in Bushwick last Saturday, Hester Sunshine was selling her life away.

“Buy my crap – I need to go to London,” the tall, tattooed brunette urged curious passers-by as they eyed piles of vintage clothing and 1980s nostalgia.

Sunshine, an aspiring accessories designer and business owner, departs for London in three weeks to begin fashion school, and in true entrepreneurial spirit, she set up shop on a trendy strip in Bushwick. “I want to leave with a single suitcase,” she explained, behind rhinestone-studded aviators. “And I have amazing stuff. Just because I’m sick of it doesn’t mean someone else won’t want it.”

Sunshine is correct. This up-and-coming neighborhood in northeast Brooklyn is attracting a post-college hipster crowd, possibly a spillover from nearby Williamsburg, but definitely the type to find Sunshine’s stuff funky, not junky. Edgy twenty-somethings gushed over the goods, which included a working Atari set, colorful roller skates, and a Bollywood-themed clock.

Most items cost just a few dollars, except for furniture, as Sunshine wanted to liquidate fast and close before dark. Her goal of $400 was, judging by the wad of cash tucked into her electric blue leggings, entirely probable – especially considering her unique way of up-charging. “That’s ten dollars because it’s ridiculously amazing,” she informed a teenage girl, referring to the Bollywood clock. A light-up Ballantine Ale sign was also a justifiable ten bucks, “because it works.”

Sunshine is not all business, though. She had charitable moments as well. When two young boys on bicycles discovered a messy mound of old video game controllers, she told them they could each have one if they untangled all the cords. Noting the heat, she also threw in two dollars “for bottled water.”

The boys got to work and in no time, Sunshine’s solo project turned into a community gathering of sorts. Items were placed on hold while buyers ran to get cash, people strolled back and forth between the street sale and a nearby coffee shop, and Sunshine connected with neighbors over her belongings, caring more about making people happy than making money. She gave away a free doll head to a joyful recipient: “I have a bunch of dismembered baby dolls and I really think this will fit,” the girl said.

It saddened Sunshine to see some things go, like a pair of fake denim ski pants, but the desire to get rid of her baggage (quite literally) and start over was much more important. “I had a really intense year at my loft,” she said. “I’m very ready to leave.”

Plus, after five years of living in Bushwick, she knows the neighborhood and enjoyed selling her things to similar people. “I’m happy to see everything go” to them, she declared. Pausing to tie a blue printed scarf around her perfectly messy hair, Sunshine, ever the fashionista, added that the woman who bought the ski pants “looked adorable in them, so it was okay. She looked hot, and that’s the whole point.”

Photo by Steve Reed

I think it’s funny when hipsters from an earlier generation, many of them among the first to begin moving to places like the East Village in the early 80s, finally make the trip out to that place past Williamsburg they have been hearing so much about. Steve Reed made his trip of discovery this weekend, and aside from his confusing Flushing Avenue with Flatbush Avenue, and expressing the bafflingly common belief that Flushing runs north and south, made some strange observations.

The photo he has posted as representative of Bushwick is very much not. It looks more like Puerto Rico than Nuyorico, with its pristine violet stucco and wood-and-iron door. Where the hell is that?

“Drivers had the salsa music cranked up LOUD. It reminded me so much of Miami.” I hear more salsa in Whole Foods than I do on the streets of Bushwick, where melody-challenged reggaeton rattles my windows and sets off car alarms. I guess he had a lucky visit.

Welcome to Bushwick, Steve — I have a feeling that once you can no longer stomach East Village rent we’ll be seeing you around a lot more.

UPDATE: D’oh! Turns out that the post below the photo wasn’t about the photo. Anyway, enjoy the really pretty building. Sorry if anyone was unduly excited.