New Amsterdam

A bulger of a place it is. The number of the ships beat me all hollow, and looked for all the world like a big clearing in the West, with the dead trees all standing. Davy Crockett

When I first moved to Williamsburg with my father I hated it. I looked out of the window of the car with disgust as we drove past a small park and he pointed out a building that he admired. I remember slumping against the cushions in the back seat and diverting my eyes to the mats on the floor that were covered with sand. When we drove past the building that we were going to live in I stared at the East River to my right and the empty lot to my left. I think I asked to be driven back home and watched the J cross the bridge out of the back window as the train faded between the lines on the glass. My first impression of Williamsburg was generated in 6th grade, one year earlier, when I read "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" in the schoolyard. I suppose I imagined that the neighborhood hadn't changed since the turn of the century and that Francie was still sleeping in the summer heat on her rusty fire escape. I envisioned a neighborhood all too distinct from Park Slope, in which there was only one tree that managed to grow between the slabs of cement despite all odds.

And when we drove under the BQE and down Kent Avenue, my verdict was guilty on all accounts. It didn't seem to have evolved since 1910 as documented by the abandoned factories, shards of glass that covered the sidewalks, and its post-War Berlin aesthetic appeal. I saw no little kids running around the sidewalks, hula hoops and jump ropes in hand, and no dogs chasing after them until they settled down on a sunny piece of concrete. What I did see were hoards of hipsters plastered in what I saw as a rebel uniform. I couldn't believe how similar they all looked when they were trying so hard to be different. It was as if they had all walked into a costume shop and asked for paint splattered high tops, ripped jeans, graphic t-shirts and rubber activist bracelets, all in different colors and sizes.

Now I find it's emptiness mysterious and the throngs of hipsters amusing if not charming. When I scooter home from the J train down the cracked and forbidding sidewalks, the wind from the East River pushes against my face. Soon I ride into the industrial wasteland, past the shells of warehouses and the domino sugar factory. It still smells like burnt sugar if you walk near the grates by the fence that encloses the building. For a while, developers were planning on tearing it down but sometime in the middle of the night unknown rebels erected a neon sign on a building reading "Save Domino" and thus it was saved. Wild flowers grow over what I once imagine to have been a bustling plant and transform the lot into Pippi Longstocking's garden in front of Villa Villekulla on the outskirts of Sweden. In fact Williamsburg is filled with very confused buildings, namely a food shop on Broadway which thinks that it's a Parisian cafe on the outside, a country market on the inside much like the Olson's Mercantile from "Little House on the Prairie," and a bar near Spouter Inn in New Bedford in the back. A school that used to be for the mentally disabled was turned into a movie studio and people live in old factories that have been converted into apartment buildings.

I have lived in Williamsburg now for four years. When the lights in the city turn off I look down out of my window at the dark water of the river. Once, as I looked out, I saw a sunken boat bobbing up and down by the foot of the bridge, the cabin peaking out of the small waves. To my knowledge, it was never hauled out of its grave and there it lies beneath the surface of the East River. It used to be someone's and now it is forgotten.