In Williamsburg, everybody knows her name (Purvi Thacker / The Brooklyn Ink)

Trenton Stein walked by North 6th street and Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg and stopped to look at the vintage jewelry displayed on the sprawling table by the sidewalk. His tall frame loomed over the trays of neatly arranged earrings, rings, pendants and necklaces. He started talking to the white haired, bespectacled lady manning the table and suddenly let out a loud guffaw.

“ I told you,” she said, “Women always lie except when you are good in bed.”   Stein started laughing again. She waved him goodbye and told him that she would see him the following week.

The wisdom-dispending vendor, Lidia Swiatkowsai, 63, has sat at the same corner on this sidewalk almost every day for the last 5 years, becoming a fixture in the neighborhood. She speaks Czech, Polish, Russian and German and seems to know everyone—and they flock to her. “They come from all over- whether it is the Bronx, London or France, I have regulars who come back to buy what I have gathered over many years,” she explains,

The artistic community in Bedford appeals to her and she trusts them. “They are loyal customers and if they stand on the other end of the table, I don’t even need to look, because they never steal anything,” she says. “These arty people dress badly in scruffy, hipster clothes. But they are nice on the inside.”

Originally from Sandau (Germany), which later became Pszczyna (Poland), she immigrated to Massapequa, Long Island 30 years ago, with her Polish husband, then in the air force, and an array of antique jewelry she had collected throughout the years. She still regularly vistis antique auctions in New Jersey to build her stock. “I have no two pieces of anything!” she says.

She started selling her collection as a way, she says, to interact with people. “I have two daughters and a son and they all are married and live in different cities,” she says. So when her husband got a veteran’s license, she decided to take charge so she could meet people and spend her time. “ I love people and I believe in relationships,” she says. And from the traffic at her sidewalk stall, it’s clear she has many of them

Another regular, this one from Queens, stops and inquires about her health. “I am a heart patient, but I also have poor vision. So I need good light when I have to fix the stones on my trinkets,” she says.

A typical day ends for her around 5 p.m. where she delicately wraps up her paraphernalia and puts it into boxes in her van and drives back home. Her husband sometimes accompanies her and the drive back usually consists of arguments about what they will eat for dinner.

“I’m going to have salmon tonight,” she says. “ But either Atlantic or Alaskan, I don’t like the regular farm packaged salmon.” She has also made up her mind to have a glass of whiskey with her supper. “ Johnnie Walker is the only way to go. Remember, it is all about quality,” she says as she cheekily winks.

Over 250 people showed up on April 7 to kick off the festival held by Brooklyn
Flea, an association of flea markets started by Brownstoner.com founder Jonathan
Butler and Eric Demby, a former spokesman for Brooklyn Borough President Marty
Markowitz. The festival features stalls serving grub as varied as rabbit stew shots
and fried anchovies. Less daring customers can choose safer options like brisket,
lobster rolls or pizza.

Smorgasburg is just one example of a movement dedicated to local and sustainable
food that has swept Brooklyn’s culinary scene over the past few years. Many of the
vendors are deeply committed to using only the freshest produce supplied by local
purveyors. It’s also a sign of a Brooklyn’s healthy economy. Since 2000 and 2010,
the borough has created more than 50,000 jobs – more than any other borough –
with over 9,300 jobs in food services alone.

If you missed it this week, don’t worry: Smorgasburg will be around until November,
leaving plenty of opportunities to whet your apetite.

Hours: Smorgasburg is open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. every Saturday until November.
Location: Between North Sixth and Seventh Streets on the East River in
Williamsburg, Brooklyn. (Bedford stop on the L train.)
For more information, check out the Smorgasburg website.

A shooting that left three children and a rabbi dead outside of a Jewish school in Toulouse, France, has put Jewish institutions in Brooklyn on high alert. (Photo: AP)

On March 19, a lone gunman in southern France murdered three Jewish schoolchildren and a rabbi outside of the Ozar Hatorah secondary school in Toulouse. On Thursday morning, just three days after the shootings, French police killed Mohammed Merah after they stormed the gun-wielding suspect’s home.

The incident has sent ripples across the world, and put New York police—and Brooklyn synagogues— on alert. The NYPD responded this week by stepping up security at Jewish institutions throughout the city, including Yeshiva University in Washington Heights and the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan.

The city “remains the most likely venue for global tensions with Iran to spill over onto American soil,” said Mitchell Silber, director of intelligence analysis for the NYPD, in his testimony before Congress Wednesday.

New York City boasts one of the largest Jewish populations outside of Israel, and local residents have been stirred by the Toulouse killings. Abe Rosen, a retired Williamsburg schoolteacher, said while the NYPD generally has a strong presence around Jewish institutions in Brooklyn, it’s great to have more security in the wake of such an episode.

“We see them standing by the synagogues on Saturdays, and during the week by the schools,” Rosen said. What he doesn’t understand, however, is the motive of people like Merah. “Those people, they don’t care for their own lives.”

Yoel Braver, a 33-year-old Williamsburg salesman, said that although he’s happy with the increase in the city’s police presence following the killings, he thinks more could be done to ensure security in the area. “We appreciate it,” he said, “but it would be helpful if they put in more cameras.” Braver believes that more surveillance around schools would help prevent such incidents.

But not everybody is sold on the surge in protection. Rabbi Zalman Liberow of Flatbush appreciates the NYPD’s efforts, but says he doesn’t understand what immediate protection from the police department will ensure.

“It’s hard to pinpoint when the next terrorists will decide to strike” Liberow said via telephone.

Though the Toulouse gunman’s actions have been called an isolated hate crime, Brooklyn’s leaders have been mindful of hate crimes here at home – not only against the Jewish community, but also to other groups in the community.

According to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, hate groups – particularly ones targeting people based on race, religious affiliation and sexual orientation – are on the rise in America.
A spokesman for Councilmember Stephen Levin, who didn’t wish to be named, says the Jewish community is only one of many minority groups in the area that are targeted for hate crimes, and that citizens should be mindful of that.

“The very best we can do to make sure that the community is safe is to encourage them to be aware,” Levin’s spokesman said in a telephone interview. Drawing attention to such crimes, he says, is one of the best ways to ward off threats.

Rabbi Liberow, meanwhile, is confounded by such tragedies. “We’re living in a crazy world now. I don’t know what really should be done,” he said. “Honestly speaking, it really lays in the hands of God.”

The Avalon Fort Greene is one of many high-rise luxury buildings in Brooklyn. (Cristabelle Tumola / The Brooklyn Ink)

From Woody Allen to “Sex and the City,” film and television have glamorized living in Manhattan. And for years, if you could afford it, Manhattan was the only place in the city to live. In a 2004 “Sex and the City” episode, one of the main characters decides to move to Brooklyn with her family for more space. This choice is portrayed as a great sacrifice. As she recalls all of her horrible Manhattan apartments, she wonders, half-jokingly:

“Why do I think living in Manhattan is so fantastic?”

“Because it is,” says her friend.

But the notion that Brooklyn living is only for bargain hunters is gone. Although Manhattan rents overall are still more expensive, in the last few years more areas of Brooklyn have began to catch up. Expensive Brooklyn areas, such as DUMBO and Williamsburg, are now comparable to rents in several Manhattan neighborhoods. And more people are choosing Brooklyn for its lifestyle than its rents.

“You see people going there because they want to actually live there,” says Andrew Barrocas, CEO of the real estate company MNS, “and they are willing to pay a premium in order to do it.”

Related: Why Brooklyn Foreclosure Numbers Could Get Worse

In January, the average Manhattan rental prices for studios, one bedrooms and two bedrooms in doorman and non-doorman buildings exceeded those in Brooklyn. But the priciest Brooklyn areas were comparable to, and even more expensive than some Manhattan neighborhoods, according to MNS’s January 2012 Market Reports, the only research on the city’s rental rates published on a monthly basis.

For example, the average one bedroom rental price in DUMBO was $3,584. The average one bedroom on the Upper East Side was $ 3,466 for doorman buildings and $2,562 for non-doorman. (More Brooklyn and Manhattan rental comparisons)

Williamsburg, Brooklyn Heights, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill are also neighborhoods that have comparable price points to Manhattan, says Samantha Behringer, a Prudential Douglas Elliman Associate Broker who handles sales and rentals in Manhattan and Brooklyn. In Williamsburg average rentals prices were $2,398 for studios, $2,960 for one bedrooms and $3,776 for two bedrooms, according to the MNS report.

Williamsburg, Brooklyn Heights and DUMBO have been comparable with Manhattan for the last three to four years. And in the last two years Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill have accelerated in price, she says. In Boerum Hill one bedrooms went from $2,170 in January 2011 to $2,750 a year later, an increase of about 27 percent.

In Manhattan neighborhoods, such as Harlem, certain areas of the Financial District, Northern Manhattan and Midtown West, a renter can find a comparable or even cheaper apartment. Of those places, Harlem is probably the best known for affordable apartments, and was by far the lowest priced area in the MNS January report. Doorman building rents were $1,433 for studios, $2,023 for one bedrooms and $ 3,300 for two bedrooms. In non-doorman buildings studios were $1,398, one bedrooms were $1,793 and two bedrooms were $2,218.

But the far Upper East Side, typically east of Third Avenue, is another neighborhood that is a great choice for renters, says Behringer. Though it’s not as economical as Harlem, it’s one of the lowest priced areas in Manhattan. Many students live there, so there’s plenty of inventory and a large turnover, which slows down the market somewhat.

If you’re living in a more expensive Manhattan neighborhood like Chelsea, says Behringer, “a great option is to go a little further up and a little bit further east. That tends to be the trend.”

A mason working on the roofline of a condominium and townhouse development in 2008. Today, the neighborhood is one of the most expensive in Brooklyn. (AP)

But Behringer likes Brooklyn. She has lived in Fort Greene since 1997. “People thought I was a little bit out of my mind,” she says. It was a rough neighborhood when she first moved there, but she knew from working in real estate that the area had potential and would see future growth because it was so close to the city.

She was right. And in the last three years Fort Greene has become very expensive, says Behringer. “You can’t find a one bedroom here for under $2,000,” she says. “That’s not a bargain to me.”

Brooklyn’s best selling point is no longer affordable rents.

As pioneers like Behringer came over to Brooklyn, businesses followed, expanding the shopping and entertainment options. Today this growth continues, and is characterized more by independent business rather than chain stores.

People come for the residential feel that Brooklyn’s always had, and is lacking in most of Manhattan, but now there are more amenities. Behringer never hears people say they want to move back to Manhattan, and many want to stay in Brooklyn long term.

When Barrocas started in the real estate business 12 years ago, he used to encounter people that weren’t familiar with Brooklyn and didn’t know how close it was to jobs and life in Manhattan, but its proximity no longer seems to be an issue.

Convenience to Manhattan is an important factor in rental prices. But Williamsburg and Downtown Brooklyn have also benefited from the development of high-rise luxury buildings. These areas have fewer height restrictions, and there’s been a lot of development to meet demand, particularly in Williamsburg.

“It’s certainly, if not the fastest, one of the fastest growing neighborhoods that I’ve ever been involved with in the last 10 years,” says Barrocas.

In Williamsburg, the rental inventory consists of many condominiums that were bought as rental investments, says Behringer. And owners can charge a premium for them.

Rent only buildings are also being developed. The development company Avalon Bay already has a high-rise luxury building in Fort Greene, and is opening one on Willoughby Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn that will have about 800 units, says Behringer. People are willing to pay a lot for these amenity-packed Brooklyn buildings, and are quickly filling up the units.

Renters priced out of Williamsburg are now going to more affordable neighborhoods such as Bushwick, Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights, says Barrocas. 

For now Prospect Heights and Clinton Hill remain on the cusp of the more popular neighborhoods, says Behringer. But those places won’t stay on the edge for long, she says, and others, such as Bed-Stuy, could see a real turnaround in a couple years.

What You Can Get for $2,000 in Brooklyn and Manhattan

Brooklyn’s priciest neighborhoods are now on par with some of Manhattan’s neighborhood deals. All monthly rents are from January 2012. (Source: MNS Real Estate)

Rabbi Liberow of Chabad Flatbush calls the billboard "disgusting." (Vikram Patel/The Brooklyn Ink)

On the evening of March 7, the Jewish community in Brooklyn celebrated the start of Purim, a holiday commemorating the salvation of the Jews from destruction at the hands of a Persian ruler named Haman. But Wednesday night ushered in a bit of unwelcomed text as well: a large billboard along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that reads, in both English and Hebrew, “You know it’s a myth, and you have a choice.”

The provocative advertisement was put up by American Atheists, a Cranford, N.J.-based organization of non-believers that says it wants to target closeted atheists in what they call “insular communities.” The group has also put up an identical billboard in Paterson, N.J. – with Arabic replacing the Hebrew script – hoping to target potential atheists in the sizable Muslim population there.

Blair Scott, the group’s director of communications, said its goal is not to mock people for their beliefs, but to reach out to those in the Jewish community who fear they’ll be ostracized if they came out as atheists.

“If you don’t know it’s a myth, then you’re not the target audience,” Scott said.

The Hebrew billboard was originally slated to go up Monday on South Fifth Street in Brooklyn, next to the Williamsburg Bridge, but Scott claims the owner of the building, Kenneth Stier, was pressured by leaders in the Hasidic community to not go through with it. When contacted by phone, Stier insisted that he wasn’t pressured by religious leaders, but then declined to comment on any further questions.

Many Hasidic Jews find the billboard offensive, like Rabbi Zalman Liberow from Chabad Lubavitch, a Hasidic movement, in Flatbush.

Jews frown on spelling out "God" (left) because it is such a holy term (Photo courtesy: American Atheists)

“This is really disgusting,” he said, sitting in a large van called the Mitzvah Tank on 14th Street and Kings Highway in Brooklyn, which serves as a sort of mobile synagogue. “I can understand why Christians or other religions would want to convert people,” he added, “but why would an atheist want to make other people atheist?”

Jews traditionally frown upon spelling out “God” because it is considered so holy. And while Scott said the decision to write it in Hebrew on the billboard was not intentional, he has no reservations about American Atheists’ decision.

“We’re not privy to their rules,” Scott said. “We don’t have to follow their dogma.”

This is not American Atheists’ first provocative campaign. The group drew sharp criticism from Christians in late November 2010, when it posted a billboard depicting a Nativity scene that read, “You know it’s a myth. This season, celebrate reason.”

Moishe Friedman, a Williamsburg resident who thinks the billboards are a ploy to drive traffic to the atheists’ website, said that Jewish people don’t go around telling people from other religions that they’re wrong for their beliefs – and neither should a group like American Atheists.

“I think non-Jewish people will build up a bad perception of the Jewish community and Jewish people in general,” he said. “Keep it to yourself.”

The billboard now sits on Meeker Avenue, above the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a little more than a mile-and-a-half north of the original Williamsburg location. Scott said the billboard company, Clear Channel Outdoor, was extremely apologetic, and has given the atheists five free days of advertising in its current location.

He said both billboards together cost around $15,000, which came from the group’s billboard fund, which is made up of individual donations and donations made directly to the billboard fund.

The advertisements come just a few weeks before the Reason Rally, a gathering of atheists, agnostics and other “free thinkers” schedule to take place on March 24 at the National Mall in D.C.

Rabbi Liberow believes campaigns like American Atheists’ are particularly dangerous for vulnerable youth whose faith may be wavering.

“It could give an extra push for people who are looking for freedom,” he said. “Obviously, a person would rather not have the burden of faith haunting him.”

The Brooklyn Lens webcast for the week of March 2, 2012.

David Rees, master pencil sharpener and comedian turned his hobby into a profession.He now runs a pencil sharpening business from his home that earned close to $10,000.00 last year. Last month, he shared his techniques with others by reading from his manual at Pete’s Candy Shop in Brooklyn.

A rendition of what a deck over the BQE trench might look like. (Image courtesy of Dland Studio)

The bright sun was perfect for a bit of shopping. Bundled up in a coat and scarf, Heather Roslund joined the Saturday crowd that was walking the gauntlet of stalls on Union Avenue that comprises the McCarren Park Greenmarket.

McCarren Park is the only public green space of any size in North Brooklyn, but activists like Roslund are working hard to get the City to create new areas.

Union Avenue runs north into the park and dead-ends into Driggs Avenue, cutting off a small recreation area—on maps, a green triangle—from the rest of the park. But each Saturday, this part of Union Avenue hosts the local farmers’ market. The section of blacktopped road between the intersections with 12th Street and Driggs Avenue, normally accessible to automobiles, is blocked off with cones. Up and down the street, vendors sell seasonal produce, free-range eggs and grass-fed beef.

Although the market will remain, before long the road itself will be gone—literally wiped off the map. When that happens, this stretch of Union Avenue will be rezoned as parkland, and a space that is currently available for public use only for a few hours each Saturday will become permanently open.

Eventually, the blacktop will be torn up, but rezoning must precede any physical transformation of the land. A lot of paperwork remains to be done before the road can be demapped, as the procedure is called, but Roslund, who is chair of the Land Use Committee for Brooklyn’s Community District 1, can already envision uses for the open space to come.

“The idea of having it be a plaza space is really nice, which is the idea I’ve heard put forward most often. It could be really useful [even] without literally being more grass,” she said.

The transformation of Union Avenue is one of several initiatives currently being pursued by local officials, non-profits and citizen activist groups to address the severe lack of open space in this historically park-poor community. These initiatives range from the renovation of a vacant lot owned by the Parks Department to the construction of an ambitious elevated park over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that will reunite a long-sundered Williamsburg.

According to an open space study conducted by the Greenpoint Waterfront Association for Parks and Planning, a non-profit coalition, Brooklyn’s Community District 1, which encompasses Williamsburg and Greenpoint, has only 0.6 acres of open space per 1,000 residents. The Department of City Planning suggests an open space ratio of at least 2.5 acres per 1,000 residents.

In Community District 6, which includes Park Slope, Red Hook and Gowanus, 6.1 percent of the total land area is set aside for open space. District 1, with Williamsburg and Greenpoint, is far more populous with far less open space—only 4.4 percent of the land area.

Every open space project in North Brooklyn proceeds in the long shadow of Bushwick Inlet Park—a park that exists mainly in the realm of political promises.

In 2005, Mayor Bloomberg made the promise—that the City would build a 28-acre waterfront park—to pacify opposition to the controversial rezoning of North Brooklyn. Bushwick Inlet Park was intended to revitalize the waterfront and provide more open space for the increased numbers of residents attracted by the rezoning. As envisioned, the park will be a series of open spaces and private developments linked by an esplanade, and will extend all the way from the Williamsburg Bridge to the tip of Greenpoint.

Six years later, however, Bushwick Inlet Park still has not materialized.

Roslund says it may take another 10 years or more for the new park to become a reality. At the time of the 2005 rezoning, six entities owned the land that that would make up the park. So far, the city has been able to buy out only three. On two of these properties, no ground has been broken for the park development.

“It’s been six years since the rezoning, and they’re only working on the first parcel,” said Roslund, who is also the president of 2plus3 Architects.

As progress toward Bushwick Inlet Park’s completion drags on, alternative open space projects become increasingly attractive.

So far, the Open Space Alliance, a local conservancy group, has spent about $50,000 on consultants and feasibility studies for the Union Avenue project. The rezoning process is a long and arduous one that winds its way through numerous city agencies. Before the community board’s Land Use Committee can approve the measure, it has to be certified by the Department of City Planning.

Another property under development is a vacant lot at 50 Kent Ave., once the site of a Department of Sanitation truck depot, which the City demolished in 2009. Now the Parks Department is turning the property—located on an industrial street a block from the East River—into open space.

An empty lot at 50 Kent Ave. that is mapped to become a part of Bushwick Inlet Park. (Photo by Brian Eha / The Brooklyn Ink)

Unlike Union Avenue, 50 Kent is already mapped as parkland—it will eventually form part of Bushwick Inlet Park—but it’s not currently useable by the public. The lot where the sanitation garage once stood is now a vast stretch of asphalt surrounded by a chain-link fence. Considerable imagination is needed to see it as a public space where people will want to hang out.

“Zoning-wise, it’s parkland. We just have to do some things to it to give people a reason to come and use it,” Joe Vance, a board member of OSA, said.

According to Stephanie Thayer, executive director of OSA and the Parks Department administrator for North Brooklyn, the Parks Department doesn’t have the funds to turn 50 Kent into a green park, so in the short term OSA is planning to turn the site into a space for concerts and other community events.

Roslund is excited by the possibilities, but wants more than rock concerts in the new facililty. “OSA has been working to move the focus away from just rock concerts to more varied programming. If the diversification is successful, that could be a really good thing for the community,” she said.

Vance cautioned, however, that remediation of the land may be necessary before anything new can be developed. There is a possibility that toxins from the sanitation plant leached into the soil. Still, the timetable for renovation looks good.

“More than likely the concerts will be held there next year,” he said.

The most ambitious open space proposal under consideration in North Brooklyn will do much more than provide opportunities for recreation: it will reconnect two halves of Williamsburg. The plan would create a green park to “deck over” a trench section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway between Broadway and Grand Street, thus undoing the bifurcation of that part of Brooklyn that occurred decades ago in one of the grand undertakings of famed urban planner Robert Moses, then chairman of the Tri-Borough Bridge and Tunnel Authority.

The hope is that the new elevated park would reduce air pollution, end the division of Williamsburg’s Southside, ease the overuse of other recreation spaces, such as McCarren Park, and provide a draw, if not additional real estate, for commercial activity in the area.

The plan has political support, including from Councilwoman Diana Reyna (D–34), among other local politicians. Her deputy chief of staff, Bennett Baruch, called the BQE a “blight,” and drew a connection between the high rates of obesity and asthma in North Brooklyn and the lack of park space.

Parks already exist on either side of the BQE, and the goal of any new development, he said, will be “joining those spots and making it a more active and enjoyable experience for people.”

Ever since the construction of the BQE, residents on both sides of the highway have referred to those on the far side as being from “the other side”—a habit of speech that has become an ingrained and alienating attitude toward their ostensible neighbors.

Architecture firm Dland Studio has produced a conceptual plan for bridging the divided community. The plan breaks down into stages what will surely be a monumental and expensive undertaking. The first stage calls for the planting of trees on streets bordering the BQE and for the addition of greenery to the trench walls. Ultimately, a park would bridge the below-street-level trench, providing air-cleaning vegetation and much-needed recreation space.

There is also talk of providing space for residential or commercial buildings on a platform over the expressway. “This could be potentially very beneficial economically for this area,” Baruch said.

As for the expansion of McCarren Park, that little green triangle—which includes a dog run and a picnic area—may not be isolated for much longer. Once Union Avenue is rezoned, Vance said, the sidewalks will be taken up and the fences separating the former roadway from other areas of the park will come down. But people will be able to start enjoying the new space even before these changes take effect.

“We have physical changes we would like to see made. But the reality is, we can put up barriers [to block off the street] and it’s instantly usable by people,” he said.

Vance said that OSA has kept the plans for Union Avenue quiet until now because the organization doesn’t want to get people’s hopes up in the event the proposal might fall through. But signs are positive, and residents of Williamsburg and Greenpoint may find themselves with new parkland inside of a year or two. The big question remaining is what to do with the space.

“As soon as it’s certified and we’re sure it’s for real, we’ll start a public process to get ideas and start designing what it could be,” Vance said.

Steven Thompson and his studio's color (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

I | Art, To Start

Locust Hill, South Carolina is not a town. The small community on the outskirts of Greenville has a population barely large enough to register on a Google map. There are two roads and one lake. There are houses, but not many of them. Steven Thompson spent his first 18 years along these winding narrow roads, where everybody knew everybody, and nothing seemed to change.

Then one day he opened his front door and walked out. Destination: Clemson University. There were massive libraries there – appropriate, for someone intent on majoring in literature. They had a football team – Thompson was a huge fan. But one month in, still fresh in his dorm, his journey began to slow. Feelings obscured. Anxiety set in. On his own for the first time, Thompson broke down.

“Everything just became so bizarre to me…things were fundamentally without understanding,” he says today, fiddling with the wheels of a toy skateboard in his cluttered Williamsburg studio. “I don’t think I’m an artist BECAUSE of the nervous breakdown, but it definitely helped.”

Indeed, it took Thompson five years (and a transfer to the College of Charleston) before he took his first studio art class – a one-month short course on printmaking. He spent those five years as a pendulum. Sometimes a recluse, sometimes gregarious. Always, though, with a deep, unabiding, and simply unexplainable internal pain.

Slowly, tentatively, Thompson applied oil paint to plexiglass for his first project. His inner dialogue, still turbulent years after his Clemson episode, began to calm. Each brush stroke brought Thompson closer to secret places in the deep recesses of his person. Each color sang to him. In art, he could get lost in discovery. Thompson took a deep breath.

“You could say ‘I’m going to walk out this door and go into the city. I plan to go to a bar. I hope to meet my friend.’ But when the day comes around, you never know,” he says. “You could walk out the door and get smacked down by a car, and you’re gone forever.”

“When I sit down to make a work of art, it’s kind of like I’m stepping out of my door. I don’t really know what is going to happen. I have an idea of where I want to go, but I don’t know exactly where I’m going to end up.”

20 years after his first class, and it’s others who discover Thompson. They see him at galleries in New York City. In Georgia. In North Carolina. And on a cold December day, a former exotic dancer from Austin, Texas will walk into Oslo Coffee Roasters in Brooklyn and discover Thompson herself.

Merget, Ben, and the bean machine (Alexander Abnos/The Brooklyn Ink)

II | Brooklyn’s Roaster

Downtown Williamsburg may be a brick-and-mortar neighborhood, but glass and metal are beginning to loom large. Their smooth, silvery surfaces provide the facade for many an upscale condo building popping up in the area, monuments to gentrification for a community in flux.

Things begin to change to the north and west of McCarren Park. Here, glass shards powder the streets, lined with nothing but warehouses. A faint rumble emerges from one building on the corner, with chipping grey paint and a creaking front door. Motorcycle logos plaster the outer wall, appearing faded in the afternoon sun. Inside, mountains of dead metal and tools lie scattershot throughout the concrete floors. The rumble loudens. It smells like morning. In a side room, a door slides open, and within a single step you find yourself at the epicenter of one of Brooklyn’s most successful independent coffeehouses.

“Coffee always changes. It’s never the same,” says J.D. Merget, the founder and owner of Oslo Coffee Roasters. He has to raise his voice to be heard above the din of the roaster, currently cooking beans from a far away land. “It has a life at each stage. It has a life when it comes to us, it has a life when it’s roasted, and it has a life when it’s been brewed. It’s constantly evolving…or devolving, as the case may be.”

One thing that hasn’t changed is the roaster itself. The model in Oslo’s partition of this warehouse was made in the early 1980s, but the design has not been fundamentally altered since the early 20th century. Encased in dark red metal, a giant barrel rhythmically revolves. The coffee beans inside tumble like laundry, visible only through a tiny porthole on the front of the machine. Temperature and timing are paramount here. Cook the beans one second too long, one degree too hot, and the taste will suffer. Merget periodically removes a small metal bar from the front of the machine. It contains a sample of the beans within. Placing it near his nose, he inhales deeply. Not quite time yet.

Merget tuned in to this process some time ago. Formerly head of quality control and roasting at Kobricks Coffee in New Jersey, he started Oslo in 2003 at the insistence of his wife Kathy. The rationale for their shops location – on Roebling and Metropolitan in Williasmburg – was simple. It was cheap. Soon they found other advantages.

“It used to be you couldn’t get me to cross the bridge and visit my friends in Williamsburg. Now you can’t get me to cross the opposite way and go to Manhattan,” he says. “That happened pretty quick. Once we opened the store it was just like ‘What were we doing? This is such a great neighborhood.’”

Merget takes a sip of a new brew. This time, from the tiny African country of Burundi. Placing his nose inside the small glass tester cup, he inhales a sweet, floral bouquet. Taking a sip, the sensation turns to tart grapefruits, a short pause, and a finish of burnt sugar and tobacco. He nods approvingly, sets the cup down, and waits. In five minutes, he says, this same cup of coffee will taste noticeably different.

“The neighborhood is constantly changing, too,” he says. “It’s not what it was 10 years ago. It went from a sleepy little town that swelled on the weekends with visitors to the hustle and bustle of New York City.”

What has always remained, though, are the residents and their stories. When he started Oslo, Merget worked behind the counter all day, six days a week. He met customers from all walks of life, all pursuing their passions just like him. He got to know them. What they do. How they think. Where they’re going, and where they’ve been.

“At some point,” he says, “Brooklyn became this machine that attracts more and more and more creative people.”

The time has come. In one fell swoop, Ben (Oslo’s roaster operator) opens the door to the machine’s barrel, allowing an avalanche of steaming hot coffee beans to land on the platform below. Through air holes on the surface of the sifter, steam is sucked out while mechanical arms stir and jostle wave after wave of beans.

Merget observes this and takes another sip of the now-lukewarm Burundi coffee. The grapefruit is still there, but less pronounced. The pause between start and finish extends at least twice as long as it did previously. The taste experience ends with a new, flowery finish. In short, it tastes like a completely different cup of coffee.

“Ultimately, [the community] is simple,” he says. “It’s like-minded people coming together because we have passions and Brooklyn has the facilities for us to do what we want to do.”

A lever is pulled, and the now-cooled beans fall through a trap door in the roaster and into a grey plastic trash can. Another machine will sift through the beans to remove any rocks or debris that could ruin the grinders. Within a day, they’ll be up for sale in brown paper bags.

Brown bags and business (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

III | Fashion and Function

The acid-washed denim vest needed some spicing up. That’s all Nayantara Banerjee knew. It needed flash. Pizazz. Style. Something feminine and eye-catching. Something fit for a Barbie doll. Because that’s exactly what the vest was.

“It was basically just a tube of fabric,” Banerjee says of the doll’s garment, the subject of the first sewing project she ever completed. Using a needle, thread, and advice from her mother, Banerjee added lime green lace trim to the collar and arm holes. She was six years old.

“I was not a prim and proper type of kid,” she says now, at 27. “My little brother, a little boy, thought I was disgusting.” She places special emphasis on “I,” as if her brother had no room to talk.

“He used to make me wash my hands before I played his Nintendo.”

So Banerjee’s hands turned to sewing instead. Her personal wardrobe expanded to include custom creations – constructed by herself, still with the help of her mother. Even with a bigger canvas, the Barbie doll aesthetic remained.

“I started getting really particular about what I wanted,” she says.” I wanted really girly things like huge full skirts and puffy sleeves.”

She wore them all with sneakers, to run around in.

Banerjee says this seated on a chair in the middle of her studio apartment in East Williamsburg. She sips at a cup of Oslo coffee. Banerjee glances around and apologizes for the haphazard look of her front room. “I used to live across the street…I only moved in here a month ago,” she says. There is nothing to apologize for. Her apartment is well-kept, outside of the pins, needles, thread spools, and scissors that smatter the surface of a wide wood table pressed against the wall.

But those things are to be expected in the home of a door-to-door seamstress.

“As friends started to be bridesmaids, they would ask me for alterations, then friends of friends started asking and I got requests for custom made things. Then one day on a whim I was just like ‘I’m gonna quit my job and see if I can make this work.”

Her job at the time involved posting instructional sewing videos and managing the web site of a fashion design start-up. Before that, with the ink still drying on her degree in fashion design (Syracuse), she worked for a company making women’s suits. In both jobs, marketing and trends directed the work. Banerjee’s mailbox became stuffed with magazines, their smooth pages dominated by advertisements and the smell of various perfume samples. Her Twitter feed became a tangled web of “what’s hot now” and “the next big thing.” It became too much to handle. Banerjee cancelled her subscriptions, and embarked on a simpler path.

“I get fed up with the branding and marketing of clothing sometimes,” she says. “We live in a world where people want something new, something more, and somebody’s going to give it to them. But a lot of times they’re just expressing that they want to look a certain way, not that they are a certain way.”

Today she trades under the title “The Williamsburg Seamster” – a play on the “scenester” title bestowed on so many of North Brooklyn’s more fashionable, event-attending types. When she started the business six years ago, Banerjee was a bartender, too. Now, she is the same as when she was six. She sews garments, and runs around.

“I don’t know that I could do it in another neighborhood,” she says. “There’s something about this North Brooklyn area. People are open with their homes, I offer a unique service…it just fits in with everything this neighborhood is about right now.”

Banerjee hasn’t left the design game completely. But now she plays it on her own terms. Just after quitting her job and before The Williamsburg Seamster matured, Banerjee began custom-making garments again. This time, for her friends. This time, it needed to be simple. Functional. The antithesis of everything the fashion and design industry was marketing towards.

Within a year, she nearly sold out her batch of customized aprons.

“They’re like giant pockets,” she says.

Banerjee and the tools of her trade (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

The Ehlers adjustment (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

IV | To Learn To Turn

At one point, Barb Ehlers greeted her clients in full rock climbing gear. Rugged boots, thick pants, and, sometimes, jackets with untold amounts of pockets. Ehlers, 5 foot 11 inches with fiery red hair and relentlessly focused expressions, had climbed Mount Everest on a whim. People paid her to get them in top shape now, and with no company dress code to follow, she would wear whatever she damn well pleased.

Today, in a studio on the 16th floor of a Manhattan high-rise, Ehlers dons a light blue tank top and black tights that cling to her slim, toned frame. Hair up, her expressions remain focused, even while laughing at the scene she finds herself in. She stands well over 6 feet now, the extra inches courtesy of a pair of black patent leather platform heels that lace up nearly to the top of her knees. It’s Wednesday night – time for her stripper class.

“I’ve been a jock all my life,” she says. “I know how to use my body. I know the muscles. But there’s this sexiness to using your body that I was never taught.  I can do push ups and pulls ups with a guy. I can dead-lift 205lbs, but to do a little sexy turn? That’s work for me!”

Ehlers, a personal trainer living in Williamsburg, takes this class each week with seven other women. Their instructor, Kimberly Smith, leads them through an array of moves that involve gyrating hips, slow leans forward, and dipping tooshes. Ehlers’ partner sits on a low-lying wicker chair while Ehlers uses the back of it to lift her body up with her arms. Carefully, Ehlers places her knees across her partners lap and shifts the weight from hand to hand. The goal here is to bob enticingly over the subject, lift up with the arms, extend legs, place toes on the ground, and slide the torso down slowly. Very slowly. And very, very close.

This is a bicycle, into a James Brown, into a full body slide.

“It’s just like a mountain climber!” Smith says as she demonstrates for the class.

“Yeah, I know,” says Ehlers. “That’s what I’m good at!”

Born in Bremen, Germany, Ehlers came up in a family where even her grandmother biked from place to place. Time passed by with roughhousing sessions from her sister. Eating took place at regular intervals, in controlled amounts. Breakfast. Big lunch. Something small in the evening.

At six, she moved to Queens. The transition was easy, but the kids seemed…different.

“It was like ‘Why aren’t you rolling around in the mud? Why aren’t you riding your bike around like a race car?’,” she says. “I felt tomboyish. There’s more of a gender difference here than there was there.”

There’s an atmosphere difference as well. In Queens, the Ehlers lived close by JFK airport, where the roar of passing jets (and their resulting pollutants) imbued the air. Just after moving to a new country, Barb developed a severe case of asthma.

“It hit me like a truck,” she says. “I couldn’t play, and I loved playing. I loved being outside, and I couldn’t do it. It takes your childhood life away.”

Soon, regularly scheduled pills went along with her regularly scheduled meals. A new character – an inhaler – added itself to the cast in her pockets. By 12, Ehlers had enough. She would breathe when she damn well pleased. She became a vegetarian, and her mother enrolled her in a karate class. At the beginning, she couldn’t make it through without reaching for her inhaler.

“I just couldn’t breathe,” she says. “Every time I got active, it got worse.”

Her sensei, an imposing man named Lee Ireland, would have none of it. Even as Barb gasped for air on his mat, the message rang firm.

“Breathe it out,” he commanded steadily, regularly.

“Just breathe it out.”

She did. Ehlers has not touched an inhaler since.

“A good teacher can show you a vision of yourself that you didn’t know was possible,” she says. “That’s something that I try to do with my clients, too, as a personal trainer. It’s the gift that [Ireland] gave me.”

Today, Ehlers trains so much, so vigorously, and in so many different ways that she needs to have clothes adjusted twice a year to account for her constantly changing body shape. TRX training, for example, has taken in her abdomen a couple inches. This is good. But now her little black dress poofs out at the sides. This is not good.

So at 10 a.m. the morning after her stripper class, Nayantara Banerjee pays a visit to Ehlers’ cozy one bedroom apartment in one of the last-remaining old style walk-ups by McCarren. Standing in front of a mirror in her living room, Ehlers lifts her arms up over her head as Banerjee carefully marks her body’s outline with safety pins.

A series of dead weights lie neatly on the floor next to the mirror, ordered according to size.

Kimberly Smith at work (photo by Halston Bruce / courtesy StripXpertease) and Thompson's work at rest (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

V | The Cycle

The man carried stacks of money. Each stack contained one hundred dollars. All in ones. He sat in a low-lying chair in dim light, throwing bills on the strip club’s stage for whichever dancers he liked the most. Swigging vodka, the man leaned back in his seat. It creaked under his considerable girth. He liked Kimberly Smith. So when she came around to collect her tip, he told her a few things.

Smith looked at the man with wide brown eyes. She smiled with disarming grace. Then she walked away toward the manager of the club, demanding that the man be thrown out immediately. The manager remembered the stacks of money, and where his customer was currently spending it. He declined. The man would stay right where he was.

“Every single night there’s so much – you’re groped, you’re touched, you’re talked dirty to – there’s too much happening in one night to remember one situation,” Smith says, struggling to recall exactly what it was the man said that drove her to quit after 10 years of being a stripper. “That’s when I felt like I should move on. Nobody was on my side.”

Smith went home early, and angry. Sleep evaded her. At 3 a.m., she called the club, and told them to find a new dancer. Five years later, with StripXpertease, she teaches women from all walks of life the moves she learned.

There is an important caveat, though. Nobody is ever, in any way, encouraged to strip professionally.

“I get calls all the time from people saying ‘I want to be a stripper’ and my response is ‘Well, we can’t help you,’” she says. “I’m turning away money, but I just can’t justify helping some naive girl get into that industry, and then lord knows what happens to her. I don’t want that on my conscience.”

She knows all too well the cyclical, absorbing nature of the profession. Smith was in 6th grade in Austin when her drug-abusing mother moved them into a halfway house. Both of their housemates worked as strippers. One was still using. Both frequently strutted the hallways fully topless, as if it was the most normal, natural thing in the world. After all, they were just breasts.

“Looking back, it was bizarre to be living in that situation,” Smith says, emphasizing that she suffered no abuse or wrongdoing during her stay there. “I mean, they were strippers. It just wasn’t an ideal situation for a child to be in.”

But even as the women around her toiled in search of a better life, Smith couldn’t help but admire them a bit. These women were confident. They were in control. They had amazing bodies and exuded potent sexuality. In the comfort of the gaze of others, they could be the stars of their own intimate stage. For Smith, who long aspired to be an actress, these were significant qualities.

At the age of 18, she got a job as a dancer at a local club. Her 10-year journey through the seedy underbelly of strip clubs began.

“Girls are constantly getting evicted, getting their phones turned off, not being able to pay their bills, and they’re in this constant cycle,” she says. “That’s why girls dance to really sad music or really hard music. They’re angry. It’s just a horrible job. You’re getting paid to rub your crotch, your butt, your boobs on his penis. Nobody really wants to do that.”

Smith’s StripXpertease lesson plan simply removes money from the equation. Women, she says, want to know how to move, feel, be sexier. Victoria’s Secret rakes in countless millions based on that very concept. So do make-up companies. And hair salons. Buy this bra. Apply this mascara. Take on this expensive style. Even pole dancing classes, popularized by actress Sheila Kelley, market themselves as a physical fitness regime. There are tangible, physical results.

Smith’s aim is entirely mental. In the eyes of many, this makes it all the more dangerous. StripXpertease has been kicked out of multiple studios and received negative press, while pole dancing flourishes (despite the fact that most women do not have a pole in their homes). A YouTube video of Smith performing a routine with annotations explaining how she was moving and why was taken down by site administrators. Meanwhile the exact same video, without annotations, remained live.

“Apparently it’s more offensive to teach people how to do this nasty stuff than just doing the nasty stuff,” she says.

The solution would seem to be to open her own studio, but it’s easier said than done. The two main ingredients – money and time – are in short supply for Smith at the moment. In Williamsburg, though, she has a liberal, open neighborhood more likely to accept her enterprise with open arms.

“When I first moved out here I didn’t like it at all,” she says. “It’s like…everyone’s white. Everyone has a decent amount of money. Everyone’s ‘cool.’ It just seemed so pretentious. I said ‘If I’m going to live in the white suburbs, I’m going to go back to Texas where it doesn’t snow.’”

“It’s grown on me, though. I like the small, mom and pop feel here. I think a studio would do really great.”

Smith lives with her boyfriend in an apartment just off the hustle and bustle of Bedford Avenue. On a cold December day, she walks through the light drizzle into Oslo Coffee Roasters. The barista greets everyone who enters, including Smith, with a pleasant, familiar “hello.” Several pieces of art hang on the walls of the cafe, including one large web of wood and plastic suspended across from the front counter.

Smith’s eyes squint as she examines the sculpture. At first, it looks like little more than a series of translucent plastic bags suspended by planks. She inches closer.

“Oh!” She exclaims. It has become clear that inside the plastics are countless small woodcut figures, with intricate swooping patterns drawn in pen on top of them. Smith’s eyes settle back into their wide gaze. Her raised cheeks begin to relax with understanding.

“That’s a lot of work right there,” she says. “That’s so cool.”

There is a pause.

“What’s the artist’s name?”

Jason Jones and collaborator Constantine Prishep at their art collective, 'Not An Alternative.'. (Photo by Brian Eha/The Brooklyn Ink)

Williamsburg’s hard-won reputation as a center of artistic production is becoming increasingly threadbare. The relocation of an art collective and the shuttering of several galleries and event spaces in recent months have called into question whether the neighborhood will remain the rough and ready haven for artists it once was.

The recent casualties—Not An Alternative, Cinders Gallery, Monster Island, Secret Robot Project and other evocatively named arts organizations—have all shut down or left Williamsburg in the last 12 months due to rising property prices.

“There’s a trend that’s been in place for a while now,” said Sto Len, former co-owner of Cinders Gallery, which shut its doors in December 2010. “Many artists and art spaces that I dearly love have had to move in the past year.”

Williamsburg, like other now-upscale neighborhoods before it, was once a welcome retreat for artists.

In 2003, when art collective Not An Alternative set up shop at 84 Havemeyer St., the neighborhood “was a totally different place,” said co-founder Jason Jones. Rents were cheap, and there were plenty of abandoned factories whose landlords were happy to rent them out as studios, production spaces and loft dwellings.

Beginning in the 1990s and continuing through much of the 2000s, the possibility inherent in these gritty conditions drew a wave of artists like Jones and his associates.

That wave has all but rolled back. The artistic community that forged the cultural identity of the new Brooklyn is largely gone, pushed from Williamsburg by the very thing that drove its members from Manhattan to Brooklyn in the first place: astronomical rent prices.

The Not An Alternative team, whose most recent project involved an installation and signage for Occupy Wall Street, was hit with a 240 percent rent spike and two months ago relocated to Greenpoint. Jones and his wife and business partner, Beka Economopoulos, are among the latest group of artists to discover they can no longer afford to live and work in the place that once nurtured them.

“Same story that we’ve seen time and time again in the East Village and the LES and SoHo before that,” said Len.

Young creative types began to trickle into Williamsburg in the early 1990s, reversing decades of flight from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Their numbers quickly grew, and the neighborhood’s image was transformed.

Before long, cultural tourists, drawn by the new energy of the revitalized Williamsburg, began to transform the neighborhood from an authentic haven for artists into a place that manufactured what sociologist Sharon Zukin calls “an identifiable local product for global cultural consumption: authentic Brooklyn cool.”

With this newfound broad appeal came displacement—first of residents and manufacturing businesses that predated the influx of artists, then, increasingly, of the artists themselves.

“Displacement is central to the process of gentrification,” wrote DePaul University geography professor Winifred Curran in an Urban Studies paper that took Williamsburg as a case study. Curran and others, notably Zukin in her book Naked City, have detailed the process whereby Williamsburg’s growing cultural capital in the last decade brought financial capital in the form of big developers.

To some, the coup de grace came in 2005, when the city, with the enthusiastic support of Mayor Bloomberg himself, approved a major rezoning of North Brooklyn, converting the area from a primarily manufacturing zone to a commercial and residential district.

Now, property prices are six feet high and rising. According to a third-quarter report by The Corcoran Group, a real estate firm, average prices for Williamsburg condominiums have increased 16% per square foot from their average at this time last year.

West Street near Greenpoint waterfront, where 'Not An Alternative' is now located. (Photo by Brian Eha/The Brooklyn Ink)

On a recent evening at their new workshop and offices on industrial West Street near the Greenpoint waterfront, Jones was surrounded by friends and collaborators, including several members of activist design studio DSGN AGNC, which shares the space. All were refugees from Williamsburg. Their new space is unglamorous—one of their neighbors is a porn studio—but affordable.

Cinders Gallery was not so fortunate. The brainchild of young artists Sto Len and Kelie Bowman, it had operated at 103 Havemeyer St. since 2004, but closed in the face of a significant rent increase.

“It went on for six and a half years in that one space, a different exhibition each month,” said Len, a youthful Asian man with the improbable hair of a Japanese anime character. “Amazing people came through those doors.”

Bowman and Len felt the rent increase was too much, and decided to leave.

“It was a hard decision because we had so much history there, so many great memories and such a wonderful community had built up around it,” Len said.

Other Williamsburg-based art collectives and event spaces have recently moved or closed down for similar reasons. Among them are Monster Island, an arts center that shut its doors in September, and art gallery Capricious.

A number of galleries were displaced when Monster Island closed, including artist-run space Live With Animals, and have yet to find new homes. For most, it’s unlikely that their next home will be in the old neighborhood.

In their place, however, many of the retail stores and restaurants that serve cool-seekers continue to thrive—and new ones are being added all the time.

One of the latest ventures on which critics have smiled is Maison Premiere, a “barstaurant” that scrupulously recreates the ambience of the oyster and cocktail bars of fin-de-siécle Paris and old New Orleans. Despite $1.00 oysters during happy hour, it isn’t hard to run up a large bill on expensive cocktails and other scrumptious seafood dishes that are manifestly not aimed at starving artists.

In the newWilliamsburg, gentrifiers, by their very presence, have made existence impossible for the artists who made the neighborhood desirable in the first place.

Len and Bowman still haven’t found a new permanent home for Cinders, but, since leaving Havemeyer Street, they have experimented with temporary spaces and other projects, including a pop-up restaurant with a friend who is a traveling cook from Japan. Their events are grassroots and low-profile in contrast with Maison Premiere’s slick branding and promotion.

So what does the future hold? At least one new business is trying to sustain Williamsburg’s artistic identity. Paper Box, a 5,000-square-foot performance and studio space, will be opening soon at 17 Meadow St. According to marketing director Corrie Zaccaria, the landlords, who only rent to artists and musicians, are giving Paper Box a break on the rent. “They’re really cool, and we just ended up in a great situation,” she said.

It seems unlikely, however, that other art businesses will find equally sweet deals in today’s Williamsburg. Moreover, the Paper Box team is planning to install a café, making their business a hybrid foreign to artists like Jones, Len and Bowman.

With most artists gone, Len foresees a loss of cultural memory.

“We’ve all known that it was only a matter of time before the rents were going to  get too exaggerated for most artists and art spaces to be able to afford. Once everyone’s lease is up, most of the exciting things will be gone,” he said.

Asked whether he has considered what he’ll do if rent prices in Greenpoint reach Williamsburg levels, Jones is unperturbed.

“I’m sure they will,” he said. “I’m happy to move to the next center of gentrification, because I think it’s actually a good place to organize from. I’m happy to ride on the crest of that wave.”