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.”

A heder in Hasidic Williamsburg (Photo: Brian Eha / The Brooklyn Ink)

Imagine you’re a Hasidic Jewish boy of perhaps five years old.

By this time, like other Hasidic boys, you’ve already been attending heder, primary school, for two years. Six days a week you rise early. Maybe you take the bus, if you live in the Hasidic community of Borough Park, or maybe you walk, if you live in Williamsburg and your heder is nearby.

There are no girls in your school. Mandatory sex segregation begins in the classroom. This segregation lay behind the unofficial signs that were posted along Bedford Avenue last month reading: “Precious Jewish daughter: Please move to the side when a man approaches.” Many New Yorkers were appalled.

But they don’t understand that Hasidic education, especially for males, is a world apart from the one most other Americans receive. Hasidic schools like yours focus on instruction in religion and Hasidic codes of conduct. By New York State and federal law, the schools are required to teach certain secular subjects, but those who have gone through the system say it’s questionable whether even this minimum standard is being met.

After morning prayer (tefilah), the rebbe leads you and your classmates through the weekly portion of Torah. In heder, the Torah—the first five books of Jewish scripture—is divided into 52 portions, one per week, and these portions are repeated throughout your school years, always in the same order, the only difference being that the rebbe teaches each passage with increasing sophistication as you grow older.

Instruction is in Yiddish, and you, like other Hasidic children, will grow up speaking Yiddish as your first language. Torah passages are read aloud—first in Hebrew, then in Yiddish.

“Mish oyf,” the rebbe might say to his young charges, “Kapitel dalet, Pusek zayin” (“Open to chapter four, verse seven.”)

Each boy sits at his own desk, and the desks are arranged in the U-shape of the fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The rebbe paces the inner arc of this horseshoe holding a cane that he uses like a conductor’s baton, chanting in a sing-song voice to aid the students’ memory.

You and your classmates repeat everything back to him, first in Hebrew, then in Yiddish. If a boy isn’t joining in, the rebbe might rap him smartly with the cane and ask, “Farvus zugsti nisht mit?” (“Why aren’t you saying along?”)

At five years old, you’re already in the third grade of the Hasidic system, but there’s still a long way to go. At 13, you become a man in the eyes of your community and enter yeshiva, secondary school. The religious instruction becomes so intense that many students choose to live in dormitories on campus, even if their families live nearby, in order to maximize their study time. And yet, in a school day that is far longer than the average New York public school student’s, only two hours are set aside for instruction in math, English and other secular subjects.

Few Hasidic men emerge from this education ready to embrace, or even to take part in, a modern society. And those who want to transition into a modern way of life after leaving the faith often find it extraordinarily difficult—not only because they aren’t equipped for most jobs, but also because, by this time, they already have a wife and children. Faced with these challenges, some ex-Hasids turn to entrepreneurialism, others to a precarious double life.

One who has found a way to profit from his old faith, and now makes a business of pulling back the curtain on the world he grew up in, is Jacob Gluck, who runs HasidicWilliamburgTour.com. Gluck was raised Hasidic in Borough Park and went to school in Williamsburg. Now an ex-Hasid, he takes paying customers on a walking tour of Hasidic Williamsburg, pointing out landmarks and explaining the history and customs of the European Jews who settled in Brooklyn after the Second World War. Today’s Hasids are descended from these immigrants who survived the Holocaust.

Ex-Hasid Jacob Gluck offers tours of Hasidic Williamsburg to paying customers (Photo: Brian Eha / The Brooklyn Ink)

“I consider myself a historian,” Gluck says. “I’m not just interested in the way things are, but in the way things came to be.”

A handsome, lively man of 32 with a shaved head and intelligent dark eyes, Gluck is deeply knowledgeable about the Old World shtetl culture that modern Hasidim seek to preserve and extend.

Since renouncing his faith at age 20, Gluck has lived in Flatbush, away from the judging eyes of the Hasidic community.

Yakov Yosef doesn’t have that luxury. A married father of six, Yosef must remain, for the time being, in Williamsburg, and keep his anti-Hasidic sentiments quiet.

“I’m somewhat outcasted, but since I have six children, I have to keep up appearances,” he says. “My wife and I live like roommates.”

Where Gluck has his tours, Yosef’s outlet is writing. He blogs for Unpious, a website for what he calls “Hasidim on the fringe.”

Yosef is a pen name. The penalty for speaking openly and critically with an outsider is severe. If it became known that he had spoken to me, his children would be expelled from school and his wife would be humiliated. Yosef himself would be shunned, and become unable to take part in his children’s lives.

For now he leads a double life, participating in his sons’ mitzvahs and observing the High Holidays while harboring deeply felt heretical thoughts.

On Friday nights, under cover of darkness, he retrieves his car from an underground garage and heads out, casually dressed, and without his kippah, to meet secular friends. That he must do this in secret is a sign of just how antithetical Hasidism is to the modern world.

Yosef still remembers the first movie he watched, at the age of 16 in the backroom of a mom-and-pop video store: Steven Seagal’s Out for Justice. Movies of any kind, like most other forms of entertainment, are forbidden by Hasidic law.

When he was 34, Yosef says, a female friend took him to the mall to buy “outsider clothes” for the first time. At the food court, he ate his first non-kosher meal in public.

Gradually, through exposure to a world outside the narrow confines in which he had always felt awkard, he began first to accept, and then to savor, many elements of modern life.

Hasidim view outsiders as, at best, anathema to their way of life, and, at worst, outright antagonistic to it. But unlike the Amish and many other separatist communities, Hasidic Brooklynites choose to live in the heart of one of the largest cities in the world. Tension and even conflict with city officials and other citizens seems inevitable.

City workers soon took down the Yiddish signs that had been bolted to trees along Bedford Avenue.

Both Gluck and Yosef are critical of Hasidic education for males, the goal of which is to produce Talmudic scholars. Science and history, English-language reading and writing, training in modern technology, even the less savory parts of Scripture—all receive short shrift in heder and yeshiva.

“You bring people into the world and don’t give them the tools of living,” says Yosef.

In their own ways, Gluck and Yosef are proof of life after Hasidism. Forever marked by their education and upbringing, they are nevertheless making a place for themselves in a wider world.

“Once you leave the bubble of the community, you learn the world is not your enemy; the world is not immoral,” Gluck says. “It’s just a beautiful world out there!”

The guest rooms of the eight story building are equipped with hardwood floors, vintage record players, and spirits such as whiskey. Next spring the hotel will face competition as a new boutique hotel will open in DUMBO, just two blocks away. The hoteliers, however, think they will have the winning hand thanks to their Midwestern charm.

“A couple of people gave our staff hugs when they checked out,” said Jim Graves. “They said it’s their new home when they come to the city.”

For more information, go to The Brooklyn Paper.

The tattoo on Tristan Fitch's arm is his representation of his spirit. (Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink)

Tristan Fitch, 40, was flipping through an archeology book when he came across an image that spoke to him and he knew instantly that he wanted it tattooed on him.

Something “clicked” when he saw the griffin, a mythical creature with the body of lion and an eagle’s head and wings. He later discovered, after having it tattooed on his arm, that the image was a representation of a tattoo archeologists discovered on a Shaman found in Mongolia.

The Shaman had been preserved in an avalanche and her skin was still intact, covered in primitive tattoos. Fitch says the revelation strengthened its appeal because of its connotations of “strength and adventure.”

Tristan Fitch designed the tattoos on his arms himself. (Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink)

Fitch, a painter and sculptor, got his first tattoo when he was 17. Very few of his friends in his hometown in Georgia then had them. It was, he says, “different” to have a tattoo at that time. The first one is on his hip and he says that he “forgets” he has it and it’s become more like a “birth mark.”

He designed the two tattoos on his arm himself. One is a symbol that features in his paintings, it represents “forward movement” and he gave it a prominent position because of the importance it holds for him.

On Fitch’s other arm is his “representation of my spirit.” The original image – an abstract motif that looks like a highly stylized floating angel – was the result of a line drawing that he did without taking his pen off the paper.

Then there’s the gecko that rests on Fitch’s ankle. It’s his “tacky” tattoo, which he had done in Hawaii. But he doesn’t want it removed because it reminds him of a happy time in his life.

See more of Brooklyn’s inked

The Brooklyn Ink went tattoo spotting recently and asked local residents, “Why did you get your tattoo?” Click on the images to read the stories behind them.

Have a tattoo you would like to share? Tweet it to us @thebrooklynink

Tim Ryans had a sunflower with Peter Pan sleeping inside tattooed on his chest after he had his heartbroken (Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink)

Peter Pan sleeps inside a sunflower on the left side of Tim Ryans’ rib cage. Ryans, a musician from Williamsburg, says he got the tattoo – his only one – after his “heart was broken for the first time.” His decision was by no means rash and the concept for a design evolved slowly. Ryans knew he wanted something that incorporated a sunflower – a nickname friends at summer camp used to call him – and his favorite childhood character, Peter Pan.

After Ryans and his girlfriend spilt up, he started to hang around a tattoo parlor in his hometown of Austin, Texas. He befriended one of the artists and told her about his idea; without Ryans even, she drew it out for him. After seeing it visualized, he knew he wanted to go ahead with it. Ryans had the tattoo done the day before he left Austin for California. The move marked a new chapter in his life and the tattoo was a concluding stamp on the previous one.

Ryans had the tattoo placed on his chest because he didn’t want it to be visible. He shows it only to “people who get to know me first.”

A couple of days ago, The New York World, one of Columbia Journalism School’s newspapers, reported that the B110, a privately operated Jewish Orthodox bus, forced women to sit on the back of the bus.

Mayor Bloomberg called the events “an outrage.”

Should the practice continue, the DOT could terminate the license of the B110. The B110 services people of all denominations, but does not allow men and women to sit together.

Read more about it at the Post. Or go to the original story here.

According to the New York Times, an additional train will run on the L line between 9 a.m. and 9:30 a.m. on weekdays starting in December. Subway officials have also promised to start running more weekend trains in summer 2012.

These additions were prompted by an in-depth New York City Transit study that showed, among other things, that the L train has seen a 141 percent increase in ridership since 1998, compared with 53 percent across the subway system at large. On Saturdays during the peak hours of 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., L trains sometimes hold as much as 35 percent more passengers than the recommended capacity.

Get the full story at the City Room blog.