“East Williamsburg, Queens”?!
I mean, if you want to get all technical about it, Queens is not actually Brooklyn, but, I mean, it basically is, right? At least that’s what one Williamsburg realty company thinks. “East Williamsburg and Ridgewood are generic neighborhoods,” a broker at Kalmon Dolgin Associates, whose offices are near McCarren Park, told DNAinfo when the website pointed out that the company advertised a building at 1828 Troutman Street as East Williamsburg even though, you know, technically speaking it’s in Queens. (Generic neighborhoods? What does that mean???) “It’s all in the same triangle,” the broker added. “The location is the L train to Jefferson, people call that East Williamsburg.” Sure, the same people who call Franklin Avenue “Pro-Cro,” and who call 55th Street and Eighth Avenue “Bay Ridge”?
The Ridgewood-Bushwick boundary is porous, and the neighborhoods’ arts communities overlap. Like, it’s reasonable for Ridgewood studios to participate in “Bushwick” art events, given that you can easily travel between the two on foot. Delineating neighborhood, and county, boundaries shouldn’t discourage cultural exchange between neighbors. It’s just one thing—bad enough!—to call everywhere in Brooklyn “Williamsburg” in order to dupe people into paying exorbitant rents; it’s another to call everywhere in the city “Williamsburg.” Right?
“This is insane,” our own Virginia K. Smith says. “It actually makes ‘East Bushwick‘ seem comparatively reasonable.” Which is the real danger here: that the truly insane will make the mildly insane look fair-minded.
Follow Henry Stewart on Twitter @henrycstewart
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