ESSAY
the Brooklyn diaries Design writer and Brooklyn immigrant Anne Hellman’s two decades-long residential voyage through the borough ties in with the area’s journey from forgotten badland to creative heartland
words Anne Hellman
Williamsburg, 1997 The building on the corner of Roebling Street and Metropolitan Avenue housed four levels of sweatshops plus one top level of freshly renovated loft space. My first landlord had painstakingly refinished the vast wood floors in the two 2,100 sq ft rentals and installed decent kitchens, bathrooms, and even a shared laundry room. The west-facing windows framed a perfect Manhattan profile – glorious at sunset but truly magical at night, when the Twin Tower lights and rainbow hues of the Empire State glittered through the century-old panes. Before I moved in to one of these lofts with three roommates, the fifth floor had stored the heavy, redolent wares of a leather dealer. The sweatshops below produced machine-sewn fabrics. Most nights, the last crack addicts to linger off Hope Street muttered in the stairwell. They left us alone as we climbed, home from our just-out-of-college jobs in the city, crunching empty vials underfoot. I worked for a small design publisher then, my boyfriend as an artist’s assistant. He was an artist himself and he built a studio in our loft where he painted at night. At that time in Williamsburg, and elsewhere in Brooklyn, artist-in-residence spaces – A.I.R.s – were plentiful. Firemen dropped in on occasion to ensure we were up to code but they kept our 36
status in mind. Most of our friends lived similarly, except for the few who settled in homier railroad apartments. We didn’t leave Williamsburg on the weekends. There was the L Café for brunch and bars like Teddy’s or The Abbey at night. There was even an art gallery off Bedford Avenue, Pierogi 2000, where every one of my artist friends aspired to show. It strikes me now more than it did then that we lived in the raw remnants of Brooklyn’s industrial past. As the manufacturing hub of the United States in the 19th century, the borough, with its lengthy waterfront and vast interior, for decades provided the space for new-industry buildings. The sweatshops at Roebling and Metropolitan eventually moved out to make way for a tidal wave of urban dwellers. Rents rose, and those residents pushed further into the borough. In recent years, the same industrial lofts we used to call home have been revived for their original purpose, providing studios and communal workshops for designmakers and builders. The A.I.R. has become the design-build co-op. The transformation that has taken place in Brooklyn has been well documented, and I cannot pretend that my experience living here represents all that has changed and hasn’t changed. Brooklyn is the largest borough in New York
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