There are some good old buildings still tucked in among the monstrosities of the New New Williamsburg. As long as we’ve lived here I’ve kept myself from taking pictures of them, afraid of seeing myself as a kind of hipster nostalgist. But I realized over the weekend that the only result of my avoidance is that I have no pictures of the neighborhood as it was when we moved in, and things have changed so dramatically since then that without those photos it’s almost impossible to believe that Williamsburg ever was as I remember it. It’s not so much that I feel nostalgia for those days–though I do miss, say, the Dutch Mustard building–as that I feel something like instability, a sense that I can’t quite believe things once were as i remember them. And I’m a newcomer. I’ve only been here to see the last 14 years of change. I cannot imagine what it must be like for people who grew up here. I have had a feeling that the distinguishing characteristic of native New Yorkers is not their toughness but their ability to shrug off massive change to their built environment, to resist the kinds of attachment that drive the rest of us to establish historic preservation societies. Doorways like this one remind me there’s still a lot to cherish here, for now. (And that this building was once also considered a monstrosity, and that some Victorian-era hipster nostalgist wrung his hands over the pace of change in his old stomping grounds….) #explore #williamsburg #whyirun #spring (at Williamsburg NYC)
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