Didn’t know there was any left. The still great institution, Village Voice, has excellent piece on the city’s attempts to use zoning to keep manufacturers in “EAST” Williamsburg.
Tahini pours into tins stamped with Joyva’s signature sultan logo. Gwynne Hogan
See article by Gwynne Hogan. “East” kind of perplexed me though, since it’s kind of joining in on the gentrification process by using the name; there was never an “East” Williamsburg until Williamsburg itself got so hipster-saturated that realtors decided they’d call an adjacent ‘hood “East Williamsburg” because that would be a greater draw than calling it what it really was and is: Bushwick. Same happened at some point much earlier when realtors decided that part of the Lower East Side north of Houston would be called the East Village, because LES wasn’t cool yet and still reeked a little bit of schmaltz.
There were three Williamsburgs actually: the far southern Hasidic parts, south of the bridge; the also “south” streets that were solidly Puerto Rican and are now mixed Rican and Dominican — what Nuyoricans call “los sures”; both of these are still pretty much intact socially, especially the Hasidim. The third was the heavily Italian-American “northside,” which went from being a working-class neighborhood of the kind that New York — if any place in the United States — definitively does not have any more, through a middle period where it was a kinda old-immigranty, romantically dead waterfront zone, mixed with slight funkiness and bars you had to know in order to find, say, like Galapagos, to what it is now: the single most obnoxious neighborhood in New York.
I doubt Bushwick is safe from a comparable plague, no matter what the city has planned. To seriously fuck with the real estate industry is political suicide in New York.
I don’t know how or why Williamsburg and Bushwick were so food-oriented. I still remember being hit by the whiff of herring, bread and sweet-candiness as you crossed the Kosciuszko (pronounced “Kasi-as-ko” in Boroughese) in from Queens on the BQE.
Workers at Joyva’s confectionary plant in East Williamsburg, which may relocate after 99 years to take advantage of soaring real estate values. Gwynne Hogan
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Comment: nikobakos@gmail.com
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Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 
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