Cisco Bradley’s The Williamsburg Avant-Garde is an encyclopedic chronicle of a twenty-six-year period of cultural history, between 1988 and 2014, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, one of the most mythologized neighborhoods in recent New York City history. Beginning in the 1980s, so the mythology goes, Williamsburg’s cheap and plentiful postindustrial real estate enticed artists and musicians from Manhattan to set up do-it-yourself (DIY) spaces where they created new kinds of art, music, and performance. In 2005, the New York City Council rezoned the neighborhood, converting three decades of accumulating cultural capital into a massive influx of financial capital and triggering a wave of evictions and new construction; in 2023, an average studio apartment in Williamsburg rents for $3,800/month, and every venue included in Bradley’s study has closed. As he cogently summarizes, what happened in Williamsburg is a story of “class and racial tension and of acute financial struggle placing working-class Brooklynites, artists...

You do not currently have access to this content.