It’s The End! Bushwick Hipster Whines About Friends Moving To Sheepshead Bay For Cheaper Rents
Sheepshead Bay is very expensive. You don’t want to move here. People get stabbed all the time, bicyclists are run off the road and we don’t have a Starbucks. It’s, like, a three-day commute into Manhattan on a train that’s full of urine, showtime boys and broken air-conditioners. Really. It sucks. Hell, our news website is called “Sheepshead Bites,” not “Sheepshead Is Da Bomb.”
We promise. It’s just terrible. Don’t move here.
Plead as we might, Sheepshead Bay may be poised for a new influx of avant garde urban explorers fleeing Williamsburg and Bushwick; neighborhoods which are just, like, ugh, so 2008.
At least that’s the case if we’re to believe one SoHo-cum-Williamsburg-cum-Bushwick-cum-Gowanus musician who whined to the Village Voice that rents were rising and no one will let them bang on drums and vomit in the street at 3:30am. Her friends are apparently already pioneering the hipster trail down here.
“Who knows when the rents will go up there?” kazzoo’d Annabelle Cazel, of the Fiery Furnaces. “Most of my musician friends have moved … way south, to Ditmas Park, Sheepshead Bay, Windsor Terrace, or Flatbush. Gowanus is done with.”
Settle down there, Madison, er, Annabelle. It’s Southern Brooklyn, but it ain’t West Virginia.
The article is actually about how the rising cost of real estate and the replacement of defunct manufacturing districts with luxury residential stock mean there’s very little affordable practice space available for bands. And residential areas make particularly bad homes for DIY rehearsal spaces, since families who have to get up early in the morning to take the kids to school and generally contribute to society don’t really want to be kept up all night long by the rock-and-roll lifestyle.
Hell, these guys even had to compromise with their neighbors. Oh, the horror!
“In the past, everyone would be rehearsing. In more recent years, we had to make agreements with our neighbors: If you let us make noise during the day, we won’t make noise at night,” said Josh Copp of some band you haven’t heard of.
We concede; all jokes aside, this a very real problem. New York City has a legacy to preserve as a bastion of art and culture, and pricing out the people trying to “make it” is just as bad as pricing out the immigrant and blue-collar families that also form pillars of our economy and culture.
And, really, we could use some better music on this end of the borough. We’re so over Vanilla Fudge playing BayFest.
But if all this turns out to be true, that the hipster trail, like the Bedford bike path, now ends at Emmons Avenue, it’s certainly the end of an era for our once sleepy yet cosmopolitan corner of Brooklyn.
Good? Bad? You tell us. We’re just here to write about it.
