Friday, October 29, 2021
The Story of Hasidic Vilyamsburg
During the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a brief moment when thousands of people fled New York City, and market forces pushed rents and apartment-sales prices down, at least at the luxury end of the market. But it didn't last. A pandemic that sickened over a million New Yorkers and killed over 34,000 could only keep rents down for so long.
The city's post-COVID future will probably look much like its recent past.
There is probably no neighborhood more synonymous with New York's rise from a crime-ridden post-industrial metropolis to a high-rent playground than Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Historians Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper offer a fresh take: Williamsburg's transformation as seen through the Hasidic Jewish experience. A Fortress in Brooklyn arrives on bookshelves as the pandemic seems to be abating, but it begins with another dark chapter — the surviving remnants of Hungary's Satmar Hasidim settling in Williamsburg after the Holocaust.
According to Deutsch and Casper, they only planned to stay in Vilyamsburg for a short time, as America was a "crazy country" full of assimilated Jews — they said the best profession was to be a painter, because "in America… everything is a lie, and people gloss over everything." The Satmars' start in industrial Williamsburg was so inauspicious that the sect quickly hatched plans to set up a shtetl in leafy New Jersey.
A Fortress in Brooklyn sets this stay-or-leave decision by a beleaguered Hasidic sect in a post-World War II outer-borough hinterland as a pivotal moment for the future Williamsburg. Jews had lived in the neighborhood for decades — the Williamsburg Bridge was nicknamed "Jew's Highway" because of migration from the Lower East Side after it opened in 1903 — but postwar economic policies encouraged suburban development at the expense of cities. Puerto Ricans settled in Williamsburg in the same era, but if thousands of Hasidim had pulled up stakes, it might have suffered even deeper decay and collapse. The book describes crime as a main factor for white flight to the suburbs, but it would do well to include the roles of public policy, housing discrimination, subsidized mortgages and urban divestment, which were more important before the 1960s.
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