Bedford Avenue is the main shopping and transportation street in the highly gentrified portion of Williamsburg. It was never the center of production during the neighborhood’s industrial history, but it was and is the center of local commerce. Bedford has changed dramatically over the past few decades, and serves as a useful reference for charting the neighborhood’s retail changes.

In the 1970s, a one-mile stretch of Bedford Avenue from McCarren Park to the Williamsburg Bridge was home to 89 businesses and storefronts that served the needs of locals. There were grocery stores (including vegetable stands, butcher shops, bakeries, and bodegas), bars, restaurants, clothing stores, and services such as laundromats, carpenters, plumbers, some light manufacturing, and a pharmacy…

Through the mid-1990s, the majority of stores on Bedford continued to serve working class “old timers,” with some newer establishments geared toward the [newer, artistic] “Bohemian” clientele opening up. For a time, Polish butchers, Italian bakeries, and Dominican grocers existed alongside vegetarian bistros and art galleries. However, as commercial rents rose, many old-timer businesses, and later Bohemian ones, were priced out. 

Now the corporatized version of Williamsburg is a destination for its amenity-filled hotels, highly rated restaurants, popular music venues, and upscale boutiques. Even with the closure of some businesses during the pandemic, Williamsburg retail has continued to gentrify.

In the most recent decade, restaurants, cafes, and bars have come to dominate the commercial landscape, accounting for 45 percent of all storefronts on Bedford Avenue. Along the one-mile strip, there were also 17 clothing and jewelry boutiques and four upscale beauty or skin care-related businesses (see accompanying bar graph, prepared by the author). 

As gentrification has progressed in Williamsburg, the side streets have become consumption corridors of their own, with boutique shopping, a bathhouse, and several wine bars, all catering to a much broader scene than just neighborhood or New York City locals.

In the late 1990s through the early 2000s, a “double landscape” represented immigrant and artist communities, working-class and luxury; some signage included local ethnic languages and others communicated the aesthetics of French bistros and upscale diners. A decade later, it was less common to experience the double landscape. Ethnic signage and stores catering to everyday needs were still present but less visible. Longtime store owners who managed to stay had changed their business to attract new clientele, updating their décor and offerings and eliminating non-English languages on signage.

As late as 2010, Vittoria, an Italian bakery, was visually an odd man out on Bedford Avenue, a relic from another time, complete with linoleum floors, bagels stacked against the windows, and oversized muffins and cookies laid out on big yellow trays. Like the new cafes and bars, it was a social hub, but mainly for older adults who were neighborhood old timers. One day at the end of summer in 2010, Vittoria closed. Predictably, a chic café opened a few weeks later; unpredictably, that café was still Vittoria (pictured above). 

Vittoria had been a Bedford Avenue institution since the 1960s. Joseph, the current owner, inherited the business from his father. Watching the changes in the neighborhood, he estimated that he needed to make a change or go out of business, so he renovated. After the reopening, the walls were exposed brick, the floor was wood, and an antique scale sat on the counter next to an espresso machine. “We’re going for more of a café than a bakery, hoping to catch the younger people,” he explained.

The Northside Pharmacy was another longtime establishment at the corner of Bedford Avenue and North Seventh Street, a prime location right across from the subway entrance. The building’s awning included the words “Apteka,” and “Farmacia,” signaling to Polish, Puerto Rican, and Dominican residents that they would be assisted by the employees. 

By 2013, the current owners could no longer afford the rent and a Dunkin’ Donuts franchise moved in. To be able to stay in the neighborhood, the pharmacists bought their own building; they couldn’t afford to be on Bedford Avenue, so they moved to a nearby side street. With the move, the business became more upscale, selling high-end cosmetics in an updated storefront, a far cry from the crowded shelves and outdated fixtures of their previous location. The Polish and Spanish words for “pharmacy” are noticeably missing from the new storefront, and the pharmacy’s website refers to the business as a “boutique apothecary.”

Williamsburg’s transition from local community, to magnet of cool, to enclave of the wealthy has played out on the local shopping street… From the mid-2010s, an increasing number of businesses are owned by national and international high-end chains. The aesthetics and products that are welcoming for wealthy condo dwellers and visitors can have the opposite effect for existing residents, even when it comes to potential benefits of retail gentrification. One touted advantage is better access to retail and services, especially well-stocked supermarkets, but even grocery stores can signal exclusion… The signals that attract wealthier residents can act as symbolic boundaries for old timers and Bohemians. 

Because this type of retail shift is characteristic of gentrification globally, it is important to understand the roles that local businesses play in the symbolic changes of a gentrifying neighborhood. An aesthetic featuring exposed brick, bare wooden tables, and antique décor has become popular, even cliché, in Williamsburg and many other gentrified locales. Even the Dunkin’ Donuts that replaced the pharmacy has a wood-paneled exterior and an etched wooden sign. 

The trend evokes 19th century European bohemianism, erasing actual local history to create an “authentic” urban setting. These aesthetics harken back to a different time and place; Williamsburg’s immigrant and manufacturing history is ignored in this strategy. The disappearance of necessity businesses includes the erasure of ethnic products and languages, leaving old timers without a sense of ownership over these spaces.

There is a need for city governments to protect the rents of small business owners in gentrifying cities, and this must apply to purveyors of necessities. In a capitalist society, the future economic stability of former industrial neighborhoods and cities hinges on their ability to attract new residents, businesses, and visitors, but policy makers must approach this change in a way that does not exclude existing residents.

Sara Martucci is a lecturer in the department of sociology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. There Was Nothing There: Williamsburg, the Gentrification of a Brooklyn Neighborhood is published by New York University Press.

Photo by: Google Maps