In the fall of 2020, two large and very illegal Halloween parties were busted in New York City as the Covid-19 pandemic raged on. One was in eastern Williamsburg, the other in the Westchester Square neighborhood of the Bronx, both drawing people from well beyond those neighborhoods.

The sheriff who helped break up the Bronx party said that he realized something was amiss when he noticed people wearing costumes “in the middle of nowhere.” Reporting on it the next day, a local newscaster said, “The party planners picked neighborhoods like this one, industrial, empty so their parties could go largely unseen and unheard.”

This logic of finding a desolate area would make sense when planning a party for over 550 people during a pandemic, except that [the Bronx] party was not in an “empty” area. The census tract down the street from the venue has a population density of 195,863, higher than many tracts in Manhattan. I taught in the area from 2018 to 2022 and exited the subway at the same stop where the partygoers would have disembarked. The neighborhood was always bustling with food vendors, children running back and forth in the playground, teenagers celebrating their freedom from the school day, families and older folks waiting in line for a shuttle to the nearby hospital complex, and dozens of businesses of necessity as well as fast-food and sit-down restaurants.

The party was not “in the middle of nowhere” but rather in a highly populated, lower-income, and predominantly Latinx, Asian, and Black neighborhood. 

The comments from the sheriff and the news reporter are reminiscent of the descriptions of pre-gentrified Williamsburg(s). When existing populations and businesses are labeled in this way, we can imagine that gentrification is not far off. Parts of the Bronx have already been reshaped by state-led “condo-fication” efforts. The narratives of the Westchester Square neighborhood being empty and “the middle of nowhere” should alert us that it is a likely candidate for future gentrification projects and real estate speculation.

Describing the different kinds of attachment residents have to where they live sheds light on the stories we tell about gentrification and how attachment to a neighborhood helps to orient those narratives. In Williamsburg, attachment style impacted how residents organized, claimed space, and came to symbolically own their neighborhood; it mattered for how they perceived social disorder, their use of and expectations for neighborhood retail, and their perceptions of the neighborhood’s past and future. 

The tracing of Williamsburg’s contemporary history alongside the perceptions of residents who have lived there over the course of four decades highlights how the wounds of disinvestment are interpreted in disparaging ways by in-movers, media, and the city. These narratives neatly set up a justification for state-led gentrification, a mechanism for politicians to provide incentives and breaks to the real estate developers who buoy their political campaigns. 

In its wake, existing populations of residents experienced surveillance, a diminished sense of belonging, and cultural and physical displacement. Looking at the complexities of gentrification and neighborhood attachment will help us to expose the myths of state-led change, preparing residents, community organizers, and progressive urban leaders in their fights for equitable cities.

Unimaginative strategies for urban growth give rise to “Williamsburgs” around the world. Popular neighborhoods increasingly have predictable mixtures of cocktail bars, breweries, public art, coffee shops, and boutiques. If the retail, amenities, and luxury housing of Williamsburg’s gentrification are recognizable elsewhere, so are its problems.

The emptied warehouse districts and loss of jobs, the clearing away or incarceration of unhoused people, the Airbnb takeover of housing, the physical displacement through skyrocketing land value, the pricing out of subcultural or artist scenes, the erasure of existing residents and cultures through the repeated narrative that there was nothing or nobody there – these are observed globally as well. 

The goal of the Where Is Williamsburg? app, developed in 2016 to identify the world’s hip urban locales, is to never be too far from home thanks to data from users “exactly like you.” It is a promise of homogeneity, predictability, and consistency, an urban-lite experience that makes global cosmopolitans feel safe and comfortable. Developers, politicians, and corporate entities are all too eager to oblige these ideals.

The spell of homogeneous cities and displaced populations can be broken. Neighborhoods must be revitalized with public investment, housing security, and input from existing residents. Historically divested places need to be rebuilt in restorative ways that focus on uplifting existing communities. We must drop these narratives of “empty nowheres” and the privileging of gentrifiers’ perspectives at the expense of everyone else. If we fail to protect and honor existing cultures, residents, jobs, institutions, and histories, then there really will be nothing there.

Sara Martucci is a lecturer in sociology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. This piece is excerpted, with light adaptations, from her recent book There Was Nothing There, Williamsburg, the Gentrification of a Brooklyn Neighborhood, published by New York University Press.

Photo by: Luis Sansur