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A firsthand account of the swift transformation of Williamsburg,
from factory backwater to artists' district to trendy hub and
high-rise colony
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is now so synonymous with hipster culture
and the very idea of urban revitalization--so well-known from
Chicago to Cambodia as the playground for the game of ironized
status-seeking and lifestyle one-upmanship--that it's easy to
forget how just a few years ago it was a very different
neighborhood: a spread of factories, mean streets, and ratty
apartments that the rest of New York City feared.
Robert Anasi hasn't forgotten. He moved to a $300-a-month
apartment in Williamsburg in 1994 and watched as the area went
through a series of surreal transformations: gritty industrial
district, low-rent artists' enclave, dot-com denizens' crash pad,
backdrop for neo-bohemian cool, playpen for stroller-pushing trendy
parents, and now a high-rise real-estate developers' colony of
brushed aluminum and plate glass. Tight, passionate, and
provocative, The Last Bohemia is at once a celebration of the fever
dream of bohemia, a lament for what Williamsburg has become, and a
cautionary tale about the lurching transformations of city
neighborhoods. Through Anasi's eyes we see the warehouses become
lofts, secret cocaine bars become stylized absinthe parlors,
barrooms become stage sets for indie rock careers, and rents rise
and rise--until the local artists find that their ideal of personal
creativity has served the aims of global commerce and their
neighborhood now belongs to someone else.
"[A book] as good as any I've read about the sport." --George Plimpton
In his last year of eligibility, Robert Anasi, age thirty-two, decided to fight in the Golden Gloves tournament, the premier event in amateur boxing. "The gym becomes a way of life," he explains, and so it does for the reader, as Anasi ushers us into the world of training and competition, of friendly rivalry, of artistry and violence. He tells his story not as a journalist on assignment but as a man in the midst of one of the great adventures of his life, and in his hands "a dying blood sport is reincarnated as a metaphor for redemption under flawed circumstances" (Nita Rao, The Village Voice).
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