Williamsburg

Many of Brooklyn's middle-class inhabitants in 1946 had started out in Williamsburg. In 1939 The WPA Guide to New York City called Williamsburg and neighboring Greenpoint “virtually unrelieved slums,” a harsh assessment of a complex district. Not much had changed by 1946. Four decades earlier it was an economically-mixed residential district with a sizable German community as well as a major manufacturing and industrial center. In 1903 with the opening of the Williamsburg Bridge, it became virtually an extension of the Lower East Side. Delancey Street and the Jewish ghetto lay just on the other side, one subway stop or a stroll away, and a stream of immigrants of many ethnicities poured in, hoping to find more opportunity and better living conditions than in the slums they were leaving.

The bridge did not create the slums of Williamsburg. Slum blocks made up of dilapidated, wood-shingle, three and four-story tenement houses, looking like oversized frame houses, with no indoor plumbing or central heat and outhouses in the back yard, had sprung up in the 19th century close to the neighborhood's refineries, factories, warehouses, breweries, food processing plants and foundries. The newer five-story tenement buildings that were constructed to meet the new immigration were considerably better, usually with running water and indoor toilets and sometimes steam heat. The working class offspring of the older immigrant wave from Ireland and Germany, many themselves transplants from the Lower East Side, were among the first to arrive. Betty Smith's 1943 autobiographical best-selling novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, made into a movie in 1945, depicted the life of a poor Williamsburg family of Irish and Austrian extraction in the first two decades of the 20th century.

Ten years after the bridge opened, Williamsburg's population had doubled to 250,000, becoming even more crowded and populated than the Lower East Side. Most of the newcomers were poor but there were doctors, lawyers, merchants and entrepreneurs among them who settled on the better blocks abandoned by the middle-class Germans and old stock Protestants. Ten years after that, the population began to drop almost as rapidly as it had exploded. The more prosperous of the immigrants and their offspring moved on to better housing and more opportunity elsewhere. The Germans and Irish were the first to leave. The restrictive immigration laws that went into effect that decade, effectively designed to restrict the arrival of the very ethnic groups that had been moving into the city's tenements, prevented the repopulation of Williamsburg as it also did inManhattan's tenement districts. But in 1946 Williamsburg was no ghost town. It still had a considerable number of Eastern European Jews, Italians, Poles and Ukrainians, each of whom had carved out its own pockets of settlement. Many of the Jews who remained were observant Orthodox Jews who felt more at home here than among their secularized cousins. The war brought in a wave of Hasidic Jews who proved more resistant to assimilation than the earlier Jewish immigrants, Later African Americans spilled over from Bedford Stuyvesant. Hispanics arrived in the 50s and 60s. Nobody back then would imagine the flood of young hipsters and white collar professionals who would reside there sixty years later.