Gothamist interviewed him:
“I live in Williamsburg,” Ian MacAllen tells us. “Or East Williamsburg. It all depends on the year, the real estate broker, the cab driver, the girl you are trying to impress. For people who know the difference, I tell them Graham Avenue.” His petition, which calls on the federal government to “peacefully grant the neighborhood of East Williamsburg to secede from Williamsburg and create a new, hipper neighborhood,” currently has one signature. But once the hardcore punk DIY crowd at East Williamsburg’s Huckleberry Bar hears about this, it’s going to catch fire.
Here is MacAllen’s reason for the petition — which currently has 5 signatures:
The founding hipsters first arrived on Bedford Avenue two decades earlier convinced that the East Village was “overpriced” and that more generally, Manhattan was “so over.”
In recent years, the trustifarians have turned the Bedford Avenue area into a disneyland of fashionable shops and expensive cocktail bars. The baby-bankers living in the glass, waterfront towers have pushed out the smack junkies and complain to the police about “noise” from rock musicians.
As such, the grittier East Williamsburg would prefer to disassociate from Williamsburg as a fully separate and independent neighborhood. The people of East Williamsburg actually have real jobs. Their shops are not particularly fashionable. Some of the bars are genuinely dangerous dives. Please allow the neighborhood to secede.
and I’m from Southeast Williamsburg and I want to secede from East Williamsburg
Is it ok for me to punch myself in the face after reading that?
I’d like to petition for Bedford above 8th to secede & become a new street.
Like the city could give a sh*t whether or not you like the name naborhood you live in. Get a grip. Stupid article.
*Of the Naborhood
-h
plzz, sucession is so in right now.
secession*
Really funny and sadly true. It has just gone the way of SOHO….a couple bars now being forced out because of complaints from neighbors about bands. …sad…
I moved into a former crack den off of the Montrose stop in 2003. It was next door to a chop shop. One by one the mostly Puerto Rican inhabitants of the neighborhood were pushed out by young white artsy types like me who romanticized the ‘grit’. But the gritty people didn’t like us. We paid too much for seemingly worthless vintage shit. We dressed like goddam idiots and ‘worked’ like 15 hours a week at some bar that pays more a minute than most of the gritty people made in an hour. We were gentrifiers. By 2010, the neighborhood was ours. We replaced the chop shop with a health food market. We have bars and coffee shops and music stores. I never felt bad. I still don’t. Now we, the gentrifiers, are being gentrified by far more wealthy and less artsy people. They suck. I dated one for a hot second. Her waterfront condo was 1.5m. She had two maids and a parking garage. She made fun of the work ethic of artsy types like me. She told me to grow up. Worse, she wanted me to wear a condom. I have no right to complain. No one does. And anyway, it’s useless to do so. This is the way of things. Just move further out, or go back to Idaho, or wherever the fuck.