The Local: Matzo-Gate and the Rise of Ridgewood

Once upon a time, before Williamsburg was a neighborhood of self-conscious hipsters and cookie-cutter condo conversions, it was a haven for the city’s artists.

As loft space in Manhattan became increasingly scarce and inexpensive throughout the 1990’s, artists flocked to commercial buildings in Williamsburg and DUMBO that were not certified for occupancy, but nonetheless provided ample space to live and work in.

One of the few de-facto artists’ colonies that had been able to resist the wave of condo conversion sweeping the neighborhood over the past few years was 475 Kent Avenue. Located on the fringes of gentrified Williamsburg on South 11th Street, at the end of a waterfront avenue lined with luxury condos in various stages of development, the 10-story building was home to more than 200 photographers, musicians, sculptors, filmmakers, and artists spread between 110 units.

Then came what the tenants association of 475 Kent Avenue dubbed “Matzo-Gate” in a Jan. 24 statement.

At 7:30 p.m. Sunday on the eve of Martin Luther King Day, the building was issued a Vacate Order by the Fire Department and tenants were given until 1:30 a.m. to collect their belongings and leave on one of the coldest nights of the year. The department said they had found a potentially explosive grain silo and a wood-burning stove in the 10-year-old Matzo factory in the basement of 475 Kent Avenue during an earlier inspection, and claimed residents were at risk.

Conspiracy theories abounded in the wake of the vacate order.

“Ideas were flying around that it was the landlord or a developer who wanted to make it impossible for us to re-occupy the building,” said Kathleen Gilrain, a sculptor and the director of non-profit art gallery Smack Mellon. “Because why is this happening now? The bakery has been there for 10 years.”

Some speculated that graft was involved or that the order was payback from the Fire Department after one of their own was killed in a blaze last summer at a different building owned by landlord Nachman Brach.

Though the wheat has since been removed and an issue with the stand-pipe has been fixed, the tenants have not been allowed to return. But thanks to pressure from local politicians, the landlord is now working with the Fire Department to get residents back to their homes as soon as possible.

Williamsburg began to transition into an increasingly inhospitable neighborhood for artists well before Matzo-Gate, say most occupants of 475 Kent Street. The artists who came to Williamsburg in the 1990’s to escape high rents in Manhattan have had to watch once again as “spaces that have traditionally been occupied by artists who contribute to the cultural community are converted to luxury condos,” said Ms. Gilrain.

“Williamsburg is no longer an artists’ community, DUMBO isn’t really either. Artists don’t want a two-bedroom apartment and they can’t pay two rents,” she said over the phone from her mother’s house in Westchester, where she has been living—separated from her boyfriend who has been staying in Bushwick—since the vacate order.

“The city has got to create some policy to keep artists and make it possible for them to stay in a big open space where there they can live and work,” she said, “because the city may be the capital of the art world now, but it won’t be for long.”

Since the city has taken a “kind of a don’t ask, don’t tell” stance on the people living in commercial buildings, it’s difficult to get an official count on the number of residents living in places like 475 Kent, said tenant Guy Lesser.

“All you have to do is drive through Williamsburg at night and look at the number of industrial buildings with lights on to see that there are a lot of people like this." He estimates there are about 20,000 residents living in buildings “of this kind”—meaning not up to residential code—in New York.

Sculptor Lee Boroson was part of “the third wave” of artists to move to Williamsburg in 1993. Some had arrived as early as the 1980’s, “back when it was a really scary place.

“Even in ’93 it was totally different than it is now. You’d take the L home at night and only 10 other people would get off the train at your stop... Eventually you’d be the only one walking on the block, and you’d almost sprint home,” he recalled.

At the time there were “dozens and dozens” of buildings occupied by artists who lived and worked in the same space, said Mr. Boroson. A few residents of buildings who were grandfathered in under the Lofts Law between 1980 and 1982 remain in Williamsburg, but if they loose their space, “they are not going to find another one," he said. Others have been pushed farther out to Bushwick, Ridgewood, Queens, and beyond.

Meanwhile the thriving gallery scene that began when Pierogi opened in 1994, has dwindled. Rents are too expensive for up-and-coming galleries, and some of the more established venues that got their start in Williamsburg, like Rubbelke and Bellwether, have moved to Chelsea because customer traffic in Brooklyn is too light to sustain a gallery.

“I don’t know any artists who can afford to live here at this point. I teach at [Rhode Island School of Desgin], and when my students graduate and move to the city, they move to Ridgewood,” said Mr. Boroson. “If it’s so impossible and so inconvenient to have the space you need to produce your work, you’re going to go to L.A., Chicago, or Berlin.”

Councilman David Yassky has been one of the most vocal voices among of the chorus of elected officials pushing for 475 Kent Avenue residents to be returned home. Councilman Yassky supports the position the city has taken on illegal loft space since December 2000, when an order to vacate a DUMBO building that was not up to code was met with an uproar.

“There was outrage after that and the city basically created a policy saying ‘we won’t evict people from homes unless there is an immediate threat,'” said Councilman Yassky’s spokesman, Sam Rockwell.

“The city’s policy very aptly reflects their responsibility. 475 Kent did have some major problems but they’ve been fixed and people are still not getting into the building. which shows a potential shift in city policy,” he said. “If the Fire Department went into 475 as it is now, there’s a good chance they’d slap a lot of fines on them, but let them stay.”

Sculptor Deborah Masters has been a “prime tenant” of 475 Kent Avenue since 1998, meaning she leases an entire floor and has been forced into the position of landlord to 17 tenants.

This is the second Brooklyn space Ms. Masters has been forced to vacate in the past decade—she lived in a building in DUMBO, owned by the notorious landlord, Joshua Guttman, and was eventually awarded compensation from a judge that allowed her to move to 475 Kent, which is “not a cheap building." Ms. Masters feels the city is not only ignorant of the housing needs of New York artists, but exploits them to catalyze the gentrification process.

“They’ve purposefully used artists in Williamsburg and DUMBO to bring the neighborhoods into a fashionable state… It’s the mayor’s responsibility to bring buildings into the loft law or to find housing for [displaced] artists,” Ms. Masters said.

“I’m not a poor person, I have a job and I pay taxes. And these are not unfamous, unsubstantial people we are talking about.”