Bohemian South

ROBERT ANASI LEFT Williamsburg in 2008, which makes his new memoir of the neighborhood a work of very recent history. Proximity defines The Last Bohemia—both its author’s perspective and his book’s appeal. I have sat in a Williamsburg restaurant reading The Last Bohemia, with the girl next to me also reading The Last Bohemia. Anasi’s old neighborhood now houses a built-in audience of navel-gazers. And while it’s easy to fault those ever-Tumbling and Tweeting millennials for a surfeit of narcissistic self-awareness, Anasi has the inverse problem: a fatal lack of self-awareness, an unexamined regard for himself and his experience, which constitutes its own brand of narcissism. The Last Bohemia chronicles the fourteen years Anasi spent in Williamsburg after moving there in 1994. In those years, it was home to gangsters, hookers, sprawling lofts, a brigade of artists, a bar called Kokie’s that sold cocaine, a post-industrial waterfront wilderness, and swoony, crazily low rents. This was, of course, a world that was disappearing even as he inhabited it. Anasi quotes a New York magazine story from June, 1992: “In the seventies, it was SoHo. … In the eighties, the East Village. In the nineties, it will be Williamsburg.” And so it was. And now we speak of the neighborhood with knee-jerk jokes about skinny jeans and artisanal pickles and condo towers with names like The Edge. It’s clear Anasi has a story on his hands: the neighborhood has changed, and changed fast enough that every mention of an intersection, bar, or subway stop offers a disorienting thrill for the present-day Williamsburger.