Bushwick is a dizzying, thrilling place to be.
At Maria Hernandez park men pack into the volleyball courts, shouting over matches in Spanish, while children chase soccer balls around shirtless skateboarders. Reggaeton plays from passing cars and techno leaks out of nightclubs under the M train. Recent art school grads throw rooftop parties and split rent four ways, and European tourists roam the neighborhood’s industrial sections to snap photos of street art.
A largely Latino neighborhood in north-east Brooklyn, Bushwick has become known as the home of New York’s young and reckless (and in recent years, queer) creative class. Now it sits at a crossroads.
Once a brewery district and industrial hub, then a postwar magnet for German and Italian immigrants, in the 1970s it became a destination for Black and Puerto Rican families. In 1977, a catastrophic blackout rocked New York, resulting in fires and looting that decimated Bushwick’s business district and accelerated a vicious cycle of housing insecurity, poverty and crime. In this tumultuous era, more Latino immigrants – Mexican, Dominican, Peruvian, Ecuadorian – arrived, and soon enough, Bushwick became the community in Brooklyn with the largest Latino population.
It wasn’t until the mid-aughts that the first wave of younger, whiter creatives moved in, many of them pushed deeper into Brooklyn when rents in the once-bohemian Lower East Side and Williamsburg reached outrageous heights. Inevitably, the rents in Bushwick started to inch upwards too. After the Covid pandemic, they surged. These days, the locals are getting priced out of even “affordable” housing, and millennial couples pushing baby strollers have descended.
As a result of this gentrification, Bushwick has become a cultural shorthand: for a way of dressing, partying, even shitposting online. When Kamala Harris ran for president, her stepdaughter, Ella Emhoff, was crowned “the first daughter of Bushwick”, not only because she lived there but because she embodied the neighborhood’s stick-and-poke tattoo and mullet aesthetic. When Charli xcx launched her Brat summer with a special Boiler Room DJ set, she went straight to a Bushwick warehouse; “All I could smell were poppers,” raved one attendee.
But Harris lost, Charli’s gone home and an ominous political mood now blankets the city. It feels as though all that is weird and freaky – part of what makes Bushwick Bushwick – has never been more important. Or precarious.
Here, four writers explore the wonders and flaws of the neighborhood – before it changes again.
Back in the day: ‘It was a hard place growing up’
By Vanessa Mártir
Last summer I spent a week in my childhood apartment – the apartment my mother still lived in when she died in June of 2023 – on Palmetto Street, steps from the Myrtle-Wyckoff train station. It made me think about my daughter, a 20-year-old college student, who lives in a very different Bushwick to the one I grew up in.
I was raised in Bushwick in the 1970s and 80s when its inhabitants were nearly all Black and brown. At the time, the neighborhood was being decimated by the “fire wars”, when arson-fueled blazes swept through New York. Burnt-out buildings and trash and rubble-strewn lots dotted the landscape, and Bushwick was a hotbed of poverty and crime. In the mid-80s, the carcasses of tenements became crack dens as the drug ravaged the neighborhood.
Bushwick was a hard place to live, but it fostered a sense of community. We knew our neighbors on the block, and if one of us kids did something uncouth, our parents heard about it quickly. The piragüero knew me by name and asked “y tú mama como está?” as he prepared my tamarindo-flavored shaved ice treat, and at the end of the month, when the food stamps ran out, the bodega owner Miguel gave us credit without question. One year, my Honduran mother learned to make pasteles en hoja from a Puerto Rican neighbor and Ma taught her to make frijoles.
Present-day Bushwick is making headlines for other reasons, as countless travel guides rave about its bohemian vibe, colorful street art, trendy cafes and nightlife scene.
Recently, I sat down with my daughter Vasia to talk about how the neighborhood has changed. She insists the community I grew up in is gone now that gentrifiers have moved in. “It shows up in little ways: something as simple as them not moving out of the way for the vecina or offering to help the viejita with her groceries. They look straight forward, don’t make eye contact. They don’t interact with the few old-school residents that remain,” she said.
Vasia doesn’t think the gentrifiers are bad people. “I work with a bunch of artists from Wyoming who come here in search of a dream. That’s real. That’s valid. I’m an artist too. That’s why I stayed in NYC for college – this is the place to be for artists,” she said. “So, it’s great you came here to pursue your dreams, but you get to pay your $1,200 for your room with your three other roommates in Bushwick. That was a choice. You can still go home. What about the people who’ve called Bushwick home for decades? Where are these people being displaced by these exorbitant rents going to go?”
Throughout my career, I’ve written extensively about the gentrification that has exacerbated inequalities and sadly priced out so many with roots in Bushwick. I still hear stories of longtime residents being treated terribly by landlords and living in squalor. Most recently, a friend had to start a social media campaign to get the property managers of the building her elderly, mentally ill mother lived in to make the repairs they’d been promising for years. Meanwhile there’s yet another luxury condo going up blocks away.
Still, I can appreciate how the neighborhood has been revitalized. I remember seeing images on TV of Lebanon after the bombings in 1982, and thinking that it looked like home. We shouldn’t have had to live like that. Gentrification has its benefits, like less crime and healthier food options.
My daughter only partly agrees. She doesn’t feel safe around the increased police presence in Bushwick of late – “half the time they’re staring at my body and objectifying me the same way the perverts do” – but says she feels safer in Bushwick walking down the street holding her girlfriend’s hand: “I don’t feel safe like that in some Latine neighborhoods, like Dyckman. I hate to say it but Latine culture is very homophobic. The comments I’ve heard are gross.”
As a queer woman myself, I too have witnessed this shift. I was raised by lesbians shortly after the American Psychiatric Association took homosexuality off the list of mental disorders in 1973, and encountered a lot of homophobia in my youth. In the late 80s, during a dispute, our neighbor called my mother a terrible slur that I won’t repeat here. These days, I too can walk with ease around Bushwick holding my butch wife’s hand.
Still, it’s strange to find that this neighborhood that even other New Yorkers avoided going to a few decades ago is now garnering global attention. I learned from the local author Jacqueline Woodson that Bushwick was discovered in 1660 by Franciscus the Negro, who was formerly enslaved and bought his freedom. Woodson, whose National Book Award-winning memoir Brown Girl Dreaming is centered in Bushwick, writes: “When I saw how the Bushwick of my childhood was becoming a hipster neighborhood that was often referred to as ‘newly discovered’, I knew I wanted to put the Bushwick of the 70s and 80s on the page – so that it wouldn’t be forgotten. No place is discovered. Many places are ‘Columbused’.”
When I visit Bushwick, the murals, the salsa and hip-hop playing from passing cars, and Puerto Rico’s beloved flag hanging from windows every few blocks remind me of the rich culture that has always existed here, even when the world didn’t know about it.
Bushwick was always rich in culture. Folks expressed themselves with what they had. During a block party years ago, an entire section of the street was roped off so the B-boys and B-girls could lay out their cardboard to do headspins and windmills. Further up the block, a DJ set up his equipment, siphoning electricity from a nearby lamppost to power his turntables; and a makeshift stage was built where emcees rapped and girls sang Menudo songs while back-up dancers replicated the boyband’s dance moves. It wasn’t unusual to walk the hood and come across a group of men in guayaberas gathered for a jam session, with a conga drum, a güiro, a guitar and a haunting voice that sang of longing, heartbreak and the homes they’d left behind.
To the newcomers and transplants: you’re living in a place where, as my daughter says, “we made home when there wasn’t much to make home out of.” Don’t try to erase that, please.
***
The nightlife: ‘No other neighborhood compares’
By Michelle Lhooq
For denizens of New York nightlife, the corner of Myrtle Avenue and Broadway is the center of the underworld. The endlessly memed intersection, at the border of Bushwick, is a place “where the veil between this world and the next is thin”, as a user on X put it. A chaotic crucible of street drugs and urban decay, this slice of Brooklyn is also where a vibrant party scene has emerged. While other cities around the world struggle to keep their nightclubs open, there are at least a dozen venues hosting parties here every weekend – and the party never has to stop if you just keep saying “yes”.
Nights start at about 9pm and can extend past dawn. Stepping out in Bushwick, there is a perpetual sense of propulsion: a chance encounter with a flirty stranger can lead to a secret afterparty in a club built in someone’s basement, or a rooftop rager with the city skyline on the horizon. By 2am, the sidewalks themselves are a scene: clubbers in their 20s, 30s and 40s spilling out of fog-filled rooms, wobbly on ketamine, to smoke joints scored from nearby neon-lit delis, thudding techno blending into the screeching of overhead trains.
No other neighborhood in New York City compares. According to a Bloomberg analysis from a Placer.ai database, Bushwick’s weekend nighttime foot traffic has more than doubled since 2017, and currently surpasses that of other popular nightlife neighborhoods: South Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Dimes Square.
To many partygoers, the borders of what is considered Bushwick are fluid, extending to East Williamsburg and Ridgewood, Queens. “Bushwick nightlife” is thus defined less by geographic constraints than by an overarching vibe: in contrast to the bottle service clubs of Manhattan, the dancefloors here are diverse, queer and politically progressive. Rather than velvet ropes and snooty bouncers, you’re more likely to encounter safer-space policies, fentanyl test strips and drag queens at the door.
Bushwick’s demimonde spilled over from the DIY scene that had flourished along the Williamsburg waterfront in the 2000s, as new zoning laws pushed out artist-run music venues like 285 Kent and Galapagos for sleek new condos. A tiny, tropical-themed techno bar named Bossa Nova Civic Club, one of the first electronic music venues to plant its flag in Bushwick in 2012, soon became a breeding ground for a new wave of underground techno.
Techno, born in Detroit’s Black queer dance clubs in 1980s, became a mainstay in Europe’s megaclubs, where the genre exploded. The techno scene flatlined in the US after the 90s rave era died out, only to be reclaimed by this new generation of club kids.
“The European take on techno is a lot cleaner and more paced out, while New York City has a lot more sounds and people bringing in different inspiration to the table,” said John Barclay, founder of Bossa Nova Civic Club. “There are way more people being smushed together in Bushwick, which has a large Dominican element.” The convergence of cultures that defines Bushwick extended to its dancefloors too: DJs drop dembow or reggaeton tracks into their sets with a strutting confidence that crowds respond to with just as much attitude – anything goes here, as long as you have the chutzpah to pull it off.
But the expansion of Bushwick as a true nightlife hub was stymied by the cabaret law, an outdated prohibition-era legislation that banned dancing in venues that did not have special licenses. In 2017, Barclay spearheaded a movement to repeal it. When the then mayor, Bill De Blasio, repealed the law and established a government-run office of nightlife that same year, it signaled that a post-Giuliani era of improved relations between the city’s nightlife operators and authorities had begun. This fresh turn opened up investments into venues that have DJs playing regularly, and by the late 2010s, the neighborhood was home to a growing cluster of legal venues with DIY roots.
“A lot of people who cut their teeth in the 2000s and earlier doing underground events decided to follow a legitimacy route,” explained Todd P, a longtime nightlife promoter who owns Market Hotel and Trans-Pecos, venues where the music often veers hard and experimental. According to P, the DIY backgrounds of many venue operators in Bushwick allow the scene to retain its community-driven, music-over-profits appeal.
“There’s a feel here that it’s for the people by the people, and less about maximizing returns,” agreed Gareth Solan, the manager at Nowadays, a popular club on Bushwick’s eastern border that took over a former kitchen cabinet manufacturing shop from the 50s. The indoor-outdoor venue often runs all-weekend parties with international DJs, and feels like a sunny, plant-filled womb.
These days, the Bushwick party world spans a vast constellation of hotspots. Mood Ring, a horoscope-inspired queer bar, is a dancey date spot straight out of a Wong Kar-wai movie. Elsewhere is a hyperpop paradise for gen Z ravers, while House of Yes is a Burning Man-style den of aerialists and hedonists. The 80,000sq ft Avant Gardner brings Ibiza-scale megaclubbing to the masses, while H0l0 is a cozy club with a DIY feel. There’s even Xanadu, a new roller rink that regularly hosts headlining funk and disco DJs on the decks.
Wherever you end up, the physicality of the dancefloors is palpable – the pent-up energy from bodies grinding through a grueling city finding a release. The crackling ferocity of New York’s dancefloors have long earned the city its status as a global nightlife hotspot, but unlike previous heydays when Manhattan reigned supreme, tourists from China to Europe are now flocking to the Bushwick scene.
But as the neighborhood’s nightlife continues to explode, the political consciousness at its roots has come into question, and many wonder if its progressive ethos will be diluted.
“There still is a lot of consciousness when it comes to race, class, community and things of that nature, but over time, as Bushwick continues to get more gentrified, there is a bit less purity,” said Bowen Goh, co-owner of Mood Ring. “We deal with more customers that are discovering Bushwick as a nightlife hub. They’re just visiting for the night, and don’t have any kind of ethos when it comes to nightlife. They’re just out to party.”
Other venue operators worry that between the rising costs of talent, real estate competition and a downward trend of alcohol consumption among young people, financial success is not guaranteed. The legendary nightclub Paragon announced it would close its doors in April, and the indie rooftop venue Our Wicked Lady launched a GoFundMe in December to try to stay afloat.
But Nowadays co-owner Justin Carter said he felt optimistic about his club’s future. “It’s the story of gentrification,” he said. “We are at once victims and a part of it.”
***
A Bushwick starter guide
Tortilleria Mexicana Los Hermanos: order al pastor and enchilada tacos to eat in the tortilla factory next door (BYO Modelo).
L Train Vintage: shop for poorly fitting jeans and busted biker jackets so you too can look the part.
The Bushwick Starr: home to bold local theater for over two decades – longer than some Bushwick transplants have been alive.
La Isla: this Puerto Rican cuchifritos (fried snacks) spot, around since the 60s, hasn’t been “discovered” yet.
Nook: stop by this coffee and beer parlor for chess club on Tuesdays and a Sapphic creative writing group on Fridays.
Blue Hour: for late-night grub, hunt down this new halal fast food joint tucked into a BP gas station.
***
The look: ‘Everyone’s wearing their club outfits in the daylight’
By Alaina Demopoulos
Big cargo pants and a teeny-tiny top. Cowboy boots with a Telfar bag. A stained sweater that cost $17 in 1995 but was just resold in a dusty thrift store for $65 plus tax. Jorts.
The Bushwick look: you know it when you see it. And you don’t need to live in the neighborhood to find it anymore. Think of Brat-era Charli xcx, wearing cut-up shirts, hot pants and bras as tops, looking like a Barbie doll dressed by a depressed child. Or a so-called hot rodent boyfriend, in the style of the anti-hunks Jeremy Allen White or Josh O’Connor.
The hipsters of early aughts Williamsburg were instantly recognizable – and mocked – for their plaid flannel shirts and vintage work boots, which were seen as a reaction against Y2K excess and tech-obsessed capitalists. Twenty-odd years later, their Bushwick successors signal a desire to embrace excess, to stand out, to maybe even appear edgy enough for the TikTok apartment guy to ask them if he can tour their place. They flout gendered styles and fashion rules. And though they might look a little chaotic, a bit grubby, no one can afford to sign a lease in one of the world’s trendiest neighborhoods without cash flow; the Bushwick look is weird, but also wealth-coded.
“When I first moved here, I was like, ‘Oh, everyone’s wearing their club outfits in the daylight,’” said Critter Fink, 27, a part-time stylist who lived in the neighborhood for years before recently moving to adjacent Ridgewood. “I would definitely define it as somewhat out there, eccentric pieces that have been styled thoughtfully to follow the most current micro trends of the internet. A funky misuse of items is key. You might have these more formal items paired with, like, athletic clothing, and you’re fighting against the original, natural use of your clothing.”
The last time Fink dressed “Bushwick”, they were wearing boots by Syro (a local and recently shuttered line of heels made for larger feet, championed by Bowen Yang on the Emmys red carpet), a vintage mesh dress and layered chain jewelry. “That felt very Bushwick – pushing gender norms and wearing a big black boot, especially,” they said.
Bushwick hit New York fashion week in a big way last February, when the independent label Luar brought Beyoncé to a local warehouse to sit front-row. Beyoncé also named-dropped Telfar on her 2022 album Renaissance, citing the Black-owned label’s bags, which are so ubiquitous in the neighborhood they have been dubbed the “Bushwick Birkin”.
Other non-residents who remain exponents of the aesthetic include Kamala Harris, whose camo baseball cap merch owed royalties to one first made by the Instagram-famous brand Praying, which sells a version with the phrase “God’s Favorite” – you can’t walk a block in the neighborhood without seeing someone wearing one. She was probably tipped off to the trend by her 25-year-old stepdaughter, the kitschy-cool knitwear designer, artist and model Ella Emhoff, who calls Bushwick home.
With increased attention on Bushwick style, the dupes, duds and slapdash attempts by fast fashion to imitate followed: peruse Shein, Temu or Forever 21, and you’ll find riffs on the Bushwick look, repackaged for middle America. Then again, so much of the Bushwick look comes from riffing on the corny charms of middle America (imagine Julia Fox wearing a $2,000 designer version of a pleather jacket you could find at Walmart for $15).
“A lot of my personal style is just sarcastic,” said Cait Poli, who lives in Bushwick and is the social media director at Boys Club, which produces culture podcasts, newsletters and zines. “Everything is a bit, a parody of something else. When you look at the Bushwick camo hats, Bayonetta glasses or pleather jackets, I just go: lol. My mom buys those glasses at Walgreens. My family members in Florida wear these camo hats unironically. That’s what I love about this style: it’s funny and doesn’t take itself too seriously.”
Maybe, but the commodification of a Bushwick aesthetic brings up issues of gentrification, and who gets to define what a neighborhood looks like.
Paperboy Prince, a local artist and mayoral candidate who grew up in Brooklyn, attributes the look to the “weird artists” of the neighborhood – “not just singers or painters but clowns and drag queens and performance artists”, they said. “The people who are cool are on the scene, whether it’s a DJ, or some they/them who’s really fly, or a bartender. Those are the people who actually push [trends] forward. The people on TikTok are just playing catchup.”
The Bushwick look, or at least as it’s seen on TikTok, garners criticism from some who say it glamorizes gentrification while ignoring the neighborhood’s Latino, working-class roots. Many of the often-referenced avatars of the look are white transplants to the area – Emhoff serves as the prime example.
Fink remembers a moment from their first week in Bushwick, when they were approached by a local who wasn’t charmed by their eccentric style. “He said it was hard because he grew up here, and here are all these white kids coming in with their crazy-ass outfits,” Fink recalled. “He was like, ‘Why don’t you go back to your midwestern homes and dress like that there?’ You can’t. I think there are a lot of people who move to Bushwick and suddenly feel permission to start having fun with their style.”
Despite it’s going mainstream, Prince, who is non-binary, is confident that elements of the Bushwick look will stay unique to the neighborhood. “I’ve gone to an event in Manhattan that’s supposed to be artsy, and even that feels really hetero compared to what you see in Bushwick,” they said. “Even the hetero Bushwick people seem gayer than the ones in Manhattan.”
***
The memes: ‘Perpetual stew and K-holes’
By Rich Juzwiak
Over the last five years, badly photoshopped, self-mocking, often surreal memes have gone viral, spreading the word about Bushwick to people who have never set foot in the neighborhood.
These memes include the twink who fell through the skylight at a Clairo-themed lesbian rooftop party; the sex doll on Knickerbocker Avenue that commanded a shrine; and the hazy revelation that five Taco Bell locations in the area form a pentagram. Others touch on Bushwick’s incomparable nightlife and its nocturnal residents who live from party to party. A TikTok from the neo-club kid Linux features her twirling around outside in a fuzzy hoodie under text reading: “I love being a Bushwick girlie. I wake up at 8pm get my little coffee, take a little walk and then just go to a rave like I live in Euphoria.” The K-hole is a key feature of this discourse.
Many memes also satirize the gentrifier’s “up-its-own-ass” attitude towards living in Bushwick. In a TikTok poking fun at the specific alt-ness of Bushwick, the actor Anna Rudegeair rattles off fictional bar after fictional bar to check out before landing on the punchline: she suggests finding “a place that has a mirror in the bathroom” – an absurd prospect for its impossibility. The implication: we put up with a lot to be in New York, and Bushwick offers no relief.
But Bushwick does give back in other ways. Take, for example, 2023’s much celebrated “perpetual stew” – a communal soup in Fermi playground that fed anyone who showed up with an ingredient for 41 straight days. According to the New York Times, it was “hardly a serious culinary exercise” but “a full commitment to the bit”.
Every generation, at least since the invention of the teenager in the 1940s, has had its cool crew: greasers, hipsters, alternatives, indie kids. Bushwick, for the moment, occupies this space in the popular imagination, but here the cool factor is localized. The coveted Harris-Walz campaign hat “sat perfectly at the intersection of the ‘Midwest dad’ (Walz) and the ‘Bushwick gays’”, Vogue observed. When Katy Perry debuted the cover for her much-derided single Woman’s World, the fashion editor Savannah Bradley posted on X: “Bushwick Basic is beginning to infect all corners of society … we are about to see Rue21 models in bayonetta glasses and faux leather moto jackets … pestilential.”
These are fun-size bits of Bushwick that go down easy when digested from afar. Even the neighborhood’s most irritating qualities (cooler-than-thou pretense from infesting transplants, for example) come off as charming when filtered through this audio-visual lens. Yet it is a neighborhood that cannot be condensed into a meme language.
Maybe that’s why the most truthful Bushwick meme is a simple picture of a string of fast food joints under the Myrtle-Broadway subway stop: a Dunkin’, a Checkers and a Popeyes. The picture, uploaded to the @joan.of.arca meme Instagram account in 2023, features casual trash and smeared lights. It looks like no place special in a neighborhood people are crawling over each other to live in.
