peak brooklyn [west of the moon, 31 july 2017]
When Sus was visiting last week, I described something to her as “peak Brooklyn” and then was unable to unpack that statement on request. “Peak Brooklyn” might be, as Matt later commented, a lot like pornography, in that you know it when you see it.
If I’d been thinking further ahead, I’d have brought Sus to this coffee shop, where I’m sitting right now as I type. It’s a tiny vacant lot in North Williamsburg, right at the junction where the industrial waterfront is still a little industrial but the gentrifier wealth is creeping in. A few of the old warehouses are staging areas for film shoots now. On the way here I walked past a hotel that requires a “lobby ambassador” to escort you to the elevator if you’ve got a reservation at the rooftop restaurant; when we first moved here, less than a decade ago, I’m pretty sure that site was a warehouse too.
Where was I? Right. Coffee shop, tiny vacant lot. It’s perfect, in that way where it feels utterly unpretentious but I’m one hundred percent confident that every utterly unpretentious detail was carefully crafted (curated, even?) to produce exactly this experience. They sell coffee and a few pastries out of one half of a refurbished shipping container, and the other half houses an internet radio station. The ground is gravel and mulch, liberally seeded with cigarette butts; the seating is a highly eclectic salvage-yard mix. Old picnic tables, shipping pallets, church pews, garden furniture and nineteen-seventies doctors’ waiting room chairs.
The customer base at this place confuses me. I’ve been here for about forty minutes, and I haven’t seen another woman yet. I’ve seen young men in watch caps, young men with messenger bags, young men walking dogs. One guy had clipped to his jeans a bundle of keys so large it was sagging his pants down; one guy was shirtless except for a very large backpack. A grey-haired dude with horn-rim glasses walked in the side entrance, sat for fifteen minutes alone at a table, and then left without buying anything.
I’ve been here before--I might have talked about it last summer? I brought Declan here a few times on our way to swim class. This, too, is Peak Brooklyn, or at least Peak Williamsburg, perfect gem-like experiences carefully crafted for a demographic of beautiful young people and then invaded by the parents of young children desperately trying to fill their daytime hours. One of the new high-end hotels that opened recently started offering day passes to use their swimming pool. (An outdoor roof-deck pool, with wraparound hand-carved teak bar or some shit.) Or maybe it was a thing where if you had lunch at their in-house restaurant, artisan cocktails and small plates etc, your lunch came with a few hours of pool access. Something like that. The women in my mom group were all over that. The kids were still babies, I think this was the summer they all turned one, and it wasn’t a bad deal if you played it right. Get a group of three or four women, all with kids in tow. Get a lunch reservation, share a couple of appetizers, and then take the babies swimming. If you didn’t want to deal with the long lines at the city pool, and you didn’t live in a condo building, it was a pretty sweet deal. (I never went along, so I don’t know how well it worked. I feel confident, though, that this was not what the hotel expected, their roof deck wrap-around-hand-carved-teak-bar experience turned into Mommy and Me swim class. But maybe I overestimate the contempt that the Beautiful Young People of Williamsburg feel for the Kids in Tow demographic.)
Today I am here alone. I turned my child over into the care of a bunch of twenty-something British men, a.k.a. soccer camp coaches, and I am just fingers-crossed that his first day of soccer camp goes well. When I left him, he was in the process of tripping over his own feet as he explained to his coach that he’s very good at soccer because he watches it on television.
I tease with my “peak Williamsburg” discussion but right now, this morning, this place feels sort of perfect, like a pocket universe, a bubble stolen out of regular time. It’s a perfect morning, warm with a light breeze, the sky that sort of faded blue that means it’s going to be very hot later. The shipping container at the end of the lot is playing some very peaceful ambient stuff, the coffee is very good, and it’s peaceful here.