Among the Artists

"Why are these crazy Italians walking up the street with a four-ton structure on their back?"

Joe Rubino laughs after asking the question, and starts telling me about giglio, the Italian word for lily. Here it's a feast complete with a tower, but it goes back to 4th century Italy and St. Paulinus, who was imprisoned (the reasons vary) for the sake of the people of Nola, and upon his return, was welcomed with lilies. For years this was celebrated with flower displays, and at some point this mutated into these towers that have been erected and carried about since the Renaissance, and have been raised each year in Williamsburg since 1903. The six-story tall towers are made of brightly-decorated papier máché attached to an aluminum base (a wood lattice frame up until 1966) and are carried about by hundreds of sturdy Italians as part of the feast of the same name. On the base of the giglio is a 13-piece band, also carried about by the sturdy Italians.

This happens on Hevermeyer between N. 9 St. and N. 7 St., spitting distance from the artists, as Rubino calls the newcomers. However Williamsburg has changed over the past decade, there are still moving parts left from fifty years past.

Rubino tells me that he came up, "in Greenpoint, actually. It's funny because the area I don't know if it's actually? if it's the end of Williamsburgh the beginning of Greenpoint. Back then we all said Greenpoint because housing in Williamsburg was cheaper or something." He laughs. "Now it's all changed and everyone wants to be in Williamsburg."

It's not as well attended as back when, Rubino tells me, since "now the people are all from the Midwest-it's all the artists. Every Wednesday we go down there and go out and have a drink, and realize that no one here's from Greenpoint, all of them are from out of state." He was kidding around about this with one of the waiters who told Rubino that he was from Kansas and "he went on the internet looking for the best place for an artist-Paris was number one and Williamsburg was number two. He's from Montana or something."

He tells me about 20 years ago, when he went out with a girl from Manhattan whose friend ran the Greenline, then the area's only community paper, and who wanted to fix up McCarren Park, just after they first closed the pool. "He calls me and I tell him, 'that all sounds great, but you're not going to find anyone really from Greenpoint to support that. They all know that if you fix the place up the first thing that's going to happen is no community-all new people.' Even the merchants didn't want to support him. The guys who owned stores, little bars, were all from Greenpoint and they didn't want the neighborhood to change, which it did. It really was a community place and it's not anymore. Now it's a cool place. Before if you walked down the street they knew if you belonged there or not. It was like growing up small town." He pauses. "Not really, but you know what I mean. I don't think they fixed up McCarren Prk yet. They did a lot of work on the track and the soccer fields and the handball courts but never did touch the pool."

He suspects, though, that the artists may be breeding themselves out of existence: "There's too many kids now in the neighborhood, it's not as cool as it used to be. People having babies-they went there artists and free and all that and then they got married, I guess, and had kids and now it's a little different. Too family-oriented-people yell at you if you make noise and you can't just hang out. Things are still changing. Always changing. The South Side is a totally different area, not as cool as the North Side but getting there. It's still a little cheaper so now people are going there. I don't know where the people there are getting displaced to. It was totally Hispanic before and then Hasidic Jews. The Jews have been going toward Kent Ave. and into Greenpoint, buying up all the houses and building new ones."

I ask about how he feels about the changes. "There are pros and cons to both how it is and how it was. I don't know if the artists made it safer, though they went into a pretty rough spot, the first of them at least. I used to live in a loft on Ash St. at the end of Greenpoint. It wasn't safe then. Once they see that they could get cheap loft space-not even commercial, an industrial area. It was the big lofts that's attract ed the artists. My nephew's there. I'm sure he still thinks he's tough."