The most written-about neighbourhood of the last twenty years, and still worth the L train — for the waterfront, the food, the music venues and the Hasidic south side that has nothing to do with any of it.
Three neighbourhoods with one name
North Williamsburg, around Bedford Avenue and the waterfront, is the one everyone means: the restaurants, the boutiques, the hotels, the record shops and the Manhattan views.
East Williamsburg, past the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway, is warehouses, studios, music venues and a great deal of the actual creative work.
South Williamsburg, below Division Avenue, is one of the largest Hasidic communities outside Israel — Satmar, mostly, Yiddish-speaking, and entirely separate from the rest of it. Lee Avenue is the commercial street. Visitors are not unwelcome but should dress and behave with the same courtesy they would in any religious neighbourhood.
What to do
The waterfront: Domino Park, built on the site of the Domino Sugar Refinery with the original syrup tanks and gantry cranes kept as structure, has the skyline view, a good playground and a taco stand. East River State Park next door hosts Smorgasburg on Saturdays from April to October — around a hundred food vendors, and one of the best eating events in New York.
Bedford Avenue is the main street: shops, coffee, and the crowd.
Music: Brooklyn Steel, Music Hall of Williamsburg, Baby’s All Right, and a dozen smaller rooms. This is one of the best live music neighbourhoods in the country.
Brooklyn Brewery on North 11th does tours and has a taproom.
Wythe Hotel’s rooftop bar has the postcard view and the queue that comes with it.
Getting there
The L train from 14th Street in Manhattan is one stop under the river to Bedford Avenue and takes about four minutes.
The NYC Ferry from Wall Street or East 34th Street is the nicer way in, at a standard fare, landing at North 6th Street.
The Williamsburg Bridge is walkable and cyclable from the Lower East Side in about twenty-five minutes.
The rest of North Brooklyn
Greenpoint, immediately north, is the historically Polish neighbourhood — the delis and bakeries on Manhattan Avenue are still there — and is quieter and increasingly where the people priced out of Williamsburg went.
Bushwick, to the south-east, has the street art, the warehouse parties and the best of the recent restaurant openings.
More Neighborhoods
Midtown
Where the skyscrapers, the theatres and most of the hotels are. Nobody who lives in New York would choose to live here, and almost every visitor should stay here once.
Lower Manhattan
The oldest part of the city, where the streets predate the grid and bend around vanished shorelines. Offices by day, increasingly residential by night.
Greenwich Village
Low brick townhouses on streets that ignore the grid, because the Village was a separate settlement before the grid arrived and refused to be redrawn.