Anyone with even a few years of Brooklyn residency under their belt has undoubtedly seen how rapidly the borough is changing. Warehouses that were once populated with twirling gypsies, DIY beer distillers and nihilistic bike punks now greet visitors only with construction signs and unaffordable high-rise apartments. It’s all very depressing and inevitable, but we owe it to the future generations of people complaining about cool shit vanishing in Brooklyn to document all these spaces before they, like their throngs of admirers, evaporate into passing clouds of gentrification or city-approved destruction.That’s exactly what journalist-in-residence Oriana Leckert aims to do with her Brooklyn Spaces project. After an unexpected weekend tour of some of Brooklyn’s transient underground worlds last summer, she decided to start capturing these places, knowing full well that some of them might not be there when she returned.From her interview on Free Williamsburg:Out of the fifty spaces I've covered so far, nine are already gone. The Brooklyn Free Store was burned to the ground in March. Newsonic held their last show in April. The Bushwick Trailer Park got evicted in May. Silent Barn was violently ransacked and destroyed in July. Monster Island, a Williamsburg cultural hub for almost a decade, which I'll be posting about next week, is closing their doors at the end of September. It just seems urgent to me to make a record of this movement, whatever it is, before it's finished, or changed beyond recognition.The allure goes beyond simply “weird shit.” These places are valued because their very existence runs contrary to the collective ideal of the environments they inhabit. The fact that cities like New York are filled with so many drab, rigid establishments of clearly discernible purpose invigorates these fleeting locales, sparking momentary bursts of unrestrained culture amid an otherwise regimented urban sprawl.
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