Alina Gertsenshteyn- Activity #2

I live in Brooklyn within the Manhattan Beach neighborhood and the culture there is very Russian. This is distinct from Williamsburg- another neighborhood in Brooklyn to where I have seldom visited. Williamsburg is very urbanized and has an active nightlife with bars, cafes, restaurants, playhouses, etc. It seems to be that there are two prominent social groups in the area: the artistic/creative yippies and the Hasidic Jews. It is astonishing that such different groups can share the same space without any serious problems against each other (at least from my knowledge).
Jane Jacobs has noted that “hang out” spots are populated by different crowds in the nighttime as opposed to the daytime (p. 40). This is evident by Williamsburg’s restaurant, Sea. Sea is an Asian fusion hotspot and when I went there the crowd was evidently from a diverse crowd who did not seem like they were locals. However, locals were still walking around the neighborhood and it was easy to distinguish them from the Sea tourist group by their “artsy” sense of fashion.
I liked Sea a lot. The food was very good and not expensive. The environment is almost loungish. The wait for a table was two hours for my party of three, but we got to hang out at the bar and listen to the DJ play music while getting pushed and shoveled in all directions. A lot of people from my neck of the woods frequent Sea. It is a place not only for locals but for people (mostly young people) within the Tri-State area. Overall, the trip to Williamsburg was very fun…it is hard to imagine that a neighborhood within Brooklyn is extremely different from “my Brooklyn”. Williamsburg reminds me greatly of the Village in NYC, which is another fun place to go too.