I wrote a short little thing on gentrification and, uh, The Village Idiot for Curbed:

When I moved to Williamsburg in 1996, there was little to do on Bedford Avenue other than eat really good massaman curry at a hole-in-the-wall called Plan-Eat Thai, or dodge the cracked-out prostitutes who haunted the streets south of Metropolitan Avenue. (They’d chase you if you walked too slowly.) My shared, two-bedroom apartment, steps from the subway, was $900 a month, but still felt overpriced on a minimum wage salary from The Strand. Bored, I often found myself venturing into the city at night and quickly became a local at the aptly named Meatpacking District dive, The Village Idiot. The place was filthy. The bottles behind the bar were buried in bras. The music was of the rowdy, George Jones variety. If you got bored watching the Tonya Harding sex tape that looped on the monitors, you could buy a goldfish for a buck to feed to the snapping turtles in the aquarium up front. But best of all, it was cheap. In fact, on slow nights the bartenders would feed me drinks, free of charge, so they wouldn’t have to drink alone. [Read more…]