The Brooklyn Rail

When Subway opened a location on Bedford Avenue in 2005, there was an outcry from the local community. A brick may have been thrown through its window. By the time it closed a decade later, the neighborhood was dotted with national chain/franchise stores, but things were just getting started. Come 2024, Williamsburg, which once balanced the bohemian bonafides it accrued in the 1990s with a generations-deep immigrant working class population, has fully gone over to the dark side. Take a walk down the once-deserted Kent Avenue on a sunny day and you can be convinced that you’re strolling in Miami. If you’re able to glimpse the Manhattan skyline through the luxury goods stores cluttering the landscape, you will affirm that you’re still in New York City. The transformation of Williamsburg into a playground for the rich has been a done deal since Apple opened its first store on Bedford in 2016.

Some would point to an earlier date, such as 2014, when Vice forced beloved DIY venue Death By Audio to close its doors. DBA was on the south side of Williamsburg, a part of which has somehow managed to hang onto its soul. Stretching from the south of Grand Street to Broadway, this area is known to its residents as Los Sures. Predominantly populated by Dominican and Puerto Rican immigrants, Los Sures has managed to avoid much of the glitz and fake glamor so prevalent elsewhere. This tight-knit community is protective of their small area, so when they embrace an establishment, it’s a leap of faith by both parties.

On the corner of South 5th and Hewes Street lies P.I.T. (Property Is Theft), a former laundromat that has been converted into an all-purpose hub for a range of activities. As P.I.T. founder Jim McHugh relates, “There's no neighborhood more radical than a neighborhood full of working class people of color, because they've had to be radical to survive.”

P.I.T. stands in stark contrast to the gaudy, newly-built 42 Hotel across the street. From the windows of P.I.T. you can see directly into the hotel’s foyer, which features a wall of LED screens that churns with retina-searing digital animation twenty-four hours a day. Meanwhile, mere feet away, the XFR Collective (pronounced “Transfer”), which traces its roots to ABC No Rio, can take your outdated information media format and convert it into accessible digital files. It’s a face-off between what Williamsburg has become—temporary and ugly—and what previously existed. Except these old buildings and old mediums have been transformed into something new and beneficial to the community. This is the neighborhood’s future, where traditions are preserved and fresh ideas are given the space to breathe. P.I.T. is such a place, as homespun as it is newfangled. When you walk into P.I.T., it’s as if you have arrived at a friend’s home that you haven’t seen in years, and they have some thoughts about the way things are going out there in the world. Grab a book—such as Seth Tobocman’s You Don’t Have To Fuck People Over To Survive or Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Selected Poems—put on a record from the house-curated Revolutionary Music Archive, let your mind wander and the conversation flow. P.I.T. is packed with countercultural arcana, but, as crucial as these items are to radical thought, they function as food to nourish the activists and cynical utopians that gravitate to the space.

The venue opened on Groundhog Day, 2022. Since then, the volunteer staff has ballooned to around twenty people, augmented by a host of mutual aid organizations that utilize the space. P.I.T. subleases their garage to Come Forever, which provides the community with free fentanyl test strips, naloxone, masks, and Covid tests. People bring in bags of clothes, toiletries, and other necessities for asylum-seekers, many of whom are shunted deep into Brooklyn at Floyd Bennett Field, secluded and cut off from public transportation and basic goods. Adult education courses are presented by the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research in “subjects that range from philosophy and feminist theory to biology and economics,” while Autonomous University holds weekly seminars teaching anarchist theory. P.I.T. also partners with Saxapahaw Prison Books, sending reading material to those caught in Georgia’s penal system, which has extremely restrictive regulations about incoming literature.

If P.I.T. has an analogue, it is to European punk and activist spaces. Of course, it isn’t a squat or government-supported arts center—it pays rent by selling books and records. But it is the kind of space where a gathering celebrating the Revolutionary Health newspaper put out by Armenian activists can be thrown together at the last minute, and noted feminist and Marxist scholar Silvia Federici will Zoom in with some analysis and words of encouragement.

As you would expect for a punk-inspired venue, P.I.T. is welcoming to all ages. Just ask the kids who come to learn taiko, the ancient tradition of Japanese drumming from teacher and composer Yoko Nakahashi. She leads the students, ranging in age from five to fifteen, in a series of stretching exercises before running them through drumming routines. Somewhere between discipline and play, there is an aspect of teamwork to the synchronized movements, but the choreography ultimately serves a musical purpose. In addition to taiko classes, local musicians teach guitar and saxophone, prioritizing accessibility and affordability.

While books and pamphlets provide vital information for those curious about radical culture, there is nothing that quite gets the blood up, the mind working overtime, the gooseflesh rising, like live performances, particularly of the musical variety. P.I.T. has quietly become one of the finest performance spaces in the city. In the course of a few weeks in September, they participated in two events showcasing the range of their commitment. First, they once again arranged the entertainment for the annual block party, booking WKCR’s Mambo Machine host Frankie Tambora to DJ. McHugh tells me, “My block was psyched.” A few weekends later, P.I.T. hosted a mini-festival in coordination with the 2024 NYC Anarchist Book Fair.

Donna Allen and the Cultural Revolution opened the festivities, performing stripped-down versions of songs by Phil Ochs, Tracy Chapman, Scottish anarchists Political Asylum, and NYC peace punks A.P.P.L.E. Allen, a Texas transplant who also leads the band Chronophage and is a member of trash-picking experimental troupe Flag of Human Exclusion, sees the long-term benefits of a place like P.I.T.:

I've been in a lot of DIY spaces and a lot of them have a feeling of being something that might not be there in a few months. P.I.T. does feel like it has more staying power. I want to have a relationship with this place, because it could be here ten years from now.

Following the Cultural Revolution’s set, Fred Moten and Brandon Lopez enthralled the crowd. Lopez contorted himself around his bass, coaxing and wrenching a variety of sounds out of the instrument. Over this flurry of knocks, plucks, and creaks, Moten recited his poetry that walks on levitating asphalt. The duo’s set was a perfect distillation of why P.I.T. is the logical venue for a celebration of the liberating potential of anarchist thought and action. Closing out the evening with a potent dose of noisy jazz, the debut performance of Rebel Phaze Quartet embodied galvanizing rhetoric wrapped in ecstatic music. Led by drummer Bashi Rose from Baltimore’s Konjur Collective, Rebel Phaze features Ryan Easter on trumpet, and the Blacks’ Myths duo of Luke Stewart and Warren G. Crudup III on electric bass and drums. The quartet was in friendly fire mode, a riot of euphoria that was loud as hell, as Rose alternated between hitting his kit and exclaiming his words, with the band holding off before melting all the way down. After the set, Rose told me that he thinks “a lot of times people try to take spiritual jazz, or whatever you want to call it, out of its radical context. Improvisation gives us a taste of what a revolutionary society can look like.”

Cracks in the concrete are harder than ever to trip over. “All your spaces belong to us,” the monoculture seems to say. But wildflowers still sprout up through these fissures. A thriving city should be full of strange blocks that remain hidden until stumbled upon, where unexpected encounters can supercharge a day or an evening. You might find yourself at P.I.T. listening to salsa records with someone who once ran with the Young Lords, or an immersive deep listening drone performance, or a scrappy punk band playing its first show.

In a society that is increasingly hostile to the idea of a “third space,” P.I.T. is a beacon in the darkness. As McHugh states, “The P.I.T. is intrinsically organized, meaning we hold space for the community to come and do stuff.” What kind of stuff, you may ask? The stuff of life, which is often synonymous with refusal, resistance and reinvigoration. P.I.T. isn’t a throwback to old Williamsburg, but a new way forward, one based on becoming an integral part of the local community, and encouraging things to grow outward from there.