I swear, sometimes the shorter the block is, the longer the post is going to be. Here’s another tiny stretch with a big footprint.

This part of South 6th Street is tucked under the Williamsburg Bridge with roots that appear to reach back as far as 1833, predating even Williamsburg’s entry into Brooklyn, according to this very thorough genealogy website.

Being close to the East River, this street was filled with workshops, factories, and tenements serving the working waterfront. The Williamsburg Bridge, which opened in 1903, led to some of these buildings getting lopped off for the construction. As the industry gradually left, it left some room for the radio pirates, poets, and trendsetters to pick up the pieces.

The “hipsterization” of Williamsburg and the subsequent 2005 rezoning to the north changed much of the area. But this little alcove of leftovers and backdoors still seems a bit removed from all of that, even though it’s steps away from the famous Peter Luger steakhouse, nightlife spots, and the bridge that brought more than a century of change to the neighborhood.

Photos are from May.

Plop yourself down and get a streetview here.

In the 1980s and 90s, the Brooklyn Immersionists were a loose scene of artists who made their way to the post-industrial Williamsburg waterfront to make art, play music, and hold parties in dangerous neighborhoods and even more dangerous buildings.²

So, in 1988, when Terry Dineen and Jean-François Pottiez opened The Lizard’s Tail in a former industrial paint supplier, it was still unusual for kids to schlep across the Williamsburg Bridge for a show. But those who did, found an experimental venue made from salvaged materials heated by a stove from a junk shop, Cisco Bradley wrote in “The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront.”

On March 23, 1990, the New York Times described the Lizard as looking “as if it had been built by high school students who pilfered their materials from junkyards and empty lots to make a clubhouse,” and the description still stands.

“The whole thing seems illicit,” the Times continued. “You can imagine it as an Eastern European club before glasnost.”

Two days after that review appeared, an arsonist burned down a crowded club in the Bronx, killing dozens of people, and prompting the city to clamp down on cramped, unlicensed venues, Bradley wrote.

And since this bar had already run afoul of alcohol violations, it was an obvious target for authorities, especially with the prominent news coverage. venue closed some time afterward and by 2010, it housed Time’s Up! Brooklyn, with repair classes, bike activism, and a sidewalk vending machine for parts.

For several years, there was also a vending machine selling bike parts like locks, handlebar grips, patch kits, and even a $33 used BlackBerry, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

There was also a bike rental shop called Traif Bike Gesheft—meaning unclean—nodding to the somewhat acrimonious relationship at the time between the Hasidic population and the bike lanes. The store—opened by Orthodox Jew Baruch Herzfeld—rented free bikes to Hasidic Jews to help them explore beyond the neighborhood and acted as a “semi-secret window onto the larger world and a clubhouse of mild transgressions,” New York Magazine wrote in 2010.

One notable resident of Time’s Up was Adam Purple, who was one of the pioneers of the Lower East Side’s community gardening movement, but later lived in a small room here. (We’ll have to talk more about him next time we’re on the other side of the bridge.) In an essay, Benjamin Heim Shepard recounted:

“I introduced myself, asking if he had a minute to talk. He said he was busy. A minute later he paused, asking me if I had ever taken my own bowel movement and buried it and watched bugs take it over.

Sure, I told him.

“Good. It’s the law of return,” explained Purple. “You take something from the land, you’d better put something back. It’s a law that you dare not break.”

Purple died of a heart attack in 2015 while riding his bike back to Brooklyn on the Williamsburg Bridge, which loomed above his onetime home.

It appears that Time’s Up has moved to Manhattan, but the building still bears the signature, with plenty of spray paint and plywood. Now there’s just a broken ATM and some for rent signs.

In September 2025, an application to open up a weed store named Cannabisseur was put before the Community Board.

Here’s a little overgrown wedge of reclaimed street with trees and wildflowers with some chairs from a waiting room sitting under a very large mural.

The image began with a 17-year-old named Steven Paul who took a photo of his friend Nina Attal (now an art director and wardrobe stylist) and entered the photo in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. It won and was selected by the mural advertising company Colossal Media to be painted on the wall by its team of “wall dogs.”¹

Somewhere along the line, people began calling it the “Mona Lisa of Williamsburg.” I don’t really like the name, but I appreciate the mystery.

Of the pensive expression, Paul told the Wall Street Journal: "She was thinking at the time, 'I was really upset with you for not letting me take my bangs out of my face.’”

A small curved apartment building was proposed there in 2017, but it never happened. Instead, we have our peaceful place to lose some of our own time.

A progressive plant nursery called Pollyn has been here, and did a little bit of everything: it sold Christmas trees, pumpkins, and hosted events and DJ sets where even the plants joined in.

These photos were taken almost three months ago. It’s been a long summer. So if anything’s changed, please give me a heads up.

Anyway, here’s what the corner looked like in ‘98, when it was the final stop for a doomed bus in The Siege.

Next to the East River Bar, there’s a mural dedicated to Dave Rodebaugh, a cycling enthusiast and bike mechanic who died in a bike crash in 2015. After he died, his family donated his face to transplant to a Mississippi firefighter who’d been seriously injured in a fire. New York Magazine has a detailed article about the whole sequence, and it’s remarkable.

This is a fish-heavy restaurant where one of the highlights is a take on the Filet-O-Fish sandwich with skate, Comté cheese, and kimchi, according to Greenpointers.

What’s red, white, and super thin?

83 South 6th with a lot size of 526 square feet. It’s narrow! Google’s AI thing says it would fit three standard parking spots and I’m not sure if that’s correct, but it seems right.

In 1891, this red-brick Romanesque Revival fortress was the Bedford Avenue Theater, perfectly situated near the horse cars on Broadway and the elevated train on Driggs Avenue, according to the theater’s newspaper announcement.

Crowds seeing one early show no doubt marveled at showstoppers such as “What I found in baby's pocket!” (The pocket, among other things, contained a fishhook, a small pencil, and a jackknife, which should NOT be in the baby’s pocket, no sir.)

The wholesome era ended when it became the Empire Theater a few years later and the Little Egypt Burlesque Company began to orient shows for “working class men” and “slumming gentlemen,” according to the Big Onion Guide to Brooklyn.

“Little Egypt herself was known for performing an indecent ‘hoochy koochy’—a bellydance—in a revealing costume,” the guide notes. “Although Little Egypt received notoriety and bad press for her lascivious dancing, her audience would have been just as disreputable and poorly behaved.”

By 1903, the back portion of the theater was chopped off to make way for the Williamsburg Bridge, according to Brownstoner. The remaining bit was a garage and repair shop, then home to a warehouse for the Fruitcrest Corporation. After the company decamped to Long Island, the building sat neglected and covered in yellow paint before it was renovated to host a fancy gym.

In 2020, NY YIMBY reported on a proposal to replace this with a 26-story mixed-use hotel, but it instead converted to apartments with some market-rate and affordable units.

Nearly all of the buildings on the south end of this stretch are back entrances to those buildings on Broadway, a block to the south.

Once a shoelace factory in an odd-shaped lot is now an oddly-accented apartment building in an odd-shaped lot.

Do we like this? Hard to say, but it certainly looks much better than its original design. Nice views of the bridge from there, too, I’m sure.

This small brick building with an overhang started, possibly, as a paint factory, and looks like a good enough headquarters for pirates.

“According to oral legends, a biker gang had taken over the first floor for a few years in the early 1990s, until they got kicked out and supposedly threw a firebomb over the back wall,” Cisco Bradley wrote in The Williamsburg Avant-Garde.

Beginning in 1997, sound artist Tom Roe ran a pirate radio station from his upstairs loft, which was microcast to a range that reached only a slice of the neighborhood limited to roughly Grand Street, Division Street, and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. “We put flyers up on telephone poles locally around where we thought people could actually tune in to the broadcast,” Roe told Bradley for the book.

One night in 1997, the group even brought gas-powered equipment onto the Williamsburg Bridge for a party and live broadcast. Roe recounted the night here.

He ultimately named it the free103point9 Project Space, a performance venue for free jazz, noise, and electronic music, which hosted early Animal Collective, !!!, and plenty of other emerging, weird bands.

"I loved it even though, when you played there, you had to load your gear up two full flights of stairs,” guitarist Jon Fine wrote in an excerpt taken from the book Where the Wild Gigs Were: A Trip Through America's Legendary Underground Music Venues. “Ungentrified, narrow stairs, which distressingly gave a bit when you stepped on them, and variously squeaked, squealed, creaked and howled as you and your bandmates hauled your amps and speaker cabinets up to the third floor."

One artifact is a record of dub reggae covers of Joy Division songs recorded here by a supergroup called Jah Division. (Grab your Unknown Pleasures t-shirt and dive in.)

Today, the East River Bar downstairs maintains the open and bricked feel from its former industrial use, according to New York Magazine. You can even barbecue your own food if there’s a grill free.

Here’s a recent music video filmed at the bar. Are trucker hats and PBR back?

Now that you’re here, sit down and, as the mural suggests, lose some time. Or better yet, take it in.

At 99 South 6th, before any of the immersionists, the “law of return” and the bike vending machine, there was Paint-Point Products. Its president, William Rice, was himself a poet and in 1989, the Columbia College grad submitted a poem to the alumni magazine where he’d graduated 67 years previously:

To be alive
To be around
To see sky and clouds
Some trees
A friendly face
To do the day's work
To hear some pleasant sound
To read a book
Just to be around

What’s Good: This corner is tightly packed with gems and almost feels forgotten. The view with the bridge is cool. And sometimes it’s nice to hear some sounds amid the trees and a friendly face.

What’s Not: Seriously, somebody get that jackknife away from baby.

Block Rating: 7/10