The Williamsburg that appears in Taiwanese director Ang Lee’s film ​The Wedding Banque​t is somewhat post apocalyptic. Barren, except for the humongous factories, it is an all concrete landscape: industrial, run-down and gritty.

Wai Tung, the young “​real estate entrepreneur” and protagonist of the film​ owns one of these factories where, perhaps not in complete accordance with the zoning laws, he rents out a floor to Wei-Wei, a struggling artist. This space, her home and studio, cannot really be called an apartment or even a loft. It is not, as Wai Tung puts it, “a living space” nor at all habitable. The boiler is broken and cannot be touched or else all the hot water in the building will be turned off. The window, which has been stuck for a year, is unopenable. Add to that a humid New York City summer. The space has drastically overheated. It is past boiling, sweat literally pouring down your back, hot: a sauna. This is, Wai Tung says, why the rent is so low.

Wai Tung and his boyfriend Simon’s apartment in Greenwich Village, fully equipped with an air conditioner, functioning windows, and crisp white linen sheets which is, in comparison, a paradise.

Wei-Wei’s living situation is one which is familiar to my father who moved to Williamsburg nearly forty years ago, in 1978, and to other long term residents of the neighborhood.

My downstairs neighbour, Greg Wulf, ​recalls that our building (in around 1981) was lax in providing heat to the upper floors. So, during the winter, some of the tenants from the upper floors would go to the boiler room in the basement and set the boiler according to their preferences. There were ensuing battles over the boiler, and its temperature, depending on which floor the tenants lived on. Turning the boiler on to its maximum capacity provided a reasonable sixty eight degrees on the top floor, the seventh. However it meant that Greg, downstairs on the fourth floor, was stultifying at ninety five. Thankfully his windows, unlike Wei-Wei’s, fulfilled their function and were openable. They remained open for the entirety of winter.

The seven floor factory we live in was constructed in 1903 as a bomb proof building where some type of explosive materials were fabricated. After the bomb makers left the building was used for many different purposes. It housed two knitting factories, Williamsburg Paints: a manufacturer of oil paints for artists, a frame-maker, a plastics manufacturer, an envelope manufacturer and a bookbinding factory in the basement. Part of the seventh floor was also used to house a special education program but, upon finding the ceiling lined with asbestos, they abandoned the premises.

At this point the fourth to seventh floors were empty and the owners, trying to make some money, decided to open up the building to artists.

My father had been previously living on Center Market Place in Little Italy above the John Jovino Gun shop, the oldest gun store in New York City.

The owner of the shop, Lou Imperato, wishing to have been an interior designer, transformed the upstairs offices into three fancy apartments including my father’s duplex with a spiral staircase.

These converted offices, just across the street from the former Police Headquarters (which is why the street was lined with gun shops), were formerly used by police reporters covering the New York City crime scene. In the movies in the forties, and in real life too, when a criminal was apprehended and they said “take him downtown” this, Center Market Place, was exactly where they landed. Amongst these reporters was Usher Fellig, Weegee, one of the great photographers of the 20th century.

He settled on Williamsburg. A friend of his, also an artist, had just moved there. Indeed many young artists, in search of cheap rent and big spaces, had begun to populate the neighborhood. Initially fourteen artists, my father included, occupied seven lofts in our building, 5,000 square feet each.

Back then, my father says, he could have bought the whole building for two hundred thousand dollars. It was actually sold to its present owners for two hundred and forty thousand in 1982. Now one of the refurbished downstairs apartments (about 800 square feet large) can go anywhere between two to four thousand dollars ​a month​.

The owners would like to sell the building for forty ​million.

In the late 1970s Williamsburg had fallen into hard times. There were drug dealers and heroin addicts. Prostitutes occupied the downstairs foyer of our building doing their nails and preparing for their late night excursions. Stolen cars were dumped, stripped and torched in the streets. Armed street fights were frequent and one could hear the sound of gunshots almost every night.

Police officer Frank Serpico was shot in the face and gravely wounded in the middle of a drug bust at 778 Driggs Avenue and South 4th Street having been set up by his fellow officers. This event was later made into the movie ​Serpico, ​starring Al Pacino.

Lou Imperato’s gun shop on Center Market Place also appeared in this movie. Bullet holes in the windows were the norm. Neighborhood kids were using our building as target practice, firing at it from rooftops across the way. Greg from the fourth floor was sitting in his living room one day when a bullet whizzed in through the window and lodged itself in one of the couch cushions. Someone was firing at the building from the Williamsburg bridge. “It was a really bad neighborhood”, he said. “Nobody wanted to come over here”. This made it really difficult for the artists to get a gallerist to look at their work. When Ivan Karp first visited my Dad, he was carrying a gun.

Even taxis refused to go anywhere near it. Chris Crowhurst, another long term resident, remembers trying to travel back to Williamsburg from Canal Street one night at around 10pm in 1984. She was kicked out of no less than six cabs when the drivers found out her destination.

Nobody, except “those crazy artists”, could fathom living in Williamsburg. These artists were called pioneers by the press, since they were mostly young and white, but immigrants had been living in Williamsburg since the 1830s and the Native Americans before them.

The first immigrant group to settle in Williamsburg were the Dutch. In 1638 the Dutch West India Company, an association of Dutch merchants, purchased the area now known as Williamsburg from a local tribe of Native Americans, the Canarsee Indians. These Indians disappeared, just like the current Puerto Rican population of Williamsburg is disappearing now. The descendants of this vanished tribe are living on a reservation near Patchogue in eastern Long Island. They numbered 271 in the 2000 census.

Most of this area, known colloquially as the “Bushwick shore” (previously ​Boswijck,​ the name was anglicized during the 1664 English takeover of the colony of New Netherland, made up of what are now parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Connecticut) was composed up primarily of farming land which was slowly developed and turned into a cluster of little villages and farming developments. Farmers and merchants from other nearby villages would send their goods and produce to Bushwick Shore to shipped via ferry across the East River and sold in a market on Grand Street in Manhattan.

In 1792, ​Richard M. Woodhull, an “entrepreneur” and real estate speculator from Manhattan purchased 13 acres of land in Bushwick Shore. Hoping to promote a new idea of suburban life for New Yorkers he opened a tavern and began running a rowboat based ferry service from Grand Street to North 2nd Street, then known as Bushwick Street. James Hazard, another entrepreneur and Mr. Woodhull’s competitor, bought an additional 28 acres of land in the area and established his own ferry service. In 1802 Woodhull hired Colonel Jonathan Williams, a U.S. army engineer, to survey the property he had purchased.

Together they laid out a gridded street plan of the area (almost a decade before such a tactic was incorporated into Manhattan) envisioning it as a residential area. Woodhull named his new town Williamsburgh (the h was, for unknown reasons, dropped from the name in 1852), in honor of the Colonel.

In the early 1800s the Wallabout and Newtown Turnpike was built, connecting the interior with the coast. This made travelling much easier and interest in both living and working in Williamsburg grew. In 1818 a steam ferry was implemented, replacing the rowboats and in 1825 the Erie Canal was opened. These, among other things, helped to increase the levels of commerce in the area. In the 1830s Irish, German and Austrian immigrants arrived to Williamsburg, establishing homes and businesses. ​These capitalist immigrants began developing along the waterfront opening breweries, distilleries, docks and shipyards. They also helped to raise the popularity of the neighborhood attracting wealthy developers such as James Fisk, a financier, Cornelius Vanderbilt a business magnate and philanthropist, and Charles Pratt, a pioneer of the petroleum industry.

Williamsburg expanded and developed rapidly and, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, separated from Bushwick, becoming its own city in 1852. It was incorporated into the City of Brooklyn three years later. By this point its population had increased from an initial 1,000 to a tremendous 40,000.

Manhattan based businesses and manufacturers, seeing the favorable tax structure in King’s County, began to set up in Williamsburg. In 1856, Havemeyer and Townsend opened a sugar refinery, now known as Domino Sugar, by the waterfront. It was initially capable of refining 300,000 pounds of sugar per day but production grew and by 1883 the output was up to one million pounds (more than 50 percent of the country’s sugar supply). ​The sugar refinery dominated the south side and provided hundreds if not thousands of jobs for the local people.

Other notable industrial firms include Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, Brooklyn Flint Glass, D. Appleton and Company (publishers of Darwin’s The Origin of the Species and Alice in Wonderland) and the Williamsburg Savings Bank, which opened in 1851.

Williamsburg became the home to a plethora of gigantic manufacturing enterprises (including lots of spice factories along Wythe Avenue) from the 1870-1980s and was by 1890 responsible for 10% of the gross national product of the entire country.

In 1961 there were 93,000 manufacturing positions available in Williamsburg most of them filled by immigrants – the influx of Puerto Ricans who came to Williamsburg in search of these positions helped to expand the neighborhood’s Hispanic community.

In 1896 construction began on the Williamsburg Bridge.

It was finalized in 1903. Before the bridge was built, Williamsburg had been a mainly Irish and German enclave. It’s construction, linking Williamsburg with Manhattan’s Lower East Side, opened up the area to anew group of immigrants. Thousands of Jews crossed over from the Lower East side in search of better living and work conditions. The bridge soon became known as “Jew’s highway”.

The population of Williamsburg continued to skyrocket after the construction of the bridge, doubling from 1900 to 1920. By 1920 South 5th street was the most densely populated street in the United States. An Italian enclave developed in the Northside. And immigrants from Eastern European countries, including Lithuania, Russia and Poland, began to settle in Williamsburg.

Now Williamsburg has been radically gentrified and ​hipsterized (​although many of the original hipsters seem to have moved on, setting their sights on Bushwick and Crown Heights, Ridgewood, Maspeth and points beyond).

Bodegas, once a staple on every street corner, have vanished. Of the five Italian bakeries that were once in walking distance of our house only one remains. And the wonderful Polish charcuteries on Bedford Avenue have been forced out, replaced by clothing, eye glasses shops, and cutesy cafes. Walking down Bedford Avenue is like walking through a strip mall. What used to be small locally owned shops have been taken over by larger corporations. Duane Reade replaced King’s Pharmacy, the Bagel Store relocated to make room for an Apple Store, HSBC and Citibank are fighting it out, side by side, on the same street and there are, within minutes of each other, a Verizon Wireless and T Mobile.

The surrounding streets are no better. You can get a five dollar take away latte at Blue Bottle Coffee (which was formerly a spice factory),drop into Le Labo for a three hundred dollar bottle of perfume, purchase a five thousand dollar handbag from Sandro, and round up the day with a ten dollar pressed juice from the Juice Bar.

If, however, you prefer your fruit in a solid form, you can always pop into the brand new Whole Foods on the corner of North Third Street for some shiny nine dollar strawberries. Don’t forget that six dollar scoop of black pepper and fig ice cream from OddFellows and a Saturday stroll through Smorgasburg, the overpriced and overcrowded outdoor food market on Kent Avenue and North Seventh Street.

The variety of immigrant groups who used to reside in the neighborhood have been largely pushed out by a new class of ferry riding young white millennials. Williamsburg is something else.

“Transformed utterly”, Yeats said in another context, “a terrible beauty is born.”