REUTERS/Carlo Allegri
On Saturday, SantaCon, an all-day pub crawl where New Yorkers dress in Santa suits to allegedly celebrate the holiday season, will kick off in McCarren Park — the park that separates Williamsburg and Greenpoint.
Apparently the organizers of this drunken disasterfest got permits to be able to invade the neighborhoods best known for HBO's 'Girls' and black skinny jeans. Apparently they're allowed to be there, to drink there, to embarrass themselves there.
Fine.
But there's a very clear reason they shouldn't be. It's a moral one, not a legal one. The reason is that SantaCon breaks things, dirties things, pees on things. And we, in the People's Republics of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, are really precious about our things.
Let's contrast the two peoples — the people of SantaCon and the people of Williamsburg and Greenpoint.
SantaCon is a day when a guy in Long Island gets up, calls Lauren (his girlfriend), puts on a Santa suit (no shirt), gets on a train (Long Island Railroad), comes to the city (our city) and plans to get drunk enough to black out during the day time.
Usually this kind of thing happens in Midtown or Murray Hill, a place where seeing a bro yell "Lauren, you always get this way when you're drunk" while a crying girl vomits into a trashcan is common and expected. She (Lauren) is crying because she believes she lost the jacket that she is wearing.
Those neighborhoods are prepared for events like SantaCon — events where a bar owner may have to break up a midday knife fight, for example. Worst comes to worst, Lauren passes out in one of the many Starbucks locations within hobbling distance from one of the many terrible bars where she just did many shots of Fireball.
By contrast, Williamsburg and Greenpoint are not ready for Lauren or her boyfriend.
The people who have settled there have grown out of just being cigarette inhaling club kids and have grown into adults who name their kids "Tyger"(she's a girl). They like hand-made contemporary furniture and coffee that costs $7 a cup. They want to know where their chocolate came from. They (used to) worship a guy named James Murphy who fronted a band called LCD Soundsystem, and want to make the tone that sounds when you swipe a Metrocard more musical.
They just opened an organic wine bar. It's really nice in there.
REUTERS/Carlo Allegri
And that's the point here. The People's Republics of Williamsburg and Greenpoint are gentrifying fast, and they're doing that because the people who moved there created a great place to live. Its development is out of their hands now — there's a J. Crew and a Scotch & Soda, and banker bros living in high rises — but that doesn't mean they want the stuff they built broken by a bunch of drunken creeps.
So again, fine. We can't stop SantaCon from coming to our neighborhood. Just please don't break our stuff.
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