A Condo Tower Grows in Brooklyn

"And no one bloody knows where the working class will go."

As Williamsburg turns urban Disneyland, those who own homes, a small fraction, see values spike and pass the dough to their kids. Everything becomes safer, hipper, there's better sushi.

"Follow the gays and the artists -- they restore cities. It's that or wither away," says Frank Braconi, director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council of New York.

As for the working class?

"A high-school-educated person," Braconi says, "stands a much better chance of prospering in Atlanta than in New York."

But that raises the question: What does become of millions of middle- and working-class residents who represent the majority of New York, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles? An edgy mix of races and classes has for generations defined the world city. Now coolness does the suburban dance.

Elvin Wyly of the University of British Columbia authored a Fannie Mae report that found mortgage lending in Williamsburg has increased in recent years at twice the national average -- and most of those dollars go to upper-class families. "We are transforming class character of the American city," says Wyly. "There's nothing 'natural' about it."

"The struggle in the 1970s was to force banks to loan in poor neighborhoods," he adds. "Now we're trying to slow the banks down."

Change comes with particular poignancy in Williamsburg. Residents wrested their neighborhood from blight's maw long before the gentry arrived. From 1986 to 1995, New York City poured $750 million into Williamsburg and Greenpoint, and tenants created thousands of low-income cooperative apartments. When factories shuttered, boutique manufacturers and artists took root, employing laborers at good wages.

Nor did natives object when their old neighborhood slipped on a new dress.

Luis Acosta, a 61-year-old former seminarian, won't wax nostalgic for the day a teenager bled to death on his front stoop. Nor does Rob Solano, the thickly muscled son of a Puerto Rican knish vendor, object to the wasabi-and-poblano-sauce restaurants; it beats convincing his girlfriend to ride the L subway line to Manhattan for a dinner out.

You walk into South Williamsburg and find Rabbi David Niederman, black-hatted and bearded, standing by the automotive river that is the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. His ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish sect washed ashore with a dozen families 50 years ago and built a 50,000-strong shtetl that repelled the crack gangsters of the late 1980s.