A Condo Tower Grows in Brooklyn

"Clearly the city didn't drive a hard enough bargain," says Martin Dunn, a developer of low-income housing. "What was wrong with holding developers to a mere 500 percent profit?"

Over on Union Avenue, Barbara Schliff, a tough-talking blond organizer of three decades' vintage with the nonprofit housing group Los Sures, stands by a graffitied tenement with 30 Mexican and Ecuadoran tenants. The landlord offered tenants $5,000 to vacate -- he has condos in mind.

The tenants are defiant, but history isn't in their favor. Schliff's voice slides edgy. "I can't feel like this rezoning battle was some great victory," she says. "I feel like in five years we're all gone."

As for the boutique manufacturers who are the postmodern face of Williamsburg? Dawn Ladd, 55, an expat Arkansas artist, owns Aurora Lampworks, which designed the handsome iron lamps in City Hall Park. She points across North 11th Street.

A luxury condo rises. No resident, she notes, wants to hear trucks backing up at 7 a.m. or listen to a $19-an-hour Latino craftsman banging hammer on metal like a mad monk. She purses her lips. "I fought like hell and lost. My next move is out of the city."

Rabi Elbaz, an intense architect, moved here in 2000. His friends are having kids and no one can afford Williamsburg anymore, and besides: How cool is a place dominated by white Manhattanites and hedge funders anyway? "We are becoming like the Hispanics," Elbaz says. "We're all moving."

Elbaz has tracked the gypsy hipsters to Bushwick. Crack and smack gangs once controlled it, but that was yesterday. It's the new land of cool. He's bought an apartment building and is turning it into condos.

And what of Solano, the knishmaker's son? He sits in an old Italian restaurant and fiddles with his penne. He bridles at the notion he's a goner. He has his eye on a subsidized apartment, which he will eventually obtain. "I'm not good enough to live next door to you?"

Then he asks: "Where are most of us going to live?"

Then he answers: "Pennsylvania."