In the very last days of the 1970's a trickle of artists moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, looking for cheap space. They found Polish, Hassidic, Puerto Rican and Dominican communities living quietly around a dying industrial zone on the East River, littered with radioactive waste, abandoned buildings, a flourishing drug trade and Polish bakeries in which English was not recognized.

A handful of characters — a Tesla-obsessed electrician, art students, Vietnam veterans — were the first to make art in this industrial outpost. They built a neighborhood on top of the one they found.  As an impromptu community began to cohere, their own lives flew apart.

All young, adventurous artists step onto a fringe and create a mythic landscape of their own; thirty years later a far-flung group is pulling documents out of boxes and sharing them. WILLIAMSBURGH BROOKLYN is a paean to those years and a pantheon of friends, old buildings, empty streets and the disparate immigrant cultures that nurtured these artists.

WILLIAMSBURGH BROOKLYN builds a tactile and emotional sense of an older Williamsburg, looking at the roots of artistic yearning and the price that is sometimes paid in the name of art.