How the Tough, White Working Class Neighborhoods of NYC vanished.

By Rundo

I was born and raised in Flushing queens, NYC, by a single mother who was also born and raised in Flushing, Queens. Her parents (my nonna and popa) were the first “American” generation raised on Mulberry St. (little Italy) in Manhattan. I say this because you can no longer find anyone in NYC who has a connection to the city like this. The Italian/Irish working class neighborhoods that everyone loves to watch in the movies do not exist. Guys with authentic accents like mine are gone, at best you see some faggot on tik-tok who grew up in long island — or god forbid upstate NY, trying to fake something for views. but these guys didn’t grow up drinking beers off fire escapes and spending summers just hanging with the crew on subway platforms. I was part of the last generation of that and the recent mayoral election showed this. Over now, are the white working class enclaves and tough white hoodlums of NYC, replaced by liberal hipsters and brown migrants.

It was the introduction to the Williamsburg hipster that really fuelled my journey to become a fascist. Seeing those skinny fat, trust funds guys with their oiled beards disturbed me to my core. So I strove to be everything they were not: I started going to boxing gym; I kept my hair always in a tight skin fade; i wore only athletic wear and track jackets; i stayed clean shaven and thickened my strut when i walked. I never wanted anyone to think i was one of them as I took the subway.

It was the hipster liberal swarm that finally hammered the last nail into New York’s coffin. Ofc, the black gangs and the migrant floods changed things up, redrew the maps with blood and chaos, but those old white working-class enclaves Astoria, Ridgewood, bayside, the last scraps of Bay Ridge they hung on, stubborn as the guys like myself who grew up there. We still had our bars to shoot pool, to take the girls out to call “ours”

Then came the trust-fund kids. At first the neighborhoods opened the door: hey, just some pale college types with funny haircuts, what’s the harm? Give ’em a slice, a Nodding smile, let ’em rent the railroad apartment above the bakery, but these weren’t travellers passing through. They bought the corner deli that had been slicing prosciutto since Sinatra was on the radio and turned it into a “queer anarchist infoshop” with zines about dismantling the patriarchy stacked next to $18 cold brew. They put Black Lives Matter signs in windows that used to have faded American flags and statues of the Virgin Mary.

And here’s the killer: they were soft. Not just soft—effete, scented-candle, therapy-speak soft. The kind of guys who apologize when you bump into them. Back in the day, those neighborhoods had gatekeepers: thick-necked Italian kids in wifebeaters, knuckles still raw from last night’s misunderstanding outside the bar. We used to hold down our blocks, we didnt just let any crew or gang show up and do what they wanted. Many nights ended with someone getting a bat pulled out on them, or a couple of the boys jumping someone that was in the wrong place. Because of this, the animals understood that our neighborhood was off the menu. It was these youths that kept the animals at bay.

But the hipsters? They invited the zoo in. Open borders wasn’t just a bumper sticker to them; it was a lifestyle. So when the gangs that used to circle the neighborhood like wolves finally smelled weakness, they didn’t creep they strutted. They chimped out in the bars that used to play Billy Joel on the jukebox; pawed the girls who grew up with brothers who’d break a bottle across your face for less; turned Saturday night into a jungle. And the new locals the ones sipping barrel-aged IPAs just stepped aside, eyes down, mumbling about systemic whatever.

By the time the crime stats looked like a war zone, the hipsters had what they came for: Instagram backdrops, a couple years of “authentic” grit for the memoir. Then the first stroller appeared and suddenly it was, “We need space for the baby, somewhere with good schools and no vibrations.” They flipped the walk-up for seven figures, packed the rescue dog into the Subaru, and headed upstate to take over Hudson or Beacon or whatever pasture was next. The new buyers? Koreans, Indians, tech bros with H1-Bs replacing the sons of the local streamfitters union.

That’s how it died. Not with a riot or a blackout, but with a $14 avocado toast and a shrug. The neighborhoods you see in A Bronx Tale, in The Wanderers, in every Scorsese tracking shot where the tough youths in track jackets owned the night—gone. Sand-blasted, renovated, neutered. The last real New York didn’t get murdered by the usual suspects. It got gentrified to death by kids who thought “community” was a branding exercise and “toughness” was “toxic masculinity”

Me and OFC crew at the handball court 2007(im the one on right in the white wifebeater )

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