By Rebecca Ungarino

Aldo Cabrera sits on a barstool in his Bushwick, Brooklyn tattoo shop, Sacred Phoenix Tattoo. He watches passerby through his large front window from behind the counter, a small space on Wyckoff Avenue. Six years ago, his traditional tattoo parlor was a Spanish party supply store run by his mother, Luca.

Bushwick’s Hispanic community has shrunk considerably in the last few years, and so have the majority of his mother’s customers. The Cabreras have tried to hold onto the businesses they’ve put together – Luca’s once thriving party supply business has been reduced to a shelf of quinceañera party favors and a dozen rental folding chairs in the tattoo shop.

Though the sign above the door advertises both services, they know they won’t be able to last much longer without the ethnic clientele they once had.

Bushwick and Ridgewood, two neighborhoods whose young professional, artistic, steadily more affluent, white communities have sprouted in the last decade, have undergone drastic demographic and economic shifts. New and long-standing local business owners are feeling the change on the neighborhoods’ border, where strips of small businesses dot the avenues.

Aldo Cabrera’s customers are increasingly younger and seek traditional tattoo art, though he, too, knows he will soon have to relocate because of a smaller pool of clients.

In Conversation with Local Business Owners: Tales of Change, Formation

Ridgewood and Bushwick from Rebecca Ungarino on Vimeo.

“It’s really a race thing, as this area changes,” said Cabrera. His mother’s clientele, almost entirely Spanish-speaking and working-class, has moved toward Jamaica, Queens to find cheaper rent. The reason, he said, is simple.

“The presence of white people means more cops, cleaner sidewalks, less robberies, more cops, and higher rent,” said Cabrera, who has lived steps away from his shop since 2007.

Though this demographic shift has been steadily looming over the Ridgewood and Bushwick border for the last decade, longtime members of the community say, the past two to three years have been the most rapid; more renovated apartment buildings, ethnic eateries closing.

‘I Don’t Have to Sell Booze from Behind Glass’

Two blocks away on Wyckoff Avenue, Chino Villa stands behind the counter at his wine and liquor store.

“Oh, it’s safer around here. It’s a younger crowd now, more ‘hipster.’ It’s still very diverse, but now I even have tourists in the past year,” laughed Chino Villa, co-owner of Vinos En Wyckoff.

Villa, 45, lives close in neighboring Maspeth, Queens, and walks to work every day. He has managed wine and liquor stores across Brooklyn since 1991, and opened his larger Bushwick store with his son in 2012 after his more narrow next-door location, which he opened in 2008, was successful. He knew his more upscale store, at first, didn’t “fit in.”

“I started to hear about those changes in this area. The clientele is more exclusive. It’s a different culture now,” said Villa, looking out the store’s front window as a young couple in pea coats strolls in to buy a bottle of Rioja on a recent Sunday night.

“Years ago, in this area, it was different. I don’t have to sell booze from behind glass,” he said.

A Cultural Shift for Small Businesses

Three blocks away on Greene Street from Sacred Pheonix Tattoo and Vinos en Wyckoff, is La Fe Funeral Home, in the same border area. Olimpia Barillas’s family owns the home, which holds about 150 services per year within the Spanish community.

Barillas’ in-laws have owned La Fe – and the apartments above the funeral home on Wyckoff Avenue in Bushwick – since 1989. Though Barillas’ father-in-law died last year, the funeral home remains a family business. She has seen the changes in surrounding small businesses and watching passerby on the street.

“This used to be a drug-infested avenue, and on Greene Street, there used to be abandoned buildings, prostitutes, just lots of drugs,” said Barillas.

White non-Hispanic residents make up 84 percent of Ridgewood’s population – close to 138,600 of its 165,800 residents – according to the 2011-2013 American Community Survey data, an ongoing Census Bureau survey.

In the 2007-2009 survey, white non-Hispanic residents made up 82 percent of the population. Median household income in Ridgewood rose from $51,415 to $54,924.

According to the surveys taken at the same time in Bushwick, the influx of white non-Hispanics has been much more significant – from 28 percent of the neighborhood’s 131,800 residents between 2007 and 2009 to 45 percent of the neighborhood’ s 142,900 residents between 2011 and 2013. Median household income rose in Bushwick from $31,797 to $38,274.

“After September 11th, things started to get safer around here, and more people moved from the city to Brooklyn. There was a real estate ‘boom’ in Bushwick, even then,” said Barillas, sitting in her mother-in-law’s office inside the funeral home.

“Ridgewood, Glendale, Bushwick – it all got safer. You know, now there’s a sushi place, and cafes,” she said.

An Appealing Area; Appeasing a Younger Generation, Pushing Out the Old

In the past two to three years, Aldo Cabrera, 34, knew where the Ridgewood-Bushwick border, touted the “next Williamsburg” in the media, was headed. He supported the owners of a nearby bar, Old Stanley’s, when they looked for backing within the community when they opened in April. He said he gladly signed the petition the bar’s owners presented him, partly because he knew the area was already heading in a more upscale direction.

Three blocks away from Old Stanley’s, a “Cheers”-style bar with a wooden interior and a punk jukebox in the back unlike small nearby Spanish bars, sits Fair Weather Bushwick.

“People who come in here are mostly young, 20’s, 30’s, and have moved here one or two years ago,” said Shane Sener, owner of the year-old artisanal coffee shop and steps away from the Myrtle-Wyckoff L and M train station.
The train station is on the intersection of Brooklyn and Queens, and its changing surroundings exemplify the border’s change.

Sener, who lives one block away from his shop, said he knew that the area was changing once a Planet Fitness gym, CVS, and Dunkin Donuts were all built adjacent to one another at the intersections of Myrtle and Wyckoff Avenues between 2011 and the shop’s opening in 2013.

“If a guy comes here who is 28 years old,” said Sener, wearing a sweatshirt with the Brooklyn Roasting Company logo, “he’s lived around here for three years. He was a waiter or a bartender before he became a graphic designer in SoHo.”

A Look Inside Small Businesses and Life on the Ridgewood, Bushwick Border

Faisal Ahmed, who manages a Subway sandwich shop on Myrtle Avenue in Ridgewood, said the Subway franchise is looking to open more locations in the area because of the neighborhood’s “up-and-coming” appeal, and high foot traffic over the past year.

Subway had last year opened a location deeper into Ridgewood on St. Nicholas Avenue, away from the thoroughfare of the neighborhood’s Myrtle Avenue strip, said Ahmed, but closed quickly because of slow business. The real growth, he said, is closer to the train station and away from lower-income homes on the outskirts of the neighborhoods.

He found better business after relocating to the burgeoning Myrtle Avenue Business Improvement District on the Ridgewood-Bushwick border, just at the intersection of Myrtle Avenue and Wyckoff Avenues, where his monthly commercial rent is $5,000.

“This area is a major transportation hub,” said Ahmed. “And so here you have a lot of hip people, actors and students, because it’s going to be the next Williamsburg in ten years.”

Pushed Out, Farther East

The border of Ridgewood and Bushwick still has a large Puerto Rican population, and low-income Hispanic families still send their children to neighborhood public schools in the area in an area farther east, toward the sprawling Evergreens Cemetery and Knollwood Park Cemetery, both tucked beneath Glendale, Queens. Toward this easternmost part of the Ridgewood-Bushwick border, the crime is consistently higher than walking toward Manhattan; toward Aldo Cabrera’s tattoo shop, Old Stanley’s Bar, and Fair Weather Bushwick.

“We have about fifty percent Puerto Rican students,” said Noreen Zantua, an elementary special education teacher in Ridgewood for the past 14 years between two public elementary schools in the area. Lower-income families continue to push farther east for cheaper rents.

“But back then, some of the teachers had bought houses and apartments near where Bushwick and Ridgewood meet. We would say, ‘Oh, god, who would do that?’ But now, it’s much different,” said Zantua.

Zantua, who lives in Nassau County on Long Island, has witnessed a better quality of life in Bushwick and Ridgewood since starting to teach in the area shortly after September 11th.

“But what are you gonna do?” said Aldo Cabrera, sitting on a stool in his tattoo parlor on Wyckoff Avenue while his mother, Luca, sat close by behind her nearly-bare desk that was once a high-top counter, shrouded in frilly traditional Spanish party favors.

“It’s New York City,” he said, gesturing to the front window. “We have to live with it.”