16 Melrose Street, 2

Quick Profile

As one of the most diverse neighborhoods in New York, Bushwick offers a perfect snapshot of just how multicultural the city is. Long-established as an amalgam of cultures and ethnicities, a wave of varying types of immigrants trickled in from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, with Bushwick largely becoming a home to Hispanics of Puerto Rican and Dominican backgrounds by the latter part of the twentieth century. 

With the Bushwick Initiative of the mid-00s that aided in revitalization, it became an attractive area to young professionals and artists. And even now, Bushwick has sustained affordable rent prices where other North Brooklyn counterparts, like Williamsburg and Greenpoint, have become more expensive. Priding itself on the weird and the wacky, numerous art collectives thrive in this part of Brooklyn, once famously named the seventh coolest neighborhood in the world by Vogue. 

Though it has drawn in many tourists in recent years (there’s even a graffiti tour you can take from the Bushwick Collective), the neighborhood remains very much community-oriented, and has not been subject to quite the same sort of corporate infiltration phenomenon of its nearby Williamsburg environs. 

But yes, of course, Bushwick has come a very long way from its 80s and 90s reputation as being “The Well,” a nickname given to it for its free-flowing and widely available amount of drugs (quantity over quality being the cliche applied here).