A Trip to Williamsburg, Brooklyn

In my ongoing quest to get to know the 5 boroughs, I spent an afternoon wandering around Williamsburg, Brooklyn. This was the most interesting thing I saw. Although Williamsburg has an appealing desolateness - it is heavily industrial, but in a yesteryear, no-longer-productive way - its main strip is a pretty bland collection of obnoxiously expensive "hipster" stores. I say hipster because that is a word I come across here a lot lately. It is used deridingly, and as best I can fathom it means people who a) dress in skinny jeans, 70s band t-shirts and white Chuck Taylors, and b) live in Williamsburg. I never heard this word in Toronto. Does Toronto have hipsters? What's their outfit of choice? Anyway, I digress. In Williamsburg I had an average lunch and an average coffee, walked around forever, and, mostly unimpressed, boarded the J train home, happy that I had at least seen another little piece of this city. But, a few days later my interest in Williamsburg was again peaked by a piece in the Times, which mentioned in passing the tendency of some Hasidic Jews of the Satmar sect (of which there is a heavy concentration in the area) to deface business signs that they find morally reprehensible. For example: the website address of a kosher restaurant, listed on their storefront, was blacked out, because the Satmars don't use the internet. Why had I not come across these renegades? Witnessing some surrepitious graffiti censoring would have been much more fun than traversing the hipster-laden streets around Bedford Avenue!