Open House: Docu on Williamsburg's Frenzied Development
The MoMA is screening a 31-minute film today at 4pm and 7pm about the residential transformation of Williamsburg over the past few years. It’s called Open House, and is directed by Diane Nerwen.
In recent years, Williamsburg, one of the most visibly transformed neighborhoods in New York City, has seen a host of new residential construction and glass-and-steel structures spring up on blocks long defined by factories and modest row houses. While the housing bubble was deflating across the country, forty-story luxury buildings were being erected along the Brooklyn waterfront at an unprecedented rate. Chronicling developers literally tearing apart the neighborhood and frenzied property owners desperate to cash in before the market collapses, Open House reveals an urban renewal project on a scale not seen since Robert Moses’s ‚”slum” clearance of the 1960s.
Diane will lead a discussion with the audience following the screening of the second film, Behind the Iron Gate, which is a 55-min Polish documentary about Za Zelazna Brama, “one of the biggest housing estates built in the center of Warsaw between 1965 and 1972.”
If you miss it tonight, an encore screening will be tomorrow night at 7pm. For tickets and more info, visit MoMA. Here’s the trailer:
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