In another blow to your mom moving to Williamsburg and finding it’s not what it was supposed to be, yet another charming boutique has been pushed out by high rents to make way for a national brand affiliated with a soul-destroying corporation. Except this time the charming boutique is well-known secondhand store Beacon’s Closet and the national brand is Vice. Sounds like we’ve got an alt-war brewing, so you’d better choose sides now.
Crain’s reports that Beacon’s landlord has jacked up the rent to a point where the eleven-year-old store can’t stick around any more, so they’re joining Academy Records in their sojourn north to Greenpoint. “It seems like a lot of landlords are assigning arbitrary pricing to their spaces and just waiting to see what big fish or national chain will come and take the bait,” Beacon’s founder Carrie Peterson told Peterson.
Although in this case, it seems like that arbitrary rent increase paid off, because 21st Century Fox’s new buddy Vice is going to be taking over the space that used to house Beacon’s Closet. We’ll let the alt-war sort out whether this signifies the ultimate victory of DGAF attitude triumphing over a world of squares or just another previously dangerous media property selling out and becoming The Man we all hate so much. That is barring something like Brooklyn Brewery being pushed out for more Vice expansion. Everyone sides with a brewery.
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I think at this point is clearly not an "alt-war" if Vice is on one side. Vice is about as alt as MTV is music or Anthropologie is vintage. The real question is why are all these businesses moving to Greenpoint when they are about 18 months away from getting priced out of there?
Your parents have to shop somewhere when they visit you.