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Walk along a certain stretch of North Sixth Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and you might wonder if you’ve stumbled into any upscale shopping district in the United States. A block away from an Hermès store, you’ll find a Chanel, Warby Parker, Lululemon and several other chain retailers.
The neighborhood wasn’t always this commercialized. Steven Kurutz, a reporter on the Styles desk at The New York Times, lived in Brooklyn for more than 20 years during the ’90s and 2000s. He remembers when Williamsburg had “a kind of grittiness to it,” a place where artists seeking cheap rent moved next door to Hispanic and Hasidic communities, he said.
He knew that Williamsburg had changed. For many New Yorkers, the area has come to represent a certain era of gentrification in the city, with glass-walled condominiums, retail stores and boutique hotels lining formerly industrial streets.
“The global rich is in that neighborhood now,” Mr. Kurutz said.
With luxury fashion houses setting up shop in the area, Mr. Kurutz thought a piece of journalism could chart the neighborhood’s transformation.
The result, published in The Times last month, is a comprehensive timeline and visual history of Williamsburg’s evolution over the last three and a half decades. The article does not offer an exhaustive history of Williamsburg or the communities that have called the neighborhood home. Instead, it showcases a brief history of its transformation, chronicling changes such as its evolving music scene, restaurant openings (and closings) and new residential developments.
The article is anchored by archival photography. Images depict store fronts, street corners, residents and other elements found in the Williamsburg of yesteryear. Christy Harmon, a photo editor on the Styles desk, was instrumental in tracking down the archival footage. It was not an easy task: Images predating the year 2000, before the rise of digital photography and the existence of online photo caches like Flickr, were scant, she said.
One of Ms. Harmon’s first steps was visiting The Times’s clippings library, known as the morgue, which houses the paper’s historical news clippings and other archival material. However, many of the articles she found on Williamsburg were about onetime news events like a fire or a murder.
Still, Ms. Harmon managed to cull a few scene-setting photos from the files. She then scoured the internet, using early versions of Mr. Kurutz’s drafts for reference, to find pictures of the locations and time periods he referenced. When she came across images that fit what she needed, she reached out to their owners.
“I cold-emailed them to say: ‘Oh, I found this image you shot of Williamsburg in 1994. Would you be interested in licensing it to us — and do you have any more?’” Ms. Harmon said. “I started conversations and got more and more images to work with.”
The more photos that came, the more the article grew. Ms. Harmon ended up licensing 120 photos. Roughly half were used in its final version.
“It had to walk the line between being a rich experience for readers, but it couldn’t be a slog,” Mr. Kurutz said.
The interactive article also features photos of the Williamsburg of today, taken by Tony Cenicola. Ms. Harmon provided Mr. Cenicola with a series of black-and-white archival images and asked him to recreate each shot in the present day to illustrate the neighborhood’s transformation.
“One of the things I love about photography in general is the time machine aspect,” Mr. Cenicola said.
Mr. Cenicola visited Williamsburg three times for the project. To get the perfect shot, he would connect his camera to a laptop and set it atop a small folding table. Using software that projected a ghostlike image of each archival photo onto his computer screen, he could align his camera lens and take a picture that was as close to the original as possible. In one set piece, on North Fourth Street, a photograph from 1994 shows an auto body shop. Mr. Cenicola’s frame, taken last year, shows Lilia, a popular Italian restaurant that specializes in wood-fired seafood, on the same corner.
Mr. Kurutz said he expected a strong reaction to his article, with its focus on specific decades. He hoped that the project would start a dialogue among readers, who might fill in gaps in the timeline.
“I’d love to see a lively debate,” Mr. Kurutz said. “I want people to kind of go down that memory lane of nostalgia, remembering their particular Williamsburg, whatever era that was.”
