Jeff Jensen Has Lived in Williamsburg Forever

Photo: Jake Oas

Jeff Jensen isn’t the original Williamsburg goon, but he’s been living in the neighborhood for so long that just thinking about it is giving us beards. Unlike 95 percent of the 35-and-under population, Jeff’s been kicking around the area since the 90s when there was no reason to make a visit other than buying hard narcotics from bikers and/or tempting death at the hands of Dominican gangbangers. He also makes up one half of Earles & Jensen, the funniest prank-calling duo since the Jerky Boys made that abominable movie. And his Endless Summer taco truck has provided many a delicious meal to bedraggled scenesters and drunken bridge-and-tunnel dregs alike. Let’s just say you’d be hard pressed to find a higher authority on the neighborhood. Well, maybe that weird potbellied gremlin who sells used clothes off a stoop at Bedford and North 11th, but who the fuck wants to talk to that guy?


VICE: We wanted to interview you because you’ve lived here forever and you know everyone and everything. No pressure.
Jeff Jensen: Well, I don’t know how accurate that is. I’m certainly not OG Williamsburg. I moved here in 1993.

Why did you move?
At that time you could get a studio apartment in the East Village for between $500 and $600. You could get a really big place in Williamsburg for the same price. That’s pretty much why everyone moved over here, right?

I’m from the Midwest and I liked the quiet. It was so dead then. I kind of felt like I had made a mistake moving to Williamsburg.

How come?
Back in those days all my peers lived in Manhattan, and trying to convince people to come over to Williamsburg was probably like trying to get all your contemporaries at Vice to really get into the Bible. It was a lonely vibe out here. A 20-year-old moving to Bedford Avenue was not the same as the feeling you get these days.

What was it like besides being lonely and quiet?
I really felt the gentrification guilt then because it was in such a nascent stage. If anything, the locals were very friendly to the “artists,” which is what they called every white person in the neighborhood. Now you have to really squint your eyes to find anyone on Bedford Avenue who’s never heard of Pavement before. There also wasn’t as much self-loathing among us back then because there were so few of us that you almost felt an instant camaraderie. I’ve met people just sitting on the L-train platform because you’d be like, “Hey, you look like you’re an interesting person.”

But it was also incredibly inconvenient to live in Williamsburg back then. You’d have to go to Greenpoint to use an ATM. You couldn’t get the Village Voice in Brooklyn anywhere. That sounds so archaic but that’s how it was.

So what was here?
There’s always been some so-called hipsters in Williamsburg going back to the 40s and so on. It’s a little bit absurd for me to be talking about the good old days when there’s been people here 25 years before me. I don’t feel like I own this neighborhood more than some kid who just moved here last week. This is a place people move because Manhattan isn’t affordable anymore.

I’m almost envious of young people in the sense that they get to come here, after all that’s been established. It really does seem almost an unreal phenomenon. The kids that are just moving here are probably not as conscious about what the “early settlers” went through to make that neighborhood what it is.

What type of stuff did you have to go through to make the land habitable for them?
There was a lot of violence on the south side. I don’t even know how to describe it.

Within the first week we moved above [a Williamsburg dive bar that still exists today], a car exploded on a street below our apartment. The fire department showed up, the guys from the bar came outside, and they obviously knew the firemen and brought them some Bud Light as they were spraying this car down. Everyone seemed to be having a good time about it. The next week another car was on fire on the side of the bar and I was just like, “God. That’s fucking weird.” I had a car and I didn’t want it to get fucked up. And then one of the dudes that used to hang out at that bar, this creepy dude Joey, I saw him fucking around with this Cadillac and basically stripping it. Of course later that night, the Cadillac blew up. They were running some kind of insurance scam. There was a lot of shady shit like that that still happens a little bit, but not as obvious. The amount of people on the street then, there’s at least 20 times as many people on Bedford Avenue now. It was easier to recognize those types of crimes.

Photo: Matt Sweeney

Has anything stayed the same?
I find it really commendable, or maybe it’s purely coincidental, or just fucking downright weird, that there’s not even a Whole Foods here or a Starbucks. There used to be a toxic dye factory up on Bedford. Then the health department busted them and they condemned the building, saying they couldn’t build on that lot for ten years. Meanwhile, I was living across the street from it and the guy below me died from brain cancer and there were these mutant tree bushes growing out of the lot. When they first knocked the building down some ingenious artist made a Starbucks sign that said, “Coming Summer 1997.” Then all these young people were so offended by it and started tagging it with things like, “We don’t want you here!” or “Stay away!” They weren’t even savvy enough to see they were being tricked by some smarter prankster.

Back in the early 90s they were practically trying to give away apartments. You could live anywhere. That’s what was so great. We liked the place we had because we liked the idea of living above a bar.

Did you ever hang out there or did you go get your drinks elsewhere?
The Mustard Factory was one place that was on Metropolitan. That was the place where they had huge parties. The best one, still my all-time favorite bar in Williamsburg that was conspicuously uninhabited, was called the Ship’s Mast and was on North Fifth and Berry. People were friendly. It was like we were all a bunch of castaways in a very dead neighborhood. Now, it doesn’t seem appropriate to acknowledge that we’re all into the same shit whereas back then, it was so totally unrestricted, like a Wild West kind of feel at certain times.

After I moved above the bar, I didn’t hang out there at all. There were too many fucked-up guys in there. They would be like, “Don’t tell Steve we’ve been doing coke in the bathroom, OK?” And I was just like, “Uh. I didn’t even know you were doing coke.”

“I know, but just don’t tell Steve!”

And I’m like, “Well, then why did you tell me?”

There were a lot of fucking psychos around. My landlord was always there and out of his mind. There was no common sense being utilized. It was just guys flying off the handle, being very violent, very creepy.

What else would you do for fun?
I started doing a lot of crazy events and parties in the 90s, 1995 through 2001. That was my era of really trying to pull as many people as possible together to have big parties. I did these citywide scavenger hunts. Have you seen the movie Midnight Madness?

Yeah.
That was essentially the role model for what we did, Manhattan Madness. We had game control like they do in that movie and all these people out in the field trying to solve these clues. One year, the finish line was in front of my house, on a Saturday night. This was probably 1999. There was this guy standing there waiting for the winning team to arrive, and no one was walking by. Every ten minutes someone from the bar would come out and be like, “What the fuck is going on out here?”

On a Saturday night.
Yeah. If I could find a photograph of some desolate corner, that would be the photo that I’d pick as a good emblem of my recollection of those days. People can get so nostalgic about some things that they forget how much it sucks. I had a view of Manhattan from my house and it was almost like a carrot being dangled in front of my face, like, “You’re missing out on all the fun over there.”

When did you move out of the north side?
I left in late 2005.

And at that point what did you think of the whole thing?
I had rent control so I wasn’t gonna leave. I was like, “I don’t care if they have some Ringling Brothers’ sad circus on my street every single day.” Then I came into a little bit of money so I had enough to put into a down payment on the east side of Williamsburg. It was crushing to pay that kind of money when you know that you could have bought it for one-twentieth of what it is costing now. It was painful.