Waterfront Week, R.I.P.

After what is guessed to be 12 years of pretty much steady publication, Waterfront Week is washed up. The humble free weekly sat quietly in the corner of Williamsburg bars, largely ignored since the neighborhood long ago became a living museum of hipster Gen-X dotcom irony. Dennis Sinned was right.

Dennis was a local "activist'' who back in the early 90s saw the future of Williamsburg. He saw penne vodkas and brioche on every corner, with rents adding a comma to the monthly tab. Back then he railed against Waterfront Week and its readership. He was a Latino John Brown, using fliers, leaflets and appearances on open-stage poetry nights within the very venues he decried. He allegedly even went so far as to glue the locks of the L Cafe in his effort to stop the hipster takeover of Williamsburg's north and south sides.

This debate has become a tired discourse as well as a fait accompli. Williamsburg is an easy target now, and besides, the Times has already got around to declaring Bushwick the next cool neighborhood now that hipsters have found lofts out there for their inevitable 11-month stays in Brooklyn before moving to San Francisco?oops, I mean Oakland.

Waterfront Week used to be a xeroxed 11-by-17 folded sheet that listed where the warehouse parties were for that particular week. I know, because for several months in the early 90s I did much of the writing, paste-up, printing and distribution. It was an odd turn of co-op journalism between several unemployed writer/artist types?a ragtag rotation of ratso-level "responsibility.'' Kind of like not eating the last free hotdog in the crock pot at the long-lost Ship's Mast.

My WW babysitting tenure was between stints of colorful editorial guidance by the glamorous foot-soldier and gossip columnist Medea DeVyse (the lovechild of Joe Franklin and Liz Smith?) and later under the more sobering but high-quality hand of activist Kate York. There were also these cyberdesigner guys (way ahead of their time) who took over for a few issues. For many months, no one knew who would print the next issue, but somehow, it got out. There was also this cartoon strip by a then-unknown local guy named Tony Millionaire. Now that the artist is selling his original artworks online for a hefty pricetag, I can admit that I own the original art to the first two "Maakies" strips ever done, because I was still pasting up WW. It would be only a few weeks and a few issues later that Drinky Crow would first land in the weekly, after his duty as a napkin-drawn traded-for-drinks advertising gimmick for another closed bar, 612 Metropolitan.

This was back when Nick Gomez was wandering McCarren Park with his Bolex camera, and people were flying in from Berlin to organize parties on appropriately dilapidated piers on the East River. Back when impromptu predawn softball games were played with Ken Russell-style hallucinogenic urgency, using a mannequin leg for a bat, with Rastas sleeping in the deep right-center gap of the Mustard Factory courtyard.

The actual printing of the early Waterfront Week issues were done on a xerox machine donated by some hirsute activist dude camped out in the old Archive building in the West Village. Many times I have visions of being forced to testify as to my weekly appearances in the bugged loft space of this dude with the John Reed vibe who seemed happy as a clam that David Dinkins was mayor.

No one quite knows what happened to Waterfront Week in its midlife crisis, much like no one can pin an exact date on when the area became such an atrocious quasi-trendy arthood with all the "one stop to the East Village" pretensions. What is clear is that somewhere along the line, WW became Reader's Digest-ed as a p.c. bastion of middle-of-the-road community boardspeak with a side of predictable animal rights pabulum for a neighborhood that invented the term "attention deficit disorder." The new editors settled in for a filibustered long haul. They added a glossy cover, staples, page after page of advertising, an "advice'' column and a column written by a dog. All this with an amazing capacity to ignore the horrific sight of the 11211 zip code becoming a ritzy, foppish enclave.

At Teddy's bar the other night, a humid Sunday, I gripped the last issue of Waterfront Week. There were four other people in the joint, which was an original advertiser in Waterfront Week. There sat, as usual?and for the last time?the giant pile of unread and ignored Waterfront Weeks on the shelf beside the door.

"No more Waterfront Week," I said to the bartendress.

"Oh yeah? Well, I'll miss having to throw away all those copies after my bar shift," she says.

Was this what it was like the night the Brooklyn Eagle printed its final edition?

I get the check for the wings and the Bud drafts. Walk to the Sweetwater. Play bad pool. Think about logging on to Maakies.com or maybe eBay, where I could sell those first few "Maakies" strips for a pretty penny.

In the car service ride back to home in Clinton Hill, where Drinky Crow also lived for a brief spell, I think of his timeless quote that was often the editorial voice of the earliest Waterfront Week sheets. It was actually something a bunch of moralizing, high-horse Germans once said to a blitzed Millionaire in Berlin: "Being drunk is the best feeling in your poor world.''