Between a Hipster and a Hard Place

To call New York City a melting pot has always been disingenuous. Its neighborhoods aren't homogenous cross-sections of the city's populace, as the famous cliché seems to imply. Each one is a fractured jumble of disparate communities stacked on top of each other. Little Ukraine is interspersed with the East Village of Lou Reed, and the boundary between Morningside Heights and Harlem is porous enough to put Columbia students on edge. Nowhere is this fact clearer than the current turf war between Hasidim and hipsters in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood.

While the two groups generally stay out of each other's way, their vast cultural and costume differences recently collided when the city decided to remove some bike lanes in the area. After biking advocates alleged the deletion was the result of shady politicking, some hipsters embarked on a late-night repainting of the lanes in a particularly busy intersection, and even a planned topless protest through the heart of the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood.