SoBro!

Hipsters colonizing the South Bronx:

Hundreds of artists, hipsters, Web designers, photographers, doctors and journalists have been seduced by the mix of industrial lofts and 19th-century row houses in the Port Morris and Mott Haven neighborhoods. Some now even call the area SoBro.

Yes, it’s the very South Bronx that had a reputation for grinding poverty, rampant arson, runaway crime and as the starting point of Tom Wolfe’s race-relations nightmare, “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” which chronicles what happens to a Master of the Universe driving with his mistress in his Mercedes-Benz on a creepy Bruckner Boulevard.

Well, Bruckner and the blocks nearby now boast two tidy bars that a Master of the Universe would feel more than comfortable patronizing, including one, the Bruckner Bar and Grill, that offers pear and arugula salad.

There are a dozen antique shops, at least one new lively art gallery, Haven Arts, to join three older ones, and a cafe partly owned by a resourceful Dominican immigrant that sells bourgeois bohemian delights like croissants and veggie wraps.

The bad news is that gentrification may price out longtime residents, the good news, however, is that White Europeans now walk comfortably there:

As he has been doing for 16 years, Angel Villalona, a Dominican immigrant, still sells papayas, coconuts and mangoes from the side of a truck, as well as batidas – fruit milkshakes that he prepares by yanking the cord on his sidewalk generator, which feeds electricity to an Osterizer blender. But now one of his customers is as likely to be a sculptor who has just moved from Williamsburg as a longtime resident like Charles Bachelor, a truck driver who immigrated from Antigua.

“White Europeans used to be afraid to walk in this neighborhood,” Mr. Bachelor said. “Now they walk comfortably.”