South Williamsburg, Brooklyn: The South Side and Los Sures

Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe, arrived in New York from Europe on 27 September 1946, the second day of Rosh Hashanah, aboard the motor vessel Vulcania, and settled in Williamsburg with a small group of supporters. About eighteen months later, in late April 1948, his followers formally established Congregation Yetev Lev — the institutional foundation of the Satmar community now centered on South Williamsburg. Holocaust-survivor refugees, many of them Hasidic Jews from rural Hungary and Romania, had been arriving in Brooklyn during and after the war and concentrated in the area south of Division Avenue. A 2023 UJA-Federation study found the wider Williamsburg Jewish community numbers roughly 36,000 adults and 32,000 children in about 21,000 households, centered on Lee Avenue and Bedford Avenue south of Division Avenue.

Puerto Ricans began settling the Southside after the Second World War, drawn partly by the jobs at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, with Dominican migration following in the 1970s and 1980s. The neighborhood's Puerto Rican and Dominican residents and their advocacy organizations are known collectively as Los Sures, and Graham Avenue between Grand Street and Broadway is signed as the Avenue of Puerto Rico. El Puente, founded in 1982 by Luis Garden Acosta, Eugenio Maldonado and Dr. Frances Lucerna to address youth gang and street violence in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, still operates from 211 South 4th Street; it founded El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice in 1993, and Garden Acosta died in January 2019.

The neighborhood's subway service runs along Broadway, on the elevated BMT Jamaica Line, and the sources consulted describe these stations broadly rather than as South Williamsburg's own.

Marcy Avenue, at Marcy Avenue and Broadway, is served by the J at all times, the M at all times except late nights, and the Z in the rush-hour peak direction; its source describes the station as being in Williamsburg rather than specifically South Williamsburg. Hewes Street, at Hewes Street and Broadway, is served by the J at all times except the weekday peak direction and by the M at all times except late nights, and the Z skips it; its source likewise says Williamsburg. Flushing Avenue, at Flushing Avenue and Broadway on the neighborhood's stated southern boundary, is served by the same J and M pattern with the Z skipping it, and its source labels the station's neighborhood as Bedford-Stuyvesant while noting it also serves adjacent parts of Williamsburg and Bushwick.

The bus is a real answer here rather than a footnote. The B44 runs Lee Avenue southbound and Bedford Avenue northbound through the core of the neighborhood, stops at Hewes Street, and uses Roebling Street to reach its northbound terminus at the Williamsburg Bridge Plaza Bus Terminal. At Flushing Avenue, Lee Avenue becomes Nostrand Avenue.

On foot or by bicycle, the Williamsburg Bridge walkway leaves from the Broadway side of the neighborhood and crosses the East River to Manhattan's Lower East Side. It opened on April 23, 1904, closed for renovation in June 1991, and reopened in March 1992 rebuilt with 12-foot-wide pedestrian and bicycle paths.