Downtown Brooklyn

From Curbed: "So, on to the stats assembled by Ideal Properties Group LLC about tenants who moved to (or within) Downtown Brooklyn (so-called) during the Q3 2008. For starters, their average age is 29.5 years, which is suspiciously short of the Big Three Zero. Also 83 per cent do not rent alone--they have significant others, families or rommates. Fifty-two percent of the renters are women. They make on average $72,342 a year and (rather bizarrely) work 'freelance in the entertainment industry.' The average rent they pay is $2,592."

After receiving community pressure last year after it wanted to raze some Brooklyn houses that may or may not have been part of the Underground Railroad, the city has announced the outline of a $2 million commemoration of abolitionist efforts in Brooklyn.

The result, a year after the city announced the $2 million commitment, will be a project called "In Pursuit of Freedom," which will have an "artistic installation," a self-guided walking tour, a theatrical performance, "interpretative exhibits," and a Web site.

The controversy arose when the city had targeted for demolition houses on Duffield Street as part of the downtown Brooklyn rezoning that may have been used as part of the Underground Railroad. The city said in December that it would not destroy the houses.  read more »

"I worked in downtown Brooklyn for many years and am now retired. I had a few errands to do there this week and, after having been away for months, I noticed for the first time how genuinely unpleasant an area it is. Metrotech is a small oasis of green with one OK lunch choice, but otherwise, what a pit! It's hard to imagine the buyers of all the spiffy new condos pushing their double strollers down the grimy, littered streets of Downtown Brooklyn on summer evenings after dining sumptuously at Popeye's." ["Downtown Brooklyn, Boomtown"]

Boar's Head -- purveyor of all manner of sliced deli meats -- will open an experimental retail shop on Court Street in downtown Brooklyn, according to an article on BrooklynPaper.com.

Boar's Head will use the so-called "F. Martinella delicatessen," to be opened at the end of this month near State Street, as a laboratory in which to examine consumer habits, according to the report.

RuthAnn LeMore, a Boar's Head spokeswoman, told the paper that, "We want to understand the retail environment and to test new products, test new concepts, and bring them out to our retail distributors and partners.”

The name for the deli may sound like your typical Italian-American moniker, but interestingly enough, it's a composite name derived from those of Boar's Head executives:

"‘F.

 read more »

Citing sanitary concerns, the Metrotech BID has barred dogs from frolicking on the Metrotech Commons, depriving Downtown Brooklyn pooches access to one of their favorite pieces of real estate, reports The Brooklyn Paper.

“[We are] certainly willing to have people sit there on a blanket — that’s not prohibited — but it conflicts with the dog thing because if the dog is doing his number on the lawn, it could be unsanitary,” Michael Weiss, executive director of the BID, told The Paper. “You can just clean up so much, and you can’t clean up wet stuff.”

According to the reporter:

As new residents move in to the predominantly commercial area, so too are residents’ dogs, and, in an area unaccustomed to the needs of a 24-7 population, there are very few places where residents can walk — and relieve — their Fidos and Fifis.  read more »

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The intrepid condo buyers who took a gamble on a modestly priced spread in Brooklyn Heights in April 2007 probably had no idea that they would be living in the borough's most expensive neighborhood for condos a year later.

The average condo price increased 170 percent annually, from $613,750 to $1.65 million in April 2008, according to the report from the Real Estate Board of New York.

Other condo price results results by neighborhood:  read more »

A venture of Acadia Realty Trust, MacFarlane Partners, Rose Associates, P/A Associates and Washington Square Partners seems to be moving forward with the redevelopment of Albee Square into the City Point development, with plans to build a 65-story, Greenberg Farrow-designed mixed-use tower in Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle writes today.  read more »

The city has changed its plan for downtown Brooklyn to eliminate the need to take a home on Duffield Street that had some connection to the Underground Railroad.

A spokeswoman for the city Law Department, Kate O'Brien Ahlers said in a statement,

"The city is pleased that this litigation was resolved in a manner favorable to all the parties involved, and is now looking forward to proceeding with its plan for commercial and residential growth in downtown Brooklyn, together with the Mayor’s initiative to commemorate the area’s abolitionist history."

A press release from South Brooklyn Legal Services, which represented one of the home's owners, Joy Chatel, is after the jump.  read more »

The planned City Point building--a.k.a Albee Square, a.k.a. The Gallery at Fulton Street--has brought another residential developer on board, according to Joe Chan, the president of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, a public-private entity overseeing the neighborhood’s development.  read more »

Joe Chan, the head of the public-private Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, is scaling back expectations that downtown Brooklyn will ever achieve the dizzying heights of central business district-dom once imagined way back in 2004.

“You are not seeing historically what has happened in downtown Brooklyn, which is exclusively commercial office towers being built,” Mr. Chan told a gathering of reporters this morning in one of those exclusively commercial office towers at MetroTech. “I think you are going to see smaller increments of office space being built within what we call hybrid buildings, like the City Point building, a mixture of residential, retail, in some cases hotel, and office.”

Mr. Chan has sounded this note before, though never so definitively. The partnership now says that it expects just 1.6 million square feet of office space to be built in the next five years, compared to 4.5 million square feet that the city Economic Development Corporation estimated would be built when it proposed a massive downtown Brooklyn rezoning three years ago.  read more »

A heavy day for eminent domain news: Property owners on two Brooklyn blocks that were about to be condemned as part of an urban renewal project are getting a short reprieve thanks to a bureaucratic blunder.

The two blocks have attracted a good deal of attention because one of them, along Duffield Street, was supposedly a hotbed of Underground Railroad activity, and because the other, at Ashland Place and Fulton Street, was supposed to be acquired and turned into an arts complex (PDF) even though the current tenants there are planning to do much of the same thing.

The city Department of Housing Preservation and Development has rescinded its eminent domain determination for the two sites, although the agency is not backtracking from the city’s plans. Rather, HPD spokesman Neill Coleman said in an e-mail that the city had failed to enter a blight determination into the public record. That means the public process has to start over from the beginning, with a new public hearing, Oct. 29, and a new determination period. (The original hearing took place in May.)

“The people involved are using it as an opportunity to try to get the politicians to convince HPD that they should alter the footprint,” said Candace Carponter, an attorney for the Amber Art and Music Space, a new business that just spent $1.2 million on renovating a former liquor store on Ashland Place before they learned about the condemnation. “It’s good news to the extent that we can garner more evidence to make a more formal showing at the hearing.”

Given that an outside consultant failed to find evidence that the Underground Railroad stopped at seven imperiled rowhouses on Duffield and Gold streets (PDF), Mayor Bloomberg could have pressed on, letting the properties be condemned and then flattened to make way for a park and underground parking lot envisioned in the 2004 Downtown Brooklyn Plan.

Today, though, comes the news that he will heed the recommendations of some of the peer reviewers of that study and has committed $2 million for capital and construction of “a project to commemorate abolitionist activity that occurred in Brooklyn in the 1800s.”

That doesn’t mean the houses will be saved; most likely the opposite will occur. But the memorial project—what it turns out to be will be decided as a result of a bidding process this fall—signals a more conciliatory approach toward City Council Members and others who criticized the Underground Railroad study when it came out in the spring.  read more »

Make no mistake about it: the developers who shelled out $120 million to buy the Gallery at Fulton Mall (a.k.a., the Albee Square Mall) are serious about bringing dough to downtown Brooklyn. In a promotional brochure circulating among prospective tenants, the new owners say that “Albee Square will dramatically change the profile of the area, providing opportunities for larger scale national retailers as well as smaller local entrepreneurs.”  read more »

A number of community groups thought they might have forced the city to reconsider a downtown Brooklyn real estate deal by packing public hearings with dissenters, but the transaction closed anyway last week pretty much as planned.

The big difference was that the developers have scaled down expectations for the number of apartments—a change that might end up diminishing what critics thought was the one redeeming, if limited, feature of the plan: affordable housing.

The buyer, a partnership consisting of the White Plains-based Acadia Realty Trust, MacFarlane Partners and two smaller entities, closed on the deal to buy real estate developer’s Joe Sitt’s groundlease for the Gallery at Fulton Mall on June 13, according to the city’s Economic Development Corporation. The purchase price was reportedly $120 million, compared to $25 million that Thor Equities, Mr. Sitt’s company, paid in 2001.  read more »