By Kim Velsey 5/02 2:04pm

Manhattan Transfers

Manhattan living, but in Brooklyn

Penthouse At Richard Meier’s Brooklyn Tower Sells For $5.1 M.

Things may have looked bleak during the recession for On Prospect Park, but the tower’s most expensive penthouse has finally sold for $5.1 million, just as everyone knew it eventually would.

Are boom times here again? Well, when it comes to gentrification in Brooklyn, Prospect Heights in particular, it’s not a question of if but when, and Prospect Heights was already pretty far gone when the sleek tower was just a rough sketch in Richard Meier’s head. Even if The New York Times did call the starchitect-designed condo “a wall of windows into the real estate bust” back in 2009. Read More

By Matt Chaban 4/30 12:42pm

THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD

A match made in Heaven—by which we mean Brooklyn.

Just What Park Slope Needs: a Hooters

Much attention has been paid to the changes the Barclays Center has wrought on the surrounding brownstone neighborhoods: eminent domain evictions, property values both falling and rising, construction noise, a starchitect fight and a rat tsunami. Yet nothing could have prepared the borough of kings and kombucha for this: Hooters “desperately” wants to open an outlet near the new Nets arena. Read More

By Kim Velsey 4/26 4:14pm

Manhattan Transfers

An embedded reporter? Dolnick's Brookklyn townhouse.

Ace Reporter and Sulzberger Nephew Sam Dolnick Trades Brooklyn Brownstones

It’s no wonder that Sam Dolnick, metro reporter for The New York Times and grandnephew to former Times publisher Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, has purchased a townhouse in Carroll Gardens. After all, The Times is obsessed with the borough and all of its charming, artisanal ways.

Mr. Dolnick and his wife Heidi are leaving their townhouse in the still-up-and-coming Prospect Lefferts Gardens for a strikingly-similar one in the well-established, Barneys-bearing neighborhood of Carroll Gardens. Read More

By The Editors 4/24 8:11pm

opinion

Good Deal for NYU and N.Y.C.

When Mayor Bloomberg announced the other day that the city would, in essence, provide New York University and its partners with a rent-free building for a new school of applied science in Brooklyn, a reporter asked why an elite school with a large endowment deserved such a sweet-sounding deal.

If Mr. Bloomberg was prepped for such a question, it showed. NYU, the mayor quickly noted, planned to spend $60 million of its own money to move Transit Authority equipment and city personnel out of the building it intends to occupy. “We should be saying thank you to them,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

Truth be told, NYU doesn’t need public expressions of gratitude. Read More

By Matt Chaban 4/24 6:00am

The Mysteries of Brooklyn

7 Photos

bureau-v-architecture-original-music-workshop-4

Is an Unconventional Music Venue with a Jagged Design the Last Hope for Williamsburg’s Art Scene?

If Bedford Avenue is the main street of modern day Williamsburg, North Sixth Street is the hipster haven’s Broadway. Home to the first proper grocery store (Tops), concert venue (Northsix), swap meet (Artists and Fleas) and grotesque theme restaurant (Sea), North Sixth Street has long been the grand stage of Williamsburg.

Now performing on North Sixth Street (even if Northsix is long gone, replaced by a Manhattan concert conglomerate) is the Original Music Workshop.

Conceived by Kevin Dolan, a former tax attorney who also happens to be an organ virtuoso, the Original Music Workshop seeks to provide a venue bridging new and old Williamsburg, sustaining music of all types for all ages. As the rest of the neighborhood continues its inexorable gentrification, Mr. Dolan hopes to preserve a tiny corner of Williamsburg cultural past, as well as one of its historic industrial buildings.

“It’s amazing you can knock down anything and build whatever you want,” Mr. Dolan said in an interview. “I’m hopeful that at least the south side of this block will still maintain its feel into the future.” Read More

By Matt Chaban 4/19 11:52am

Machers

Ms. Dunham, on location in Brooklyn. (HBO)

Lena Dunham Goes Ghost Hunting at Steiner Studios and Gretchen Mol Just Loves Being Close to Home

At the ribbon cutting for Steiner Studios earlier this month, The Observer caught up with Voice of the City Lena Dunham, who had just moved production for the second season of her feverish hit Girls to the studio in Brooklyn. Gretchen Mol of Boardwalk Empire was up on stage, looking radiant beside the mayor and Doug Steiner, but Ms. Dunham hid in the back of the sound stage.

It was actually her first day at the studios, she said, but her experience helps underscore why the city needs more and bigger studios if it is going to continue to grow its film and television industry. (Also, there wasn’t room in our profile of Doug Steiner for Ms. Dunham, but we figure giving her her own post should drive some good Google hits to Observer.com, what with the ultra-buzz humming around Girls at the moment.)

“I’m very excited to be here,” Ms. Dunham told The Observer of her arrival at Steiner Studios. “I love the Navy Yards, it’s such a cool, historic place.” Somehow we could not help but think of that scene from Tiny Furniture where she has sex with the chef inside a giant pipe somewhere in nearby Dumbo. Read More

By Kim Velsey 4/18 11:05am

Manhattan Transfers

9 Photos

Carroll Gardens Brownstone

Rug Designer Goes After A Fresh Set of Floors in $2.2 M Brooklyn Condo

Although a townhouse in Clinton Hill would seem an ideal place to raise a family, textile designer Shelley Goldberg and her husband Tony Writer, founder of the market research firm Headspace, apparently had their hearts set on Carroll Gardens.

The couple has purchased a condo at 240 Carroll Street for $2.27 million, a little over the $2.25 million ask, according to city records. The four-bedroom spread was listed with Corcoran broker Lindsay Barton Barrett and spent less than a month on the market. Read More

By Matt Chaban 4/18 8:40am

Machers

Doug3

Hollywood Along the Hudson: Can Doug Steiner Turn the City’s Largest Film Studios Into an Urban Real Estate Empire?

“People said we were crazy to build in Brooklyn, no one would ever come to Brooklyn,” Doug Steiner said from the rooftop terrace of his biggest development in the borough. The Jersey-born builder was wearing his usual polo shirt and jeans, comfortable in the unseasonably warm weather in late February, the sun glinting off his clean-shaven head. “In those days, there were wild dogs running in the streets,” Mr. Steiner added for effect.

“But look at these views,” he continued, pointing out across Wallabout Bay and the span of the East River beyond. “You’ve got the gritty industrial underbelly of the city in the foreground, the financial capital of the world in the background.” One World Trade Center and the Empire State Building bookended the panorama.

It was 1999 when Doug Steiner brought the family development business to Brooklyn. As he and so many other fortune seekers have since proved, the decision was anything but crazy. But it was not condos or artists lofts that Mr. Steiner was selling. He was in pictures.

Two weeks ago, with the mayor standing just in front of him at the podium, Mr. Steiner opened five new sound stages at his eponymous Steiner Studios inside the sprawling Brooklyn Navy Yards, bringing the total to 15. That is halfway to the ultimate goal of 32 and, at 50 acres, the largest American film production facilities outside of Hollywood—behind Warner Brothers and Paramount, and rivaling the Walt Disney and CBS backlots. Read More