By Matt Chaban 8/10/12 5:46pm

Mysteries of Brooklyn

Dreams of our fathers: an early rendering from when Downtown Brooklyn was rezoned, less than a year ago.

Downtown Brooklyn Looking Up: At Least Eight New Skyscrapers on the Rise

Earlier this week, we profiled Tucker Reed, the recently enthroned director of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership. He is responsible for the continued redevelopment (some, maybe many, would call it gentrification) of the area, and he has some big plans in the works, like better connectivity and bringing in more tech firms.

It is also up to Mr. Reed to shepherd development in the area, and it looks like he will have his hands full in the coming years. The skyline has been utterly transformed along Flatbush Avenue in recent years as six new apartment towers rose during the last building boom: the Toren, the Brooklyner, the Oro, Avalon Fort Greene, the DKLB, and Forte (to say nothing of the smaller projects littering nearby neighborhoods).

But reading Brownstoner this past week, we were reminded of just how many more of these skyscraping towers are in the works, how much more the neighborhood is bound to change, maybe even a few times over. Read More

By Matt Chaban 8/08/12 10:15am

Machers

Fulton Mall

General Brooklyn: Baghdad Big Tucker Reed Tackles Downtown, Giving Businesses Their Marching Orders

When Tucker Reed finally stepped up to the lectern inside the new BAM Fisher Building on a Thursday morning at the end of July, the crowd could barely handle any more news about just how stupendous Downtown Brooklyn was, is and will be.

Karen Brooks Hopkins, entering her fourth decade at BAM, welcomed the crowd into the brightly lit practice space on the third floor of the two-month-old red brick theater, tucked in behind BAM’s original performance hall. This would be the linchpin of the latest, greatest cultural district in the city. Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn borough president and cheerleader-in-chief for 11 years now, warmed up the crowd with his typical act. “Everywhere you look, things are looking up in Downtown Brooklyn,” he barked. This was, is, will be the center of the universe.

Next came State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, whose grandmother grew up on Albany Street in Crown Heights. He had made sure to wear his Brooklyn lapel pin, a gift Mr. Markowitz bestows on everyone he meets. Though he was a Long Island guy, Mr. DiNapoli was an adopted son of this former outer borough, at least for the day, for the good news he was bringing: economic growth in Downtown Brooklyn had outpaced the rest of the city over the past decade, according to a new report prepared by the comptroller’s office. This was, is, will be an economic powerhouse.

On the same streets where Jay-Z had once slung crack (and would soon be headlining the Barclays Center he ostensibly helped build), legitimate businesses had replaced illicit ones, and they were thriving. Thousands of new residents had moved in, filling the striking and unspectacular condo-turned-rental-in-the-downturn towers along Flatbush Avenue. National brands including H&M, Sephora, Target and Shake Shack were replacing the pawn shops and cellphone outlets on the Fulton Mall.

It’s not your bubbe’s Brooklyn anymore. It’s Tucker Reed’s. Read More

By Matt Chaban 7/12/12 9:00am

The Mysteries of Brooklyn

It's tech-nical. (Streetsblog)

Rounding Out the Brooklyn Tech Triangle by Connecting Dumbo, the Navy Yards and Downtown Brooklyn

New York’s tech boom has been a boon for the city’s commercial real estate market, as well, especially unusual spaces not typically associated with Class-A office space—look no further than Google’s astronomical purchase of 111 Eighth Avenue and the swells in Midtown South.

Downtown Brooklyn is looking to capitalize on the growing demand for a certain type of office not typically found on the avenues while also providing a bridge to techies as they begin to mature and their needs evolve. A team of local business groups hopes to create the Brooklyn Tech Triangle. The idea is to tap into the successes of Dumbo (Silicon Beach!) and the Brooklyn Navy Yard (dozen of firms are on the wait-list to get in) to create a whole new alleyway for Silicon Alley that connects these hot hoods with the still somewhat dowdy (Shake Shack!)

“We’ve seen an explosion of tech gather along the waterfront,” Tucker Reed, president of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, told The Observer, “so much so that they’ve run out of space.” Read More

By Matt Chaban 1/11/12 3:05pm

Tales of Retail

CityPoint takes shape.

Whose Mall Is It Anyway: Will Brooklyn Flock to Fulton Street’s New Chain Stores?

Joseph, a slender 19-year-old from Fort Greene, stood inside Downtown Pawn Shop Sunday afternoon turning an almost-new Nokia flip phone over in his hands. On either side of him were glass display cases, chipped and fluorescent.

Those before him held more new and used phones, neatly arrayed. Beside that were purses in an array of colors and material. Across the way was perfume—Lilac for Women, Yacht Man Chocolate—and more jewelry than the Zales across the street, in maybe one-fifth the space. Bomber jackets hung on the wall, besides po sters of President Obama, still smiling, celebrating his inauguration. Bills from every Caribbean nation were taped up next to that. In the back was a tattoo parlor and an optometrist. “Designer Frames Start at $59.99.”

Like generations of Brooklynites before him, Joseph had come to the Fulton Mall to do some shopping. Some historians credit the centuries old strip with pioneering urban department store shopping, with the opening of Abraham & Weschler in 1865 and the many stores that followed, all now long gone but for the Neo-Grec and Beaux Arts temples to retail they erected.

When he arrived on the mall this day, Joseph had passed by the T-Mobile, Sprint, AT&T and MetroPCS outlets and come here for his new-enough phone. “They don’t want so much here,” Joseph said, a Dodgers cap—L.A., not Brooklyn—resting on his head. “It’s a good deal.”

But for how much longer? It is getting to be that they want more and more on the Fulton Mall. Just like the rest of Brooklyn before it. Read More

By Matt Chaban 1/10/12 7:42pm

Tales of Retail

What to do with those once-beautiful windows? (Brownstoner)

Detail-Oriented Retail: Fixing the Fulton Mall Up

It is getting hard to catalog all the new changes on the Fulton Mall in recent years. There is the new benches and sidewalks, rebuilt after decades of neglect. The rezoning and the thousands of new apartments borne in on the tides of its land rush. A new mall, CityPoint, maybe with a Target inside, as well as the national retailers finally flooding into the old department stores alongside Macy’s: Aeropostale, Express, H&M, TJ Maxx. And who could forget the crown jewel, Shake Shack.

While people worry about the future of the mall and who might shop there—indeed, it is the subject of a feature in tomorrow’s paper—it still has much of the polyglot look it has had for decades, even more so given the new mix of national shops among the mom and pops with their riotous signs.

Just as it worked for the rezoning in 2005 and the streetscaping a year later, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership is in the early stages of  creating new standards for the storefronts on Fulton Mall, according to people involved with the project. While still very much preliminary, some form of new regulations is being developed by the local business improvement district in partnership with the Department of City Planning to spruce up the walls of the Fulton Mull. Read More