Brownsville is packed with projects, but will they be enough to push back the tide of gentrification?

"So many of the civic successes heralded by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg," Ginia Bellafonte wrote in The New York Times back in 2012, "might have happened in Lithuania for all the effect they have had (or could have) on the lives of people in Brownsville," which Ms. Bellafonte then goes on to helpfully identify as a neighborhood in northeastern Brooklyn.

We're not sure if gentrification counts as a "civic success," and we aren't aware of any pasty-faced, heritage flannel-wearing hipsters wandering around Pitkin Avenue, the neighborhood's main drag, yet. But if trends in nearby neighborhoods are any indication, it won't be long before Brownsville—a byword for blight, home to the largest concentration of public housing towers in the city and to this day a place that some mail carriers fear to tread—is selling something artisanal besides stamp bags.

Developers struck out as far as Halsey Street, only three L stops away from Broadway Junction, the gateway to Brownsville, during the height of the last boom, and "East Bushwick," which bumps up against Brownsville's northern border, is again heating up.

And now we have another datapoint in the closing-in-on-Brownsville thesis, this time on the neighborhood's western front: hipsters and yuppies have hit the "far eastern edge of Crown Heights," writes DNAinfo, that font of Brooklyn proto-trend pieces. DNAinfo chronicles the apartment hunt that led Sean and Pranjali Davidson to a gut-renovated $1,700-a-month two-bedroom rental at Montgomery Street and Utica Avenue, just half a dozen short blocks from Brownsville. The fact that the move warranted a DNAinfo write-up suggests that striking out that far east is still rare, but residential demand continues to far outstrip supply in the five boroughs and we expect that the gentrification bubble will continue growing at more or less the same pace it has been for the past few decades.

East New York's housing stock pales to that of brownstone Brooklyn, but it's nicer than Northside Williamsburg's vinyl.

And when bobos bearing yoga mats do hit Brownsville, there's at least one person who won't be surprised: Julia Vitullo-Martin of the Regional Plan Association. In January she penned an article for Untapped Cities asking, "Is Brownsville Brooklyn Ready for its Jane Jacobsian Comeback?"

"With multiple trains"—one of which is the L, Brooklyn's main vein of gentrification, with a history of raining money down on the neighborhoods it courses through—"and good bus service," she wrote, "Brownsville is a candidate for transit-oriented development."

Buffeted by racial tension during the Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers’ strike and stripped of its middle-class Jewish families in the 1960s—"neighbors firmly believe Pitkin Avenue compares with Fifth Avenue," one author wrote in 1951—the neighborhood lost its white middle class to the suburbs.

Now the worst of the decay is over. Fires no longer rage in vacant houses, a few new schools cropped up during the 2000s and Brownsville, along with its neighbors—East New York, Canarsie and Cypress Hills—have started to attract West Indian, Latino and even some South and East Asians immigrants. But so far, the neighborhoods have remained untouched by the skyrocketing real estate values and gentrification pressing in from all sides.

Not yet, at least—but in a real estate cycle or two, who knows?

Contextualism may be an opiate, but it feels so good.

As Vishaan Chakrabarti, a principal at SHoP Architects, was unveiling the Southside Williamsburg master plan they designed for Two Trees, he evoked the image of Manhattan's skyline. "Just like in the dead center of New York," he told the assembled group of reporters, "we have this parabolic moment—there's this moment of exuberance that happens" as the towers rise on the waterfront, culminating in the towers at the Domino site. The tallest will reach 598 feet, or about 60 stories, making it taller than any other building in the borough.

"And that," he continued, "that's the stuff of postcards all around the world."

But despite the best efforts of SHoP and Two Trees, the plan does not succeed in aping the natural parabolic shape of an organic thicket of towers found in midtown, downtown or even downtown Brooklyn. Nor could it—Williamsburg's new planning regime, instituted in the 2005 rezoning and reinforced in 2009, makes sure of that.

Traditional downtowns grow around transit hubs, and are built by myriad different developers and architects, all working in competition. Through thoughtful zoning and market forces, the tallest towers sprout at the center of the transit network, with heights tapering off as you travel farther away.

But the new Williamsburg and Greenpoint skylines are more Bal Harbour than Brooklyn.

The towers form a narrow stockade on the shores of northern Brooklyn, a sort of Potemkin village of development to be admired from Manhattan. But behind them—nothing.

Dramatic density differentials are par for the course on the waterfront.

A block or two away from the old Domino refinery, the skyline plummets to near zero—most sites across the street are zoned exclusively for industrial use, and cannot be developed beyond one and two stories. There is no gradual downward gradient. "There's no way to hide that," admitted Mr. Chakrabarti of the disparity in heights.

It's not hard to see how it ended up this way. The rezonings took the path of least resistance between the pro-development wishes of the Bloomberg administration on the one hand, and the anti-growth attitudes of vast inland neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Greenpoint on the other.

Manufacturing districts, where there weren't existing residents to bother, were upzoned. Development in established residential neighborhoods, on the other hand, was restricted.

The result is an awkward hybrid that pleases nobody. There isn't enough supply allowed to meet demand and temper the wave of gentrification shooting over northern Brooklyn, but what supply is allowed comes in the form of towers so out of place that they spark resentment throughout the community.

When the existing neighborhoods of New York were built before World War II, it was during a time when increases in demand were met by gradual but widespread redevelopment. Two- and three-story townhouses were replaced by six-story tenements, and when demand reached a fever pitch, as in Manhattan and a number of neighborhoods in brownstone Brooklyn, these were in turn redeveloped into grand apartment houses and skyscrapers. The redevelopment thinned as you got farther from the city center and subway stations, the result being the "parabolic moment" that Mr. Chakrabarti spoke of at the Domino unveiling—the true "stuff of postcards."

But today, the zoning code does not afford the opportunity for such organic development in the neighborhoods of northern Brooklyn.

Away from the glassy waterfront towers, much of northern Williamsburg is frozen in its vinyl-sided past.

With high-rises on the waterfront and row homes farther inland, the planning lacks provision for mid-rise buildings. Six stories or more, the traditional New York mid-rise smooths out the transitions between towers and townhouses, marrying the density needed to meet demand with a human scale that doesn't cast shadows for blocks.

But the standard new law tenement, a design that developers were eagerly building in the early 20th century in Southside Williamsburg, is now twice as dense as what's allowed in vast swaths of Northside, Greenpoint, East Williamsburg and Bushwick.

The word that leaps to mind is "capricious." Why are Manhattan-style high-rises acceptable west of Kent Avenue, while landowners across the street are not allowed to build so much as a single-family home, their land instead reserved for low-value industrial use?

And from a transit point of view, the planning makes little more sense. High-density building is allowed more than half a mile from the Bedford Avenue L, on the waterfront, but no housing is allowed at all on the blocks immediately adjacent to the Morgan Avenue stop. And it's the pre-war neighborhoods, which sprouted naturally closest to the L, where residential development was most restricted in the rezonings.

The development on the Brooklyn waterfront may look nice from Manhattan, but it's hard to see what it's given its home borough.

From a pro-development perspective, the amount of supply allowed is clearly insufficient to meet demand, evidenced by a near-tripling of housing costs in Williamsburg since 2004 and the wave of gentrification racing across Bushwick. Rents there recently jumped a stunning 17 percent in just 30 days, according to real estate brokerage MNS.

And far from allowing enough supply to bring down prices, the towers on the waterfront may have backfired. Despite being insufficient to bring down prices, the outsized heights on the river have helped foster the widespread impression of an overdeveloped Williamsburg. Anti-development sentiment has flared across northern Brooklyn, out of proportion to the relatively paltry number of new units.

Far from being a model for the rest of northern Brooklyn, the Williamsburg rezonings are seen as a cautionary tale.

Bushwick—soon served with the high prices of Williamsburg, but none of the new housing.

"We don't need the speculation that Bushwick is the next Williamsburg," Councilwoman Diana Reyna told The Wall Street Journal in October, angling for a rezoning that would limit development in Bushwick to low-rise structures. (Though given the pace of things, it might be more realistic to talk about preventing Broadway Junction and East New York from becoming the next Williamsburg.) Even Mayor Bloomberg doesn't dare rezone the manufacturing districts of East Williamsburg.

The location of the new development also raises concern. Newly built market-rate apartments in Brooklyn these days are almost never affordable, but some are less unaffordable than others. There is new construction in Bushwick, for example, that was overbuilt during the boom and is now within reach of upper-middle-class strivers. The waterfront, on the other hand, where most of the new housing is allowed, is reserved for the unabashedly wealthy.

None of this is the fault of SHoP or Two Trees, who, unlike some waterfront developers, had no role in the rezoning. But it's hard to see their piece of the waterfront as emerging any more organically. Even if Jed Walentas' waterfront towers are built to a higher quality than the Northside Piers—and there's every indication they will be—they are unlikely to be resented any less by the community.

When trendy, chic restaurants can no longer afford to stay in Soho, who can?

The say that New York is not the city it once was is a statement so obvious and oft-repeated that it is all but meaningless. And yet, even for the blasé, who view negative neighborhood change as a losing battle, there are occasionally startling changes, changes that suggest the city has reached an altogether different stage in its gentrification and development.

Like the impending closure of a hip Soho hot spot that has consistently studded its small, intimate tables with celebrities over its 20-year run. And, less than a mile away in the West Village, the opening of a juice bar.

Boom, at 152 Spring Street, is going out of business after Hurricane Sandy flooded the basement kitchen, causing some $100,000 worth of damage. But the real reason is that Soho has turned a corner when it comes to gentrification. The trendy eatery, once a symbol of how much Soho had changed from the gritty, industrial district it once was, cannot afford to rebuild and pay the $150,000-a-month rent.

“The rents are just ridiculous. It has become really hard for smaller restaurants and shops to survive when big luxury brands want flagships in Soho, the Chanels and Louis Vuittons of the world, even though there are never people in those stores,” former Boom partner Rocco Ancarola told the Post. “It’s just too costly to fix things up from the hurricane and fight the high rents.”

It's enough to make a person nostalgic for the earlier waves of gentrification that washed over the neighborhood.

Meanwhile, in the West Village, Elixir Juice Bar is opening its only storefront at 434 Avenue of the Americas between West Ninth and West 10th Streets, Crain's reports. Specializing in juice cleanses, Elixir has outposts in 10 Equinox gyms around the city, but this was apparently not enough to sate New Yorkers' cravings for juice and/or the dubious health benefits of juice cleanses. It will replace a lo-cal dessert shop. We're not sure if that's an improvement or not, but not all hope is lost: an Elixir at 532 Hudson Street closed down earlier, despite offering occasional specials like $5 smoothies. Maybe not all hope is lost?

kvelsey@observer.com

Signage will be something artsy, painted, but not graffiti style paint. Classy style paint.

It can be hard to pinpoint the moment when a neighborhood passes from one phase of gentrification to the next—was it the wine bar that opened on the corner, the coffee shop that only served espresso, the French language pre-school? But the West Village, whose change has been a source of constant hand wringing for at least the last two decades, has undoubtedly crossed a new threshold: the gentrification of even the XXX establishments.

The Villager reports that the new owner of a seedy 24-hour adult video store at Clarkson and West Streets is looking to revamp the space into a high-end topless bar for an upscale audience. The new place will reportedly be "classy." Or at least way classier than a XXX video store with a naked dancer on duty in the back. In fact, the owner is so serious about turning the space into a sophisticated establishment for gentlemen (and are not all men who visit such establishments gentlemen?) that he has ended the naked lady's gyrations.

The club would, for example, have a $20 cover charge and a dress code. The dancers would be topless, not totally nude, in compliance with New York's liquor license requirements, which prohibit alcohol consumption in the presence of fully nude dancers.

And while the club would have a stripper pole, the owner stressed to The Villager that it would be a "satellite pole" off in a corner, not on the main stage. And lap dances would be done 3 feet away from patrons, with no groping allowed.

Even classier? The sign's name—Platinum—which would not be lit up on one of those trashy illuminated signs, but painted “in a classy way, not in a graffiti way—an artisty way,” he told The Villager.

What's next? Burlesque? Cabaret-style topless performances that can taken in while sipping signature cocktails? It hasn't come to that yet, thank god. If the owner is stymied from opening his tasteful topless bar, he says he's going to open a fully nude dance club.

kvelsey@observer.com

Eric Schmidt digs Roosevelt Island. (Matt Chaban)

It wasn't all politicos and power brokers at the ribbon cutting for the FDR Four Freedoms Park gathered at the tip of Roosevelt Island earlier this week. Cornell had a strong showing, too, since their new tech campus will be the park's neighbor to the north within a few years. Cornell president and jockey David Skorton was there, and so was Eric Schmidt, the Google executive chairman who is serving on a three-man advisory panel for the campus.

Wearing a natty tweed blazer and jaunty blue scarf, Mr. Schmidt was wandering just south of the sloping lawn, near the massive bust of the 32nd president that is a centerpiece of the park, when The Observer caught up with him. "I would say first it's probably the most beautiful new public structures in America today, it's so visually arresting," Mr. Schmidt said. He thought is was a stunning space both to look at and to look out from.

It turns out Cornell was not the only reason for Mr. Schmidt to be on the island this lovely day. He is also a bit of a history buff, and he has a particular fondness for Franklin Roosevelt. "If you study FDR, he embodies the principles of America in a way that is for time immemorial," Mr. Schmidt explained. "I've been using his Four Freedoms in my speeches for a while, because if you study it, it's hard to understand in the context of what it represented in America at the time, but the ideas are remarkable and enduring. We face similar challenges today, to religious tolerance, freedom, etc. In many way, it's more applicable today then before."

So this may be a great space for the city, and for the entire nation, but it will also be a huge amenity for the new tech campus, as well. "If you think about it from the Cornell New York Tech perspective, this is sort of our neighbor," Mr. Schmidt said. "For the quality life of the students, just think of what this represents."

With so much going on on the island, the park, the school, maybe a water taxi dock, some new housing to the north at some point, what does the future hold? "It'll be more gentrified, it will be more upscale," Mr. Schmidt admitted.

Is that a good thing?

"It is the nature of New York," he responded. "Roosevelt Island will become a premier destination. Simply because of the sum of everything, the park, the new development, the residential, this will become one of those places everyone wants to be."

And you know that's the truth. After all, it comes straight from the mouth of Google.

Can new and old business thrive in Harlem? (MAS)

Gentrification has taken hold in every corner of the city over the past decade or two, but few places have felt it as acutely as Harlem. Demographics, tastes and prices are all shifting and skewing, for better and worse, often all at once. Last week at Harlem's Studio Museum, a confab of the neighborhood's business owners and power brokers came together to try and figure out what comes next for their community.

Hosted by the Harlem Park to Park Initiative, a self-styled community improvement association and business alliance, the conference brought together city officials, real estate developers and noted executives from the dining, hospitality and entertainment worlds. Among them were the CEO of the country’s largest African-American real estate development company, R. Donahue Peebles, and Tren’ness Woods Black, the third-generation owner of Sylvia’s Restaurant.

They had come together to imagine, and to strategize, a future for Harlem as the city's new chic location. It’s a tantalizing identity, one that has often been talked about but never quite achieved, for the historic neighborhood.

The conference, by chance, was held in some of the same rooms currently housing the "Expanding the Walls" exhibition, a collection of new photographs by Harlem-area teenagers mixed with historic shots from the James VanDerZee archive like Dinner Party w/ Boxer Harry Willis. The photos were a startling reminder of the area's cultural bonds both past and present—bonds that many of the speakers, for various reasons, hoped would endure.

“Harlem has a niche appeal. It’s the center of culture,” said Ilya Braz, vice president of GFI Capital Resources, the group behind the boutique Ace and Nomad hotels (both downtown).  “If you just focus on music like jazz and blues, and art and all the things surrounding that. If you create that in a hotel, you create a certain vibe. That’s what attracts people to a neighborhood. They’ll hear from their friends, ‘Hey I was at this spot the other day, and it was really fun. The ambiance was there. It was happening.’ That’s what will drive the demand. Especially among the young people.”

Whenever the renaissance of a neighborhood is discussed, there seem to be unavoidable comparisons to the transformations of Williamsburg and the Lower East Side, transformations that changed those communities from tight-knit residential districts into vibrant nightlife destinations. Each has its own advantages, though balancing them can be a serious challenge. It’s a comparison that carries with it a certain amount of hope and envy, as well as warning.

Tren’ness Woods Black of Sylvia's wondered if growing nightlife in the area was not in conflict, or at odds, with the resurgence of residential development in Harlem.

“It’s not a conflict, but it’s a challenge,” responded Robert Bookman, senior partner at the Pesetsky and Bookman law firm and a registered NYC lobbyist. “It’s a challenge that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later. When done properly, hospitality will add vibrancy and will drastically increase value to an area, including real-estate value.” He then went on to reference Soho as an example of just this kind of resurgence, an area where the rise in real estate value has been undeniable, though, some would argue, so too has the accompanying decline in cultural and artistic identity over the last 30 years.

R. Donahue Peebles closed out the event with a well-versed keynote about the trials and tribulations of his many years in real estate markets like Miami, Las Vegas and Washington, D.C. It was a speech that also marked New York and Harlem as the next big opportunity in commercial development, noting, “My business is real estate, and I believe that Harlem is now poised to provide a platform for a new generation of black and female entrepreneurs. I’m convinced that there’s a great opportunity to build transformational projects here.”

The Observer asked Mr. Peebles about Harlem’s ability to avoid the pitfalls experienced by other transformed neighborhoods in the city as it moved into its own now-promised renaissance. “I think you have long-term property owners and long-term business owners here, and it’s got a cultural history,” he said. “You look at areas like Tribeca and Soho, they didn’t have the same kind of deep cultural story.” It’s a history that he hopes he and others can support and do justice, adding, “That’s one of the reasons why I was speaking here today. To try and encourage and excite entrepreneurs as to what can happen here. I think people coming to Harlem are definitely coming for a different vibe.”

Do Not Cross!

The Awl interviewed Jonathan Van Meter, the man who penned the much beloved/much maligned New York Magazine essay "I Hate Brooklyn" back in 2005. Mr. Van Meter's essay included a multitude of wonderful zingers, including his thoughts on a visit to Brooklyn Heights: "You can see the entirety of Manhattan across the river, a fact I found both oddly comforting and deeply disturbing. Why can’t we just be over there, in actual Manhattan?"

Seven years later, Mr. Van Meter admits that much has changed. Mostly, though, it's that Manhattan sucks more. So much so that he even—gasp!—admits to having "seriously looked at some real estate" in Prospect Heights and Fort Greene. But not to worry, Mr. Van Meter and his partner decided that they'd rather buy a vacation place in Woodstock than move to the dreaded borough.

Among the more delightful things that Mr. Van Meter says—and there are many, read the whole interview!—are that he came to Manhattan "to escape the dreariness of that hoagies-and-sewda existence" that was a hallmark of his blue collar childhood in Philadelphia (implication being that Brooklyn is still all about hoagies-and-sewda dreariness).

Except for the parts that are still are twerpily twee, like the practitioners of foodstuffs trends whom so finds so self-parodying that it is redundant to make fun of them. But then adds: "to be fair to my own point of view on this topic, that is the part of Brooklyn that I loathe the most: the whole twee/hipster/foodie aspect."

He also nails the desire and the fear that lies at the heart of many a considered relocation to Brooklyn: "I did not want to risk finding myself, up and alone in the middle of the night and on deadline, living in a beautiful townhouse filled with beautiful things on a beautiful tree-lined block—that is utterly dead by 11 p.m.—obsessing over whether it was my night to move the car."

Then he quotes Anthony Lane's New Yorker review of The Ring Two to emphasize that he didn't want to move across the river into "a howling wasteland of intolerable fear."

In any event, he's now living in Alphabet City and considering the Upper East Side—apparently following the advice of the friend who he quoted in his original essay: "I’d rather live on the friggin’ anodyne Upper East Side than live in Brooklyn!”

A few other gems from the original essay:

"Most of the people who are moving to Brooklyn these days are couples with kids who treat Brooklyn as the new, hip suburbia, or artists and rich kids without the class issues that my friend Joe and I are saddled with. Now that rent control is effectively over, it makes me wonder who will be left in Manhattan once the Brooklyn exodus is complete. My prediction? Old-money families, Eurotrash, newly minted millionaire bankers, and stubborn, overleveraged, delusional, middle-class strivers like me clinging just a little too tightly to their fast-lane fantasies and 212 area codes."

"It’s not that I don’t like the culturati hipsters, but the last time I was in an environment where people only wanted to be with people exactly like themselves was in a fucking mall in Minnesota, which is why I left there twenty years ago.”

kvelsey@observer.com

Brooklyn is a lot more than a popular aesthetic. (www.baruch.cuny.edu)

When it comes to Brooklyn, the rising tide of wealth that has flooded into the borough over the last two decades seems, more than anything, to have lifted housing prices. The well-being of the borough's longtime residents has not, as the New York Daily News points out, been similarly buoyed.

Brooklyn the media darling, the real star of Lena Dunham's Girls, the place of endless New York Times trend stories about farm-to-table restaurants and taxidermy hobbyists and Etsy enthusiasts, is not the only Brooklyn. While this may seem obvious, it is frequently obscured by the massive amount of attention that is lavished on neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Greenpoint and Park Slope. Brooklyn, has, after all, become a synecdoche for a privileged, eminently marketable lifestyle that has nothing to do with the lives led by the vast majority of Brooklynites, residing in unfashionable neighborhoods such as Canarsie and Flatbush and Brownsville.

Perhaps in a gesture to its readers (who tend to be from the other Brooklyn), but also a much-needed gesture in general, the Daily News printed today a number of interesting statistics that highlight the chasm between the two Brooklyns.

Among the most jarring: while handcrafted ISH horseradish sells for $74 a six-pack at Williasmburg Smorgasburg market, 25 percent of Brooklyn residents use food stamps. And they get an average of $277.70 worth of those stamps to buy food for a month.

Also, while borough president Marty Markowitz likes to claim that Brooklyn "has more writers per square inch than almost anywhere in the country," 30 percent of its third-graders cannot read at grade level.

The rest of the list can be read here.

kvelsey@observer.com

Sure, they wanted edgy. Just not this edgy. (iank14, flickr)

Chelsea is the new Park Slope, only better!

Why, there are so many cool places to take your hip, urban children—the High Line, Chelsea Piers, the Chelsea Market, all the art galleries and, starting this fall, your terrifically-gifted little one can even attend school nearby at Avenues.

Now if only you could just stamp out those last edgy, transgressive elements from the neighborhood. Sure, those things made you feel superior to your Brooklyn-dwelling friends when you first bought that sleek new condo, but now you're all about playgrounds and preschools and you don't want to push your toddler through a crowd of scantily-clad men.

It seems that some residents of the +ART building on West 28th Street want the Folsom East Street Fair moved or eliminated entirely, according to an interview with an anonymous resident in Jeremiah's Vanishing New York.

"Residents from several surrounding buildings have passed fliers asking our residents to write to the Community Board to relocate or totally eliminate Folsom Street East because 'fetish' fairs shouldn't be allowed so close to so many residential buildings," the resident tells Vanishing New York.

There are even rumors of a petition, although the fetish fair, scheduled this weekend, is at least safe for now.

Of course, the annual celebration of the fetish/leather/kink community has been taking place on the block for 16 years, long before +ART or any other residential buildings. But condo dwellers don't want to walk through the sex-positive revelers to get to their building's entrance, and that's that. Even the festival's exuberant motto"New York Fucking City's Sexiest Street Festival" is highly inappropriate reading material for wee ones!

kvelsey@observer.com

Compared to the past? Not really. The New York Times put together a fun little infographic comparing and contrasting New York City neighborhood demographics of yesteryear (pulled from 1940 New York City census data) to what they look like today.

As for Williamsburg, well, here are some numbers:

Williamsburg         1940         2006-2010      Change

POPULATION         179,764     131,875             -27%
Native White            114,598     81,497               -29
Foreign White         61,488       16,808              -73
Black                           3,298         10,477               +218
Other races              380            23,093              +5,977

There are less native white residents and less foreign-born white residents (as well as less people and less renters) than there were in Williamsburg in 1940. Notably, most of the other neighborhoods the Times picked in outer-boroughs do represent this change to some degree (this may have to do with the fact that all the White People either moved further out or further in, ahem, Manhattanwhites), but Williamsburg gentrifiers may now assuage themselves with the fact that they still have plenty of other people to push out before the neighborhood looks like it did Way Back When.

Speaking of which, much of this data was pulled from a 1943 "Market Analysis" of Williamsburg that included some old photos of what it looked like, way back when. Check out the slideshow above for some pulls from Google Maps compared to the photos of Williamsburg from the 1943 Market Analysis.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek