The Mysteries of Brooklyn

It's Not a Brownstone, but... (Brownstoner

Mr. Brownstoner’s Crown Heights Creative Hub is But the First of Goldman Sach’s Investments in the Hood

Over the years, Jonathan Butler has covered countless Brooklyn real estate deals and developments—and by extension, the delights and absurdities of living in the borough—for his blog Brownstoner.

Now, he can finally write about his own. Mr. Butler and his partners have paid $11 million for a former Studebaker Service Station on Dean Street in Crown Heights. They plan to convert the 155,000 square-feet of space into a commercial mixed-use development that will house artists and assorted creative types as well as a food hall—a $30 million project, to which Goldman Sachs’ Urban Investment Group will contribute $25.5 million. BFC Partners, the developer behind Toren, is also involved in the deal, which was first written about in The Journal and then, of course blogged about by Mr. Butler on Brownstoner.

A promising first step—bringing Selldorf Architects on board to design the space, which should be interesting given Selldorf’s success with high/low projects in the past: Manhattan galleries and penthouses, a renovation of the Plaza’s famed Oak Room and designing a Brooklyn recycling plant. Read More

HSBC Jazz Fest: Spyro Gyra and Jonathan Butler’s Dirrrty Gospel

Spyro Gyra, who opened the the first annual (and Observer-sponsored) HSBC Jazz Festival at the Nokia Theater last night, arrived on the scene near the end of the distilled-Bitches Brew fusion jazz movement that spawned Weather Report and Return to Forever. The quintet has spent the intervening decades trading off between melodic, tonal meditations on Read More