Williamsburg
February 1, 2008
Closing Bell: Grand Theft Auto, Brooklyn Liberty City
A Wanted poster has popped up on the corner of Lorimer and Grand asking people to shoot Niko Bellic on sight. Bellic is the main character in the latest installment of Grand Theft Auto, and the poster says he's "wanted for questioning in connection with a shooting at a nightclub in the Hove Beach area of Broker." The new installment of the popular video game series, due out in April, is set in Liberty City, a fictional version of New York. The game has painstakingly reproduced NYC streetscapes, like the fake row of Brooklyn brownstones at right. Anyone know if the marketing campaign is targeting neighborhoods other than Williamsburg?
GTA Posters Showing Up in Brooklyn [Kotaku]
Photo of ad by freshyill; screenshot from Yahoo Games.
Development Watch: 186 Grand Street
Just down the street from Karl Fischer's controversial proposed Grand Street towers, ground has been broken on a smaller smaller project that is likely to go over better with the locals. The plans for 186 Grand Street call for a 4-story, 15,000-square-foot residential building "consistent in scale and style with existing neighborhood." A local architect, Philip Toscano, is handling the job and there's a rendering of the proposed building posted at the site. Considering that most recent construction in the 'Burg is mainly of the Scarano and Bricolage schools, this could be a welcome addition; plus, since the site itself was a former parking lot (albeit one with a very nice willow tree in the back) there's no destruction of the neighborhood's former industrial heritage to bemoan. Anyone heard any chatter about this one yet? GMAP<--> P*Shark DOB
Domino Sugar Factory Proposed Addition Revealed
With developer CPC and architects Beyer Blinder Belle beginning to make the rounds to sell their proposal for modifications to the now-landmarked refinery building of the Domino Sugar Factory, it was only a matter of time before the closely-guarded renderings came to light. We crammed into the Community Board 1 headquarters last night with about 15-20 other people to catch the powerpoint presentation and came away with a few dozen photos. The money shots are above—the five-story glass addition to the roof of the refinery. The big-picture plan for the building includes 30,000 square feet of retail on the ground floor, community use space on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th floors, and residential from the 5th floor up. (No pedestrian bridges though!) The residential portion will have a courtyard hollowed out in the middle of the building. Two other high-level stats for the project as a whole: 2,200 residential units and, get this, 1,550 underground parking spaces. The developers had originally hoped to have begun the ULURP process by February but it's now looking more like April or May.
BREAKING! LPC Approves Historic Designation for Domino [Brownstoner]
CPC Shows and Tells Its Plans for Domino [Brownstoner]
Plans for 'New Domino' Released by City Planning [Brownstoner]
January 31, 2008
Development Watch: 144 South 4th Street
Just down the block from our first apartment in Brooklyn, a ten-story residential building is in the early stages of development. Designed by Nataliya Donskoy, a Scarano protege responsible for the makeover of 140 Degraw Street, the structure is planned to include 75 units over 134,000 square feet. An adjacent existing building on the same zoning lot will be reborn as a commercial property with the off-street parking required by the apartments. This should be a doozy. GMAP<--> P*Shark DOB
Williamsburg’s Goody-Goody Greenbelt
The marketers behind a new Williamsburg condo called Greenbelt are really pushing the condo’s eco- and artist-friendly features. The Greenbelt team says the eight-unit building 361 Manhattan Avenue is expected to receive an LEED Gold rating and save around 46 percent of a standard building’s energy costs (its many green bells and whistles include a solar energy collector on the roof and a passive heat recovery system). The building is also going to have a 4,000-square-foot, nonprofit performing arts center on the ground floor. So it’s definitely got great credentials—but will it sell? The units are mostly two-bedrooms; the single, 710-square-foot top-floor one-bedroom is going for $599,000, while the two-bedrooms topping 1,000 square feet are going for between $759,000 and $815,000. The healthy sales at the green condo in the South Slope, 515 Fifth Avenue, certainly indicate that the market is receptive to eco-friendly builds—we’ll find out if that’s true in the Burg, too.
Greenbelt [Homepage] GMAP
Greenbelt Listings [Apts and Lofts]
Williamsburg's Greenbelt Getting Green [Curbed]
January 30, 2008
Wednesday Food & Drink Round-Up
Early Controversy Over Favela
Corner of South 5th and Wythe, Williamsburg
Eater's roving photographer, Will Femia, snapped this photo of the future home of a Brazilian restaurant called Favela, and The Gurgling Cod already has a beef with the restaurant's name: "Call me crazy, but I don't think you could get away with a soul food (or Polish) restaurant called 'Ghetto.'" Is something getting lost in translation here?
Opening on February 14: Amy Ruth's
372-374 Fulton Street (Fulton Mall), Downtown Brooklyn
"Amorous couples will dine on sauteed chicken liver and braised chitlens on Valentine’s Day at the new Amy Ruth’s on Fulton Mall — but if they need booze to get in a romantic mood, they’ll have to go somewhere else. That’s because the well-known Harlem soul food restaurant won’t have its liquor license when it opens its new location in the old Gage & Tollner site on Feb. 14." [The Brooklyn Paper]
Closed: Second Street Cafe
189 7th Avenue (at Second Street), Park Slope
"The women who work at Met Food said the rent was too high. Another local shopkeeper said that they weren't making any money. Maybe the renovation did them in. A neighbor saw the tall, white haired owner crying... So sudden. So strange. The block between 2nd and 3rd Street on Seventh Avenue has had three closings in two months (Tempo Presto, Seventh Avenue Books, Second Street Cafe). Park Slope Books will be out in March." [OTBKB]
After the jump: Trader Joe's progress report, a beer bar for Park Slope, a "jewel box" for Prospect Heights, brick oven pizza for Clinton Hill, and Harvey Wallbanger arrives in Williamsburg...
Brooklyn Apartments No Bargain Compared to Manhattan
While it’s not exactly breaking news that rents in Park Slope and Williamsburg are very high, did you know that median rents in the two neighborhoods are steeper than they are in Hell’s Kitchen and the Lower East Side? The Observer has an article this morning about how rents in A-list Brooklyn neighborhoods continue to rise while prices in the Manhattan rental market begin to dip—taken together, the trends suggest that Brooklyn’s days of being an affordable alternative to Manhattan are long gone (as if anyone needed a newspaper to tell them that!). According to listings on StreetEasy, the median monthly rent in Park Slope is $3,050, while Williamsburg’s median is $2,900. Both numbers are higher than the median rent on the Lower East Side ($2,700). In addition, rents in prime Brooklyn neighborhoods have gone up at a startling pace over the past couple of years: The median rent for Park Slope in ’05 was a comparatively affordable $1,090. Conclusion, per the article: "Queens, anyone?"
Park Slope Living at Manhattan Rents! [NY Observer]
Photo by DEDE_LE
January 29, 2008
475 Kent Avenue: How It All Began
It all started with a standpipe. When the Fire Department passed by for a routine inspection of the sidewalk in front of 475 Kent Avenue last week, they discovered a rusted, non-working pipe. This led them to follow the pipe down to its source in the basement, where they were greeted with a sea of grain boxes piled high to the ceiling. According to one building resident, this was done to gain economies of scale in the kosher certification process: The larger the stockpiles of grain, the less often a rabbi would have to shlep over to bless it. The result: A barely navigable maze of boxes, a fire hazard only compounded by the lack of proper electricity and water sources.
Big Showing From Pols at 475 Kent Vigil [Brownstoner]
Closing Bell: Moving Out at 475 Kent Avenue [Brownstoner]
‘Commune of Creative Types’ in the Burg is Emptied Out [Brownstoner]
475 Kent Message Board [475kent.com] GMAP<-->
Photo by Drew Catlin
January 28, 2008
Development Watch: Hager Wasting No Time at 421 Kent
Just two blocks north of the 475 Kent mass eviction, developer Issac Hager has wasted little time getting to work on his latest project which takes up the entire block of South 8th Street between Kent and Wythe Avenues in South Williamsburg. Just a month ago we reported that the man who has just recently broken ground on another high-profile project—the Flatbush Flatiron—had paid $42.5 million for the site, where it's unclear whether he's planning on building a 7- or 20-story building. In the past couple of weeks, much of the former parking lot has been torn up and, judging from all those port-o-potties (on the jump) they're expecting quite a crew of workers.
Hager Re-Ups in Williamsburg Big-Time [Brownstoner] GMAP P*Shark DOB
Continue reading "Development Watch: Hager Wasting No Time at 421 Kent"
Report: Subprime Foreclosures Rampant in Brooklyn
On Friday the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released data listing how many subprime loans there were in New York state in October (broken down by zip code) and how many of those loans were in foreclosure. Bottom line? Bad news for Brooklyn, especially in the zip codes that include Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York, Williamsburg, and Bushwick. As reported in the Daily News, there were foreclosure proceedings under way for 25 percent of homeowners with subprime mortgages in 11233, which covers Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights. That subprime foreclosure rate is almost four times the national average of 6.89 percent. As the chart above shows, subprime foreclosure rates were also high in other Bed-Stuy/Crown Heights codes (11212, 11213, 11216, and 11238). The data also shows that 435 homes with subprime loans in East New York were in foreclosure. Foreclosure rates on properties in the zip codes covering Williamsburg and Bushwick, meanwhile, were also high (though the total number of subprime loans in those Zips was smaller than in Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights and East New York): 22 percent of homes with subprime loans in the 11221 Zip code were in foreclosure.
Brooklyn Neighborhoods Top Subprime Foreclosures in Nation [NY Daily News]
New York Fed Releases Zip Code Level Data on Nonprime Mortgages [NY Fed]