They had found Brooklyn Heights rentals and co-op fees lower than comparable ones in Manhattan (“I’d say 20 percent lower,” one said). But the young lawyers—both married and one with a small child—also knew that rental apartments on the Heights had been dwindling and, as a general rule, nonexistent for less than $600 or $700 for two bedrooms.
“With a big income, especially with two people in the family working,” one said, “you’d better buy.”
• • •
Brooklyn Heights is in the middle of another dramatic shift in economics and living arrangements, and the single-family-owned house may soon be about as rare as among the Canarsies who once lived there. The brownstone pioneers of the 1950’s and 1960’s, waving goodbye to their baby-boom offspring (and faced with inflated costs), are converting their houses into cooperative apartments for a “new class” of upscale, two-income, often childless couples.
“I feel sad to do it because it’s making a different kind of neighborhood out of Brooklyn Heights—I’d like to see a family occupy our brownstone as we did,” said Margaret Kenny, who with her husband, Jack, an airline pilot, moved into their former rooming house in 1959 with four young children.
Also being turned into co-ops for the affluent are a dozen once-chic or genteel residential hotels that gradually have slid into grimly seedy single-room occupancy. These conversions range from the beautiful, 10-story former Hotel Margaret, just above the harborside Esplanade, to the Queen Anne-style Montague on the Brooklyn Heights “main street” of the same name.
Some of the conversions will have fair-sized apartments but, as a well-known Heights resident put it, citing a once-private 51-room mansion that had been converted to 26 apartments, “the co-op studio apartment is becoming the luxury S.R.O. of the Heights.”
“Owners of the old hotels, and often the brownstone-buyers, don’t want to face the rising costs and regulations as landlords,” the resident said, “so they dump it all on the tenants as a cooperative.”
From Afterthought to Sought-After
By JEFF VANDAM | October 22, 2006
IT IS UNCLEAR WHO FIRST STRUNG TOGETHER the words “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass” to form the acronym representing a tiny warehouse enclave on the Brooklyn waterfront—or whether there is really even a Manhattan Bridge overpass. But such questions are passé in today’s Dumbo, one of the most expensive and sought-after loft districts in New York, now buoyed further by a building miniboom bringing several hundred more apartments to its tiny market.
Starting in 1998 with the opening of 1 Main Street, known in the neighborhood as the Clocktower, a series of luxury conversions of Dumbo’s iconic prewar commercial buildings has created a new neighborhood, one with million-dollar views and multimillion-dollar floor plans. Streets that ended at the East River with the Manhattan or Brooklyn Bridge looming above were barren five years ago. Now there is life on nearly every corner, with strollers and bicycles bumping along the Belgian-block streets, and aromas of eggs Florentine and shiitake mushroom ravioli spilling onto the sidewalks.
“You’ve got a massive influx of people coming in,” said Arturo Torres, 32, a lawyer and mortgage company owner who moved to Dumbo with his wife, Jacqueline, in 2002. “There’s a need for all these retail shops and restaurants. Four years ago, walking to the subway late at night, you weren’t feeling too safe.”
With Dumbo’s old buildings already having made the transition to residential from bottle-cap or corrugated-cardboard manufacturing, it only remained for developers to pursue new construction in the area—which they are, in a big way.
Echoing the builders of 40 Wall Street and the Chrysler Building, who in 1929 engaged in a “race to the top,” the developers of two Dumbo condo skyscrapers, J Condominium and the Beacon Tower, are neck and neck. Each tower is almost complete, and sales have already begun, with most unit prices beginning just under $1 million and edging upward.
Park Slope, Reshaped by Money
By JIM YARDLEY | March 14, 1998
A Park Slope stoop on Sixth Avenue.
IN FITS AND STARTS OVER SEVERAL DECADES, Park Slope has become a laboratory for assimilation and gentrification. The Irish and the Italians once brawled on Fifth Avenue, followed by the Puerto Ricans, who elbowed into the mix. There were Jamaicans, and by the 1970’s, the hippies had arrived, enticed by the lure of stately but inexpensive brownstones in need of repair.
With each successive layer, Park Slope’s identity deepened as well: a self-consciously funky village-within-a-metropolis that embraced tolerance and diversity. But now, the Brooklyn neighborhood is enduring another wave of immigrants, a group that is regarded with more concern than any that came before: well-to-do people, many of them refugees from Manhattan.
“The death of a small neighborhood,” complained Thomas Spennato, 47, a Park Slope native who owns Soundtrack, a compact-disc store. “Oh, yes, it is. It’ll never be the Park Slope people grew up in. It’s changing more like other neighborhoods.”
This sort of angst is hardly new for either Park Slope or Brooklyn, where nostalgia is a cottage industry. But the latest real estate boom is unquestionably reshaping Park Slope. Brownstones are selling for seven-figure prices. The neighborhood’s main commercial hub, Seventh Avenue, once known for its quaint, small shops, now boasts a Barnes & Noble, a Rite Aid and a Radio Shack. Rent increases in recent years have forced several small-shop owners to close or move out of the neighborhood.
Of equal concern to many Park Slope residents is a sense that the neighborhood’s character, its granola-crusted soul, is under assault. Once, people in Park Slope scoffed at the commercialization of another bastion of liberalism, the Upper West Side. Now, a favorite pastime of weekend strollers along Seventh Avenue is examining the latest listings in the windows of real estate agencies.
The newest of the newcomers sometimes feel as though they’re on a sort of neighborhood probation. Phil Battaglia, a lawyer who moved three months ago from Chelsea into an $825,000 Park Slope brownstone, said he noticed an initial wariness among some of his new neighbors, many of whom had spent decades restoring their homes. “They don’t want a bunch of rich people coming in who just have the place and go away every weekend,” he said.
Having moved to Park Slope in 1970, Rita Knox can compare her own evolution to that of her neighborhood. When she arrived, she drove a white Gremlin with a red racing stripe and taught English. Now, after first graduating to a Karmann Ghia, Ms. Knox drives a gold Mercedes-Benz and owns her own real estate agency. She has brokered many of the deals that have changed the face of Park Slope.
Ms. Knox is white and her husband is black, and she does not believe Park Slope is less tolerant or diverse than in the past. The changes, she said, are simply signs of maturity. “That’s the evolution of a neighborhood,” she said. “I would love to be 21 again, but we all get older. I’d like to have my Karmann Ghia again, but I don’t think my back could take it.”
Has Billburg Lost Its Cool?
By DENNY LEE | July 27, 2003
Despite gentrification, South Williamsburg still has a large Yiddish-speaking Hasidic population.
HE LISTENS TO ELECTROCLASH MUSIC, HAS 40-plus pals on Friendster and creates art with discarded household paint under the moniker Scooter. So when James Edward LaForge made the big move to New York from San Francisco two years ago, there seemed to be only one choice.
“Williamsburg,” said Mr. LaForge, a goateed 35-year-old whose arms are plastered with tattoos. “I wanted to check out the art scene and live in a large loft.”
Through a lamppost flier, he found just that, a 2,000-square-foot apartment on North 11th and Berry Streets, in a grimy warehouse.
Mr. LaForge explored the cafe society of Bedford Avenue he had heard so much about. By day, he shared war stories with other hardscrabble artists over chai and iBooks. By night, he frequented the local bars, and groaned about Manhattanites who were crossing the East River and crowding his watering holes. Then the edginess star
ted to dull. “It’s a cool spot,” Mr. LaForge said. “But you know what? It started to get too cool and too hip.”
So Mr. LaForge turned his back on Williamsburg, swam against the current and landed on Avenue C, in the heart of the East Village. “As an artist, I feel more inspired here,” he said. Another thought dawned on him as he unpacked that first night. “I felt like I had finally arrived in the city.”
A smattering of recent statistics, combined with an increasing amount of anecdotal evidence, suggest that Mr. LaForge is among a growing number of hipsters who are making the reverse migration from Williamsburg, back to the granddaddy of counterculture and underground chic: downtown Manhattan.
Williamsburg is hardly over. Since the mid-90’s, a growing number of fledgling galleries and fashionable boutiques have taken root where working-class ethnic communities once intersected. They offered something fresh and charmingly proletariat at the time when Manhattan seemed to fall under the spell of dot-com millionaires.
Robert Lanham, the author of “The Hipster Handbook,” and the founder of a Webzine called Free Williamsburg, would seem like the last person to knock the neighborhood. But when Mr. Lanham, who has lived in Williamsburg since 1996, looks outside his window, he sees what he called the “paradox of hipster culture” slowly coming to an end.
“Williamsburg is having an identity crisis,” Mr. Lanham said. “It’s kind of absurd that these kids who went to fancy schools are dressing like they’re construction workers. The struggling artist is a myth. Williamsburg is a pseudo bohemia.”
Rather than stick around, Mr. Lanham has started an apartment hunt himself.
“I even looked at a couple of places in Manhattan,” he said. “If I can find a nicer place with cheaper rent, I’ll take it. I’ll go wherever the best rents take me.”
Growing Pains Come And Go in Bed-Stuy
By MANNY FERNANDEZ | July 27, 2008
Stuyvesant Heights is one of the four neighborhoods within Bedford-Stuyvesant.
DAKOTA BLAIR ACKNOWLEDGES THAT BOTH he and the apartment building where he lives are somewhat out of place.
Mr. Blair, 23, a software engineer from East Texas, pays $1,700 a month for a studio in what he calls the Yuppie Spaceship: a new luxury apartment building on an unluxurious corner in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. After nine months in the neighborhood, which New York magazine labeled the city’s “next hipster enclave,” Mr. Blair is considering moving out.
Even for hipsters, life in one of New York City’s frontier neighborhoods—long-troubled places at the fringes of gentrification—can be anything but smooth, particularly in uncertain economic times. New residents like Mr. Blair have grown frustrated waiting for change to come to Bed-Stuy, with its high rates of crime and foreclosures, trash-strewn streets and limited nightlife. And the owners of businesses that have recently opened to cater to this new population wait, in turn, for a surge that has not yet arrived.
There used to be a 12-foot-wide, blue-colored mural at Myrtle and Nostrand Avenues, diagonal from Mr. Blair’s building. The painting listed the names of neighborhood murder victims inside the chalk outline of a body.
Mr. Blair took a picture of the mural in January. The snapshot is already an antique: Someone covered it up with a thin layer of concrete, and now only one side of it remains, a tribute to lives cut short itself cut short. The half-covered mural is an apt symbol of Bed-Stuy: a changing neighborhood not quite changed, transforming not in broad strokes but in half-steps.
Mr. Blair is white. He said his decision to consider leaving had nothing to do with living in a largely black neighborhood. But he and other recent arrivals described being the targets of hostile racial remarks, isolated incidents that they said detracted from the positive reaction they received from others in the neighborhood.
Henry L. Butler, 41, a longtime Bed-Stuy resident and the chairman of Community Board 3, said the race of newcomers was not the issue. “It’s about income,” said Mr. Butler, who wants to see more housing that is affordable to working-class tenants. “I’m not looking to Harlemize Bedford-Stuyvesant.”
Well, the Ices Are Still Italian
By JOSEPH BERGER | September 17, 2002
Russian and Ukrainian men play dominos at Milestone Park in Bensonhurst, another sign that the neighborhood is now a multi-ethnic neighborhood.
WHAT SAL CALABRESE HAS ALWAYS LOVED about Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, the city’s largest Italian neighborhood, is that it provides the intimacies of a village.
“If I walk out,” he said, “I will say hello to 15 or 20 people and they to me. ‘Hi, Sal. How are you? How’s your father?’ Like the old days.”
But Mr. Calabrese worries that Bensonhurst may soon lose the congenial feeling that comes from a place of common habits and pleasures. Bensonhurst is losing its Italians. According to the 2000 census, the number of residents of Italian descent is down to 59,112, little more than half that of two decades ago, and the departed Italians have been replaced by Chinese and Russian families.
Mr. Calabrese is part of that movement. His parents still live in the neighborhood and he runs a thriving real estate agency there, but three years ago he moved to Bedminster, N.J., to a 34-acre farm where he breeds Arabian horses.
Despite the reputation of immigrant groups for die-hard allegiance to old neighborhoods, what is happening, sociologists say, is the continuation of a trend that has been going on for several decades now: the children who grew up in the working-class and middle-class homes of immigrant neighborhoods are, like Mr. Calabrese, now professionals, managers and business people who want suburban homes with backyards of grass, not concrete.
In Bensonhurst, the Italian-American residents, who once passed houses on to their own relatives or those of their neighbors, are selling them to the highest bidders: Chinese moving up from nearby Sunset Park and Russians moving up from Brighton Beach.
And so they are adapting. Salvatore Alba, whose bakery has drawn long lines for its cannoli and cheesecake since his Sicilian parents opened it in 1932, has hired a Chinese-American woman to sell Italian ices.
“I figure if they can’t speak English, we’ll get someone to speak to them in Chinese,” Mr. Alba said of his newer customers.
QUEENS
Growth of Queens Borough
By WALTER I. WILLIS, Secretary, Chamber of Commerce of the Borough of Queens | May 7, 1916
QUEENS WILL SEE DURING THE COMING year the start of the greatest real estate and building development that has taken place in that borough since it became a part of Greater New York, for trains will be running in less than six months on all the elevated extensions in Queens that are part of the Dual Subway System.
With a five-cent fare to Long Island City, Astoria, Woodside, Elmhurst, Corona, Woodhaven, Richmond Hill, Morris Park, Jamaica and other sections, Queens Borough at last will become a real integral part of New York City.
In addition to the development that will come from rapid transit operation, the greatest industrial development that possibly has ever taken place in any community has already started in Queens. New factories are locating on an average of at least one a week in all parts of the borough, bringing thousands of new employees who must be housed.
For the first four months of 1916, 20 new factories have located in Queens that will have more than 5,000 employees and require the erection of new factory buildings costing over $1 million. Not only are one- and two-family houses being constructed in great numbers, especially in the vicinity of the new Liberty Avenue and Jamaica Avenue elevated extensions to Morris Park, Richmond Hill and Jamaica, but the records of the Tenement House Department show that for the first quarter of 1916, there has been a great increase in the construction of tenements.
Is there another section in New York City, or, for that matter, any similar area, in the United States, with such a bright future ahead of it? Queens may well be called “the Borough of Magnificent Opportunities.” Queens was never more prosperous, never more attractive for business develop
ment than it is today. Every indication points to a wonderful new era.
If It Really Takes All Kinds, Queens Has What It Takes
By MURRAY SCHUMACH | March 2, 1977
QUEENS HAS SUPPLANTED MANHATTAN, Brooklyn and the Bronx as the city’s most bubbly melting pot. And there is strong evidence that despite the decline of some neighborhoods in Queens and the tensions and hostilities inherent in shifting populations in other parts of the borough, the human melting pot is working better in Queens than in most other parts of the city.
People think of Queens as Archie Bunker country because they watch ‘All in the Family’ on television,” said Richard Gambino, professor of educational philosophy at Queens College and an authority on Italian-Americans. “But the truth is that almost all ethnic groups in Queens set along better than anywhere else in the city.”
Borough President Donald R. Manes points out that all major ethnic groups are represented on community planning boards in the borough. “In that sense,” he said, “they are working together. In general, they are living side by side in relative harmony.”
More objective evidence is the following:
In Astoria, probably the largest Greek community in the Western Hemisphere, about 15 percent of the Greeks are marrying Roman Catholics, Protestants and Jews.
In Laurelton, a federation of 180 block associations is making progress in building amity between blacks and whites.
In Parker Towers, a high-rise complex in Forest Hills, one hears Hebrew, Japanese, Hindi, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, French, Hungarian and Turkish.
The New York Times Book of New York Page 68
