• Bike Lane Plan on Greenpoint Avenue Bridge

    The City is promising to install bike lanes on the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge – upsetting some but cheering others:

    “Greenpoint Avenue is not fun to ride on,” said Ryan Kuonen, a community organizer at north Brooklyn’s Neighbors Allied for Good Growth and an avid cyclist [and also a Community Board member]. “It really needs a redesign.”

    Avid business owners along Greenpoint Avenue (who stand lose parking) are opposed to the project. Unnamed avid motorists are also opposed to the project. No word on how avid pedestrians view it.

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  • Retail Report

    A few random observations on the Northside (more or less) retail/commercial front:

    Kitten Coffee, a roaster located in Bed-Stuy is opening what looks like its first retail outlet at the former Blackbird spot at North 6th and Bedford.

    Evolve Motorcycles, a manufacturer of electric motorcycles, is opening a showroom (its first?) at 155 Grand Street (the former location of East Street Gallery and before that Lawanna’s last outpost). The storefront next door is available – the pizza parlor that had been there was seized by the marshals last month.

    Sensation

    208 Grand Street (at right, the new building with the best air conditioner grilles in Brooklyn) is getting a restaurant – Sensation – which will serve “new Shanghai cuisine”.

    The newly-opened Hotel Williamsburg is changing hands – the potential new owners came to CB1 tonight for a transfer of the liquor license. One of the new owners was involved in the operation of the Barbizon, Ryalton, Paramount and Gramercy Park Hotels, as well as Coco Pazzo on the Upper East Side. The second partner is Meyer Chetrit (coincidentally, the Chetrit Group has just sold 175 Kent to Sam Zell).

    Also on the CB1 docket tonight (but not on the Northside), the owners of Traif are opening Xixa, Mexican restaurant, three doors down at the old Aldo’s Coffee Shop space on South 4th Street.

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  • Inside the City’s Ghost Subway System

    Moses Gates took WNYC on a tour of some “ghost” subways sites in the city’s transit system.

    The piece includes this cool interactive map of the system’s once-planned routes and abandoned stations. Most of the abandoned stations were taken out of service over time – the exception is the South 4th Street station, which was never completed. A few clicks around the interactive map show how different the Southside might have been if the Depression hadn’t stopped this major expansion (the 6th Avenue (F) and 8th Avenue (C?) lines both would have come out to Williamsburg, where they would have hooked up with Crosstown (G) service).

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  • What IS Con Ed Up To On River Street?

    con-ed-demo.jpg

    Con Ed’s River Street site, partially demolished
    Photo: Sharese Ann Frederick on flickr


    I’ve mentioned this in passing before, but Con Ed is doing some serious demolition at its River Street facilities. The two-block site used to house a series of storage tanks, but over the past few months, the tanks have been slowly coming down. (The speed of the demo is probably due to the fact that the tanks are constructed of concrete 20″ thick; there is no evidence of any environmental remediation at the site that I can find.)

    So what’s in store for this site? Could it be the site of the recently-rumored Williamsburg Whole Foods (I’m betting not)? Some other development (I’ve heard rumors that CineMagic’s Riverfront Studios is expanding somewhere “within a few blocks” of their Kent Avenue/South 9th Street studios, though I doubt this is that site)? Or is Con Ed just going to mothball it like they have their other waterfront site, the former BRT Power Plant at Division and Kent?

    The options are somewhat limited by zoning, which is heavy industrial (M3-1), which limits the as-of-right options to industrial uses and certain commercial uses. (The six-block area between North 3rd and Grand Street west of Kent Avenue is actually ripe for rezoning – the industrial zoning on five of the six blocks is completely anachronistic since the residential rezoning of the Domino properties to the south in 2010.)

    Or perhaps Con Ed will do something truly useful for the community and turn the site over for a waterfront park and esplanade? It would make a fantastic extension of the esplanade at 184 Kent to the north, wouldn’t it?

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  • St. Vincent De Paul Sells

    bell-tolls.jpg

    Photo: Heather Roslund

    According to Brownstoner, the broker handling the sale of St. Vincent De Paul Church on North 6th Street has announced the sale of the property for $13.7 million. MNS, the broker, says that the mystery owner plans to convert the church.

    The church owns two parcels on North 6th Street. One of those parcels (lot 30) is the rectory, a four-and-a-half story building that was constructed in 1869 (Patrick Keely, architect). The other parcel (lot 15) wraps around the rectory and consists of the church itself (also constructed in 1869 and designed by Keely), as well as the large parking lot to the west of the rectory and the 1960s (?) school on North 7th Street.

    So the first question is, which properties did the church sell? The second question is, what does the new owner plan for the rest of the site? Taking at face value the claim that the church itself will be converted, there is still a huge development potential for the rest of the site (the larger site – excluding the rectory – is over 33,000 sf; that is a lot of development rights, even at the R6B zoning for the block).

    UPDATE:The Real Deal posted the story last night; according to their piece, the lot is 37,500 sf (my figure was from Oasis). The article is also a bit squishier on the fate of the church (” the buyer may choose to develop within the existing structure of the building”), and it notes that the sale went into contract last Spring, and only closed this week.

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  • Reasons to Love Williamsburg

    NY Magazine’s annual list of reasons to love NY include two of my favorite things about Williamsburg –

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  • Did the City Miscalculate Value of Bushwick Inlet Park?

    Short answer – yes.

    Yolane Almanzar of the fledgling New York World has a very thorough rundown of why Williamsburg and Greenpoint may never see a park at Bushwick Inlet.

    The article is mostly about how grossly the city underestimated the value of the properties – by an order of magnitude, as it turns out. But the real issue is that by rushing to rezone without first acquiring (or at least negotiating prices for) the inlet properties, the city in effect raised the value of those properties to unattainable levels.

    So now, more than six years after the rezoning became reality, and with thousands of new housing units already added to the area, the city has committed over $200 million to acquire part of a park, and will probably need close to that amount again to acquire the rest. (Putting aside the question of whether they can ever acquire the Monitor Museum site).

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  • The Old Fashioned

    Slate:

    [There are] two main approaches to this uniquely venerable beverage. The austere former — its liquor merely sweetened and seasoned, not even tarted up with a citrus twist — is hard-core originalist. The fancy latter points to the opposite extreme, where the bartender muddles a whole Carmen Miranda headdress and the squirt of carbonated water becomes a long spritz of Sprite.

    Personally, I prefer the version served at Rye (which is definitely in the originalist camp).

    [via DF]

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  • Oh Look, @archdaily Fell for the Oppenheim Hotel

    It looks like Oppenheim Architecture + Design has been sending out more press releases about the “international competition” to design the hotel for the vacant site next to the Williamsburgh Savings Bank. In the past few days, ArchDaily and other sites have suddenly picked up on this month-old “story”.

    Like I said before, the design is gorgeous, but it’s probably not getting built. It’s probably not getting built because a hotel with a 16′-deep footprint rising up for 120′ is economically unbuildable. It’s probably not getting built because it’s probably not as of right and would require a host of public reviews before a height-averse community.

    But mainly, it’s probably not getting built because the owner says it’s probably not getting built: “our architect did a design on spec” (that doesn’t sound like a “competition”, international or otherwise).

    As for the press release article, it’s worth a read just for sentences like this:

    Williamsburg, Brooklyn is one of the most interesting and cutting edge [sic] neighborhoods in the world. It is a soulful, culinary and style epicenter that is raw, edgy, and visceral. A place that attracts intellectual cognisanti [sic] in search of “the real”.

    or this:

    The three towers engage and dialogue with the distinctive scales and character of the context, with the lowest volume [about 16 stories tall?] relating directly to the surrounding neighborhood in both scale and material, the middle one [about 32 stories tall?] to the adjacent iconic Williamsburg Bank [sic], and the third volume [about 44 stories tall] extends to the sky in direct dialogue with the bridge [which is 335′ tall].

    If all this sounds like senseless archibabble, it is – straight from the architect. Other sites have reprinted this press release in the past few days, and at least one of them was honest enough to credit it properly: “Article source: Oppenheim architecture + design”.

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  • Williamsburg’s Rife With New Buildings Again

    In case you haven’t noticed, development is booming (again) in Williamsburg. The Post has the details on over 1,300 new units that will (supposedly) hit the market by the end of 2014 (most of them rentals, but condos seem poised for a rise from the ashes too). As Brownstoner points out, it’s pretty clear the Post hasn’t even scratched the surface – anecdotally, it seems as though the majority of the formerly-stalled sites in the area are back in action, and there are a lot of development sites that the article misses. To Brownstoner’s list (11 Broadway and 65 Hope), I’d add South 6th and Wythe (pouring foundations), North 6th & Wythe (almost topped out), South 1st near Kent (back in action), Grand & Driggs (closed in) and about a dozen small sites between Broadway and McCarren that are actively under construction.

    As the Post says, “Think the L train is crowded now? Brace yourself.”. Indeed.

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