232 Bedford Avenue – open for business

Not like this is a regular feature, but after seeing the very sudden emergence of retail at the corner of Bedford and North 4th, it got me thinking about all of the retail that has been popping up in the neighborhood. The 232 Bedford Avenue building had been all residential, and has just undergone a pretty stunning transformation (courtesy of Loading Dock 5 Architects). As of last weekend (as seen above), there are three new retail stores operating out of the ground floor – a jewelry store, a high-end sneaker store and another boutique.

Diagonally across the street, it looks like another jeweler/boutique is set to open in the small space next to Whisk (another somewhat recent addition to the neighborhood). With Bedford Cheese Shop on the third corner, this is turning into a nice little retail hub, made nicer by the fact that it is just a bit south of the crappy stretch of Bedford. (Hopefully the fourth corner won’t be built out as planned.)

In other retail news, my friends at Treehouse, Sodafine and lots of other great local establishments are putting on The Winter Market this Sunday (6 December) at Public Assembly (70 North 6th Street).

All good reasons to keep your holiday shopping local.

FREEWilliamsburg says it’s bullshit, and they’re right. The removal of the bike lane on a section of Bedford Avenue – the section that runs through the heart of the Hasidic community, was a bad decision, made for bad reasons. Gothamist says that the Bedford Avenue bike lane was “relatively noncontroversial”, but that is not the case at all. The bike lane was hugely unpopular with the local community, in part because it made double parking illegal, and in part because (for one rabbi in particular) of the “problem” of scantily-clad women riding through the neighborhood.

Now Bedford Avenue is a heavily-trafficked and crowded street – south of Division Avenue and North of it. Which is why south of Division the bike lane – which connects north Brooklyn to central Brooklyn neighborhoods like Clinton Hill, Bed-Stuy, Prospect Heights and Crown Heights as well as connecting all of those neighborhoods to Prospect Park and the Williamsburg Bridge – runs a block west along Berry. But there is no viable detour north of Division, which is why the City – correctly – put a bike lane on Bedford Avenue. Now that Kent Avenue has a bike lane running all the way north from Flushing, it does make sense to encourage bikes to take that route – it is safer and more protected, albeit much more indirect.

What doesn’t make sense is removing the Bedford Avenue bike lane in its entirety (and I think DOT’s “quiet” removal of the lane reinforces that). As Transportation Alternatives correctly points out, bikers have a right to ride on any public street. Removing a bike lane entirely – particularly bowing to NIMBY pressure to do so – sends exactly the opposite message. If DOT really wanted to make responsible “bike network adjustments in the area”, it would have converted the Bedford Avenue bike lane to a shared arrow (sharrows) lane – at least would have reinforced the message that drivers (and neighborhoods) need to share the road with bikers.