The rebirth of a mother Northside classic. Here’s hoping that this is a good thing.
Mugs Ale House to Reopen as Meg’s Ale House
Brooklyn Boulders Books into New Kent Avenue Building
“Creator and operator of active lifestyle facilities”?
Anyhow, nice addition to the area.
So Long, Tops
From YIMBY, word that one portion of the Tops Supermarket has a date with a wrecking ball. The 4-story mixed-use building (part of the Lee portfolio), which looks like it dates to the 1860s or so, will be demolished to construct a smaller 2-story commercial structure.
Interesting that there is no residential play here – just commercial.
Mike Lee’s Portfolio on the Market
The late Mike Lee’s portfolio – which includes the former Tops on the Waterfront buildings as well as the current Rosarito Fish Shack – is on the market. The portfolio includes vacant lots on North 6th between Kent and Wythe and a number of nice older buildings.
Grand Street: The Williamsburg Divide
Grand Street separates two neighborhoods in Williamsburg, and the Times is on it. The result could be the single worst article ever written about Williamsburg in the paper of record.
Already there is one correction: “An earlier version of this article misspelled in one instance the name of an avenue in Brooklyn. It is Wythe Avenue, not Wyeth”. Presumably another correction will be forthcoming when the Grey Lady discovers that Bedford Street is in Greenwich Village, not Brooklyn. Apparently one does not need to travel to Brooklyn to write about it.
Other than seeing that the Northside is different from the Southside, the whole article hits a discordant note – it is hard to find a paragraph not to object to.
Let’s start with North Williamsburg. Unless you want to appear a rube (or you are a real estate broker), there is no such thing. The streets north of Grand Street are the Northside (and it is one word, not two). There is a South Williamsburg, but it’s not where the Times thinks it is. To locals, South Williamsburg refers to the area south of Division Avenue (in other words south of the numbered south streets). The streets in South Williamsburg are named after signers of the Declaration of Independence, and the area today is largely Hasidic. In between the Northside and South Williamsburg is the Southside (also one word) – the south numbered streets.
The moniker South Williamsburg has been creeping north for a few years now, and I suspect it starts with a real estate effort to rebrand the area away from its Hispanic identity. When South Williamsburg started moving north of Broadway, I asked some Puerto Rican and Dominican friends who grew up in the neighborhood to define the Southside (Los Sures in Spanish). Their boundaries coincided generally with what I had always thought – from Grand Street south to either Broadway or Division, and from Kent to at least Union was the Southside.
To [Northsiders], the south can feel, well, a little too real: a backwater of vinyl siding, dusty bodegas, Gen-Y drifters and unrenovated dumps unfit for civilized company.
I can’t speak to the drifters and dumps, but I do know that the Northside has far more vinyl siding than the Southside (or South Williamsburg). As an architectural historian, to me the Southside is one of the more interesting neighborhoods in Brooklyn, with many readable layers of architecture and culture. The bulk of its low-scale housing stock is pre-Civil War brick houses and flats, reflecting the neighborhood’s history as the original civic and commercial center of Williamsburg (Grand Street was the main commercial artery, which explains why it still has so many great retail buildings). As that center shifted south, so too did development. That explains the large number of late-19th century brownstones and mansions in South Williamsburg, and the great buildings of Williamsburg’s second commercial corridor – Broadway. Both neighborhoods have a lot of architectural gems in the mix (check the AIA Guide, which doesn’t spend a lot of time on the Northside). Meanwhile, the Northside was historically the more working-class neighborhood, and as a result has many more wood-framed flats and tenements, many of which got the vinyl siding treatment in the latter half of the 20th century. The same is true of parts of Greenpoint and East Williamsburg (which, by the way, has been called East Williamsburg for 150 years – no rechristening there).
From architecture and history to restaurants and retail, the Southside is far more interesting than the Northside. I hope it stays that way.
South Williamsburg Creeps North
An investment group led by Waterbridge Capital’s Joel Schreiber has closed on the purchase of nearly an entire South Williamsburg block, with plans for high-end retail development, the Wall Street Journal reported… Waterbridge is looking to bring “high-end retail,” tenants to the block, a source familiar with the transaction told the Journal. Doing so would continue the transformation of South Williamsburg into a trendy retail destination, with stores such as Whole Foods making their way to the neighborhood.
$30 million for a South Williamsburg block?!? And a Whole Foods?!!?
Oh, by “South Williamsburg” they really mean “Bedford and Driggs avenues and North Third and North Fourth streets”. (And Waterbridge already acquired half this block last year – remember J. Crew?
Prime Northside Rents $1,600 Higher Than Neighborhood’s Southside
Yet another very good reason to move to the Southside.
The spate of rent “surveys” coming out about Williamsburg and Greenpoint are by and large nothing but linkage fodder for the brokerages putting them together. The n in the equation is usually pretty low, rendering the whole thing statistically suspect in the first place. In the case of this latest report, the comparison of Northside to Southside is apples and oranges in so many ways.
Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie to Williamsburg?
According to Crain’s, Anthropologie is going to join Whole Foods (and possibly Joe Fresh, Citibank and New York Sports Club) next door to Duane Reade, HSBC and Retro Fitness, which I guess has the advantage of concentrating all the boring (and largely redundant) retail on one block.
But that’s not all… according to Crain’s Anthropologie’s corporate sibling Urban Outfitters is coming to North 6th Street, next door to American Apparel (another match made in heaven).
Meanwhile:
J. Crew has also been rumored to be looking in the neighborhood
Why do I get the feeling J. Crew is the new Apple Store?
Bedford Avenue Salvation Army to Remain a Salvation Army
OkCupid Co-Founder Pays $1.6 Million for Williamsburg Walk-up
Nice fence. That and the eccentric configuration of the yellow vinyl siding is a pretty clear indication that the building is a lot older than 1910.