166 South 9th Street, Williamsburg.
Havemeyer Street, 2020
Photo: Brian Rose via Untapped Cities
Some lovely photos by Brian Rose taken during the Spring of 2020, peak time of the shutdown. (It strikes me that many of the subject places he photographs are pretty empty during normal times.)
Korean investment firm NH Investment & Securities is under contract to buy The Dime Residences in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for $157.5 million, according to sources familiar with the transaction.
The sale does not include the retail (the landmarked bank building). This is the second big residential sale in Williamsburg in the past couple of weeks – given where rents are going, not surprising I guess.
Still getting used to the idea of a hotel on the Southside. I guess the lenders are good with it.
It can’t be a good year when one of your “wins” involved half of the building getting demolished.
And while it’s always nice to see row houses that are not in Greenwich Village get recognition and protection (nice work, Kelly!), Walt Whitman, abolitionist history and a host of other good priorities (Bushwick, Southside) still languish.
Frenchie Ramos, whose gym was at the corner of Marcy and Broadway (looking out on the platform of the Manhattan-bound J/M/Z platform), has passed away.
Domino Sugar Refinery, 1905
In 2006, Williamsburg Greenpoint Preservation Association did a very in-depth report on the history and architecture of the Domino Sugar Refinery, parts of which were incorporated into the Landmarks designation report for the Processing House and into the very detailed and comprehensive report that was prepared for the Historic American Engineering Record. Novelty Theater has recently updated the 2006 WGPA report with new information and has collected a host of images, historical and more recent.
321 Wythe Avenue, proposed.
ND Architecture & Design (2016)
Renderings are up for the new 19-story building to go up on the former site of Ss. Peter & Paul Roman Catholic Church, on Wythe Avenue between South 2nd and South 3rd Streets. The site was the original home of the church, constructed in 1847 and the first church building designed by prolific Catholic church architect Patrick Keely. (The Keely church was remodeled in 1902 and demolished in the late 1950s or early 1960s – full details on the old churches are available at Novelty Theater.) The replacement church, on South 2nd Street, was demolished last month.
The new building is certainly nothing very exciting, architecturally. The property will continue to be owned by the church, and according to YIMBY, will have 130 units of market-rate housing. Ironically, given the parish’s strong advocacy for affordable housing at developments like Domino over the years, not a single unit of affordable housing. And no word on whether there will be an actual church here – if not, that too would be ironic, since this was the first Catholic parish in Williamsburg(h) – 1837 – and the third in all of Brooklyn.
This is a bit dated, but Gothamist reports that Crown Vic is “100% [closing], it’s just a question of when”. “When” could be another five years. The property (which extends from South 2nd to South 3rd, and includes about half a block of frontage on Wythe Avenue) was rezoned in 2011 to allow residential use, with up to 20% of the site being affordable housing. Since then, it has been acquired by Manhattan developer Flank. Back in 2011, the owner of Crown Vic claimed to have a 10-year lease. Flank has said that they plan to develop the site “once the retail leases expire”, though a but out is certainly possible.
Flank has also acquired a similarly-sized site at two blocks south at Grand and Wythe.
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.
