Fort Greene

The apparently inexorable rise of a skyscraper city on the edge of Fort Greene continues apace, with developer Bruce Ratner's announcement on Wednesday that Forest City Ratner had secured financing for its first residential tower in Brooklyn, the Costas Kondylis-designed, 34-story 80 DeKalb Avenue.

The glass building will join the Forte Condo (at Ashland Place and Fulton Street), and the soon-to-be-built Danspace project across the street to form a small mini-city on the edge of Fort Greene, bordering Downtown Brooklyn -- but a taste of the 16-skyscraper-and-arena Atlantic Yards complex to come.

The tower will house 292 market-rate rentals and 73 affordable rentals, "making it the first 80/20 development in Brooklyn financed with bonds issued by the New York State Housing Finance Agency," according to the release.  read more »

What do Jasper Johns, Cindy Sherman, Annie Leibovitz and Keith Haring all have in common? Each artist has work up for sale at the 4th Annual Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM to us locals) Silent Auction.

BAM certainly plays an integral part in the Brooklyn art scene, and the auction, which raises money for BAM's various programs, raked in $237,500 last year. Artists from all over the borough have work for sale—which you can bid on on BAM's Web site—many from Williamsburg, Fort Greene and Prospect Heights. Bidding is open until April 13, when the closing reception will bring in the final bids.

Brooklyn has certainly always nurtured creative talent—nothing new there. The borough has increasingly become home to prominent names in the fine-arts community. While an afternoon spent in Manhattan's great museums or in Chelsea's galleries is certainly invigorating, poking around unconventional spaces that have sprung up all over Brooklyn can turn into quite the adventure. Brooklyn is an urban jungle peppered with art, inside and outside of the spaces that facilitate creativity.  read more »

On April 6, a weekly Brooklyn flea market will kick off in Bishop Laughlin Memorial High School in Fort Greene, but the event is a far cry from your neighborhood stoop sale or the dusty, glorified junkyards that linger in Manhattan.

For one thing the “Brooklyn Flea” is curated, said founder Jonathan Butler—until recently known only under his nom de plume Brownstoner.

Mr. Butler and his partner Eric Demby, a former communications officer for Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, handpicked about 200 up-and-coming designers as well as vintage clothing and antique vendors out of the 700 who expressed interest.  read more »

Jason Horowitz's friend Alistair Wallace just sent in this picture from DeKalb Avenue and Washington Street, near the Fort Greene farmer's market in Brooklyn, where there are a bunch of little kids giving out signs that say "Obama Rules" and "Support Obama."

They are also having a bake sale, although it is not clear at this time if the proceeds will go to Obama's campaign.

At Brooklyn grocery L’Epicerie, you can have a dream homemade meal—just make sure to bring your friends.  read more »

• Bribery arrests for Parks contractors.
[NY Sun]
• Building buyers beat gains taxes by fast selling.
[NY Sun]
• Tougher sites for new city rental development.
[NY Sun]
• Barneys may expand into Meatpacking District.
[NY Sun]
• Zoning changes coming for Bed-Stuy, Fort Greene.
[NY Sun]
• Few good choices for subprime borrowers.
[NY Times]
• Rats shut down Papaya King on Upper East Side.
[NY Post]
• City dwellers buy second home first.
[Daily News]
• Feds leave option to cut rates.
[WSJ]

Did we miss any New York City real estate news this morning? Please send along tips and links.

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• Brooklyn's busiest corner is getting yet another "upscale" development. But unlike the future Atlantic Yards monolith, "Atlantic Gardens" will be fixing up eight buildings into "shops with glass walls," adding a 3,000-square-foot flowery field. And there's a cafe! Brooklyn needs another cafe. [Real Deal]
• But Brooklyn doesn't need more babies. There are 13 newborns every day in Borough Park--and Sunset Park is the "Baby Boom Runner Up." [Fort Greene Courier, via Brooklyn Record]
• Parsons is holding a two-day interior design jamboree (a.k.a. symposium). Why does decor matter? It has apparently "become a hybrid of environmental psychology, fashion design, product design, architecture, material science, and cultivated taste." And plush velvet. [I.D.]
• It was only 13 years ago that New York's Steven Holl Architects were commissioned to build a center for Knut Hamsun--Norway's coolest, wildest novelist. The tarred-black wooden museum [above] will open just in time for Mr. Hamsun's 150th birthday. [Dezeen] - Max Abelson
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Mike Bloomberg is pushing back against critics of his education policies today, announcing a $30 milion plan to create the city's first-ever standardized science curriculum for grades 3, 4 and 6 starting next year.

Bloomberg is set to make the announcement at Brooklyn Tech High School in Fort Greene.

-- Azi Paybarah

So, after months of study and discussion, the City Council approved a plan to revise the huge tax break that residential developers receive for building large new developments. The story of the so-called 421a program is the recent history of the city in microcosm. When the program was originally enacted in the 1970s, the city was going bankrupt, the Bronx was burning, and whole neighborhoods were turning into depopulated wastelands. New York basically had to bribe developers to build here. Then the city rebounded. But the program remained. In the 1980s, the Koch administration revised it to create the so-called 80-20 formula within an "exclusionary zone"--basically Manhattan between Houston and 96th Street, except for the East Village--whereby a developer wishing to take advantage of the tax break would have to make 20 percent of his units affordable to low and middle income people. With some adjustments, that's more or less how the program remained until yesterday--or, I should say, will remain until the city's revisions are approved by the state legislature next year.

The reason the program had to change was obvious to anyone who has seen shiny glass buildings rising in, say, Astor Place or Fort Greene. The developers of these buildings, and the owners of the condos within them, were getting incentives worth tens of millions of dollars to build in areas that, because of changed market conditions, really aren't so risky anymore. Furthermore, because these areas are rapidly gentrifying, and poorer people are being pushed out by higher rents, they are desperately in need of affordable housing. Expanding the exclusionary zone to encompass such neighborhoods is a simple, relatively painless way to increase the affordable housing stock. Sure, developers make a bit less money, and maybe a few fewer mammoth apartment towers get built, but maybe that's not a bad thing for these neighborhoods, activists say. Who wants their brownstone block to be swallowed up by development, anyway?  read more »

It seems like everybody wins. But not long ago, for another story I am working on, I was talking to a well-known developer in Brooklyn who raised an interesting point.

70 Lefferts Place, the big yellow wedding cake of a house in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, was landmarked on Tuesday, leaving developer Christopher Morris feeling about $2.4 million lighter.

(Actually, a Brownstoner commenter says he still plans to convert the thing into condos.) (Photo courtesy of Historic District Commission.)

- Matthew Schuerman

The green outline shows Speaker Christine Quinn's proposed 421-a exclusion zone in northern Brooklyn--the area within which developers would need to include on-site affordable housing in order to qualify for tax breaks.

Currently, the exclusion zone covers only well-established neighborhoods (West Village, the Upper East and West Sides), where an automatic 421-a tax abatement for new multifamily housing (which is what the rest of the city currently enjoys) would seem too much of a giveaway. Adding in Billyburg makes sense (as well as Park Slope-Fort Greene-Downtown Brooklyn, of which you can see a greenish corner at the bottom).

But that two-block strip along Broadway, which goes through the southern part of Bushwick all the way to Eastern Parkway? Has that become a condo corrider? Or is anti-developer sentiment so strong in those parts that City Council members Diana Reyna and Eric Martin Dilan wanted a little piece of that green to cut into their districts?

- Matthew Schuerman

Oct. 2, 2006 7:50 pm 7 pounds, 6 ounces Beth Israel Hospital    read more »

Oct. 2, 20067:50 pm

7 pounds, 6 ounces  read more »

Beth Israel Hospital

In Fort Greene, above a storefront on Lafayette Avenue, a metallic sign decorated with unlit neon bl  read more »

In Fort Greene, above a storefront on Lafayette Avenue, a metallic sign decorated with unlit neon bl  read more »

Just when the fight over Atlantic Yards threatened to devolve into a detailed dissection of whether Brownstone Brooklyn was blighted or not, Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn has decided to bring back a little star dust. It looks like the celebrity advisory board, appointed last spring just to sit around and get picked apart by the project's proponents, is going to do a little work for once: next Wednesday, Jhumpa Lahiri and Jennifer Egan are going to crash Tillie's in Fort Greene with a reading, the highlight of a weeklong warm-up for the opposition group's walkathon Oct. 21. The cafe's website says, "Come one, come all, and bring your laptops." That goes for you too, Jason Kidd! -Matthew Schuerman

John Koblin hit the streets of Bed Stuy and Forte Greene, two neighborhoods in Brooklyn's 10th Congressional District. That's where incumbent Ed Towns is being challenged by City Councilman Charles Barron and Assemblyman Roger Green.

The people who spoke with Koblin in these two parts of the district had a wide range of issues for their next congressman.

-- Azi Paybarah

On the morning of Saturday, June 3, a line of wee Brooklynites and their guardians was lurching forw  read more »

The (pro-Ratner) Errol Louis reveals Stop Yassky's identity to Ben Smith: a Fort Greene resident named Lucy Koteen.

Funny though. Had she really wanted to remain anonymous, she could have.

-Matthew Schuerman UPDATE: Koteen called us and said she was not the one behind the Stop Yassky blog. She said she did choose the name, apparently as a Blogger "identity," when she was trying to post a comment on Norman Oder's blog, which is how Errol Louis found her name. Ben Smith has since issued an update saying that the profile page did not prove Koteen was behind the website.

John Flansburgh, of the band They Might Be Giants, was on the phone.  read more »

According to the Brooklyn Eagle, the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, Columbus Park, Cobble Hill Park, Carroll Park and Fort Greene Park may all see wireless Internet access by summer.

The Parks Department is still taking R.F.P.'s. The company that is selected to provide the service will pay the depertment $30,000 or 10 percent of the profits made through advertising on the portal's home page.  read more »

-Matthew Grace

The Fort Greene mansion we wrote about here earlier this week has sold, according to a report in the Daily News:

"A known person in real estate" plunked down the unbelievable sum to Belgian artist Marc Lambrechts for his South Oxford St. home this week, said Prudential Douglas Elliman broker Kathryn Lilly.

The eye-popping price also includes two carriage houses and a two-family home on the property.

The main house will be spared, but the two carriage houses, one of which the seller, Belgian artist Marc Lambrechts, uses as a painting studio, will be knocked down to make way for a 40,000-square-foot luxury building.  read more »

- Tom McGeveran

For anyone looking to travel back in time, a pre-Civil War "Country House" is now on the market for $13 million. That purchase price also includes an adjoining property.

So get out your checkbooks and enjoy antebellum Brooklyn, whatever that means.  read more »

-Michael Calderone

Or just too damn big?

Last week, Brownstoner broke the news on this Scarano-designed 190-foot, 80,000-square-foot mixed-use "freestanding sculptural element placed within the cityscape" in Fort Greene at Fulton and Portland streets.

Well, now Set Speed features a poster of what we can only guess is the start of a protest against the towering tower, due to be completed in 2008.

Like it or hate it, the design is more than just a bit unusual for the neighborhood.

-Matthew Grace

Downtown Brooklyn's gonna look busy soon, with thousands of square feet of residential property going up, as Matthew Schuerman reports in today's Observer. But another nearby development, the Brooklyn Public Library's Visual and Performing Arts branch, at Flatbush and Layfayette avenues in Fort Greene, is hitting some speed bumps, according to The Brooklyn Papers. Seems that funds are drying up, and construction, originally planned to happen in four to five years, is now looking like it'll take much longer.

What's the problem? Well, it looks like the library's only raised $18 million for the $70 million to $85 million price tag on the Enrique Norton-designed "slinky, all-glass, ship-bow-shaped" library. A retooled design revealed last week includes more commercial space, which will provide a revenue stream for the library's operating expenses.

This raises the question, once again, of commercial interests moving into public space: It monopolized discussions about the redesign of the northern end of Union Square Park (in which the local community board came down hard against a new restaurant), and commercial activities in various city parks have been questioned. It's basically a question of why, when tax money should be used to support public facilities, does the city need to sell or rent out public space to for-profit businesses?

It also raises the question of why must a public building be designed by starchitects, especially a public library, when prices can be so expensive (see Jason Horowitz's article on Rafael Viñoly to understand the dangers of architectural visionaries).  read more »

And, as a cautionary tale, take a look at Seattle's Rem Koolhaas-designed public library. Are we the only ones, or is it really as ugly as we think? (And let's not even talk about the inside. It's well worth a trip west just for a chuckle.) (The Brooklyn Papers)

-Matthew Grace

Ratner support group BUILD invokes Psalm 27:1 as a new year's greeting on its website: "Though an army besiege us/our hearts will not fear."

Meanwhile, Darnell Canada, the Fort Greene activist who founded BUILD only to depart a few months later, saying it had been hijacked by self-interested individuals, then created another organization, called REBUILD, has left that one too. This time though, no bitter feelings: "I leave REBUILD with quality leadership, leaders that think and care about the community in the same full-hearted way that I do," he said in a press release.  read more »

-Matthew Schuerman

The last installment of Curbed's 2005 awards came through this afternoon. Rather unscientific reader polling seems to make Prospect Heights the neighborhood of the year for readers of the real-estate Web log, unseating last year's champion, Fort Greene.

The neighborhood, which is on the other side from Manhattan of every other Brooklyn neighborhood your friends live in except Ditmas Park, won the Curbed Cup in a landslide, beating out trendy Dumbo and Manhattan's own Lower East Side.

But the author admits that some local zealots may have piled on to give the neighborhood its 37 percent share of the 400-some-odd votes.

And there's plenty of internecine Brooklyn mudslinging in the comments.  read more »

Not making the top four (only they are itemized), even among Curbed's rather sophisticated readership, are neighborhoods like Nolita, Williamsburg, Chelsea, and last year's beauty queen, Fort Greene.

- Tom McGeveran

Lenora Fulani must just not have gotten that memo from the Bloomberg campaign telling her they don't want her support. (No, we didn't get the memo either.) Anyway, the best known of Fred Newman's crew (which, according to Tom Robbins, is the right way to cast this) was spotted at a baptist church in Fort Greene last night, singing Bloomberg's praises.  read more »

Remember when Giff announced the endorsements of three East Harlem district leaders, and then two didn't show up?

Well, they've done it again.

Today, Miller announced the endorsements of "more than two dozen" black ministers.

We just spoke to one of them, Clinton Miller of Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Fort Greene.  read more »

"I did not endorse Gifford Miller. My name should not be on that list," he told us. "At this point in my ministry, I don't make political endorsements, and that was made clear to all those candidates who have asked."