3rd Avenue is Starting to Happen
If 4th Avenue is the next Park Ave. (a laughable notion at this point), does that make 3rd Avenue the next Madison? Silly comparisons aside, 3rd Avenue in Gowanus is quietly transforming into an exciting retail/restaurant corridor. New businesses are joining neighborhood mainstays like the Glory Social Club and more recent ventures such as Canal…
If 4th Avenue is the next Park Ave. (a laughable notion at this point), does that make 3rd Avenue the next Madison? Silly comparisons aside, 3rd Avenue in Gowanus is quietly transforming into an exciting retail/restaurant corridor. New businesses are joining neighborhood mainstays like the Glory Social Club and more recent ventures such as Canal Bar, Le Chandelier Salon, Tri-State Chess, Bella Maria Pizza, and the light manufacturing/artists’ hub at the Old American Can Factory. Here’s a roundup (from south to north) of what’s recently hit and forthcoming:
Bar Tano at 9th St.: Italian restaurant from Slope’s Bar Toto owners; opens this week.
Brick Oven Barbeque on 6th St.: BBQ joint opening in old warehouse.
Whole Foods on 3rd St.: Should come to fruition…eventually.
Home Ec betw. Carroll & 1st St.: Owners of the Flirt boutiques teach sewing lessons.
Hotel at President St.: Construction under way for 4-story hotel.
Crooked Tail Café at President St.: New coffee/sandwich shop; will open in about a month.
Drugstore or Supermarket on Degraw St.: New owner is looking to lease big warehouse.
Skate park at Douglass St.: Local group wants Thomas Greene park revamped with skateboarder friendly features.
Check out the photo montage of the new places and coming attractions on the jump.
“Where are these artists?”
Need a map?
– http://www.agastbrooklyn.com/directions.html
“Note that artist-gentrification is very location-specific. The native New Yorkers who grew up and got normal working class/middle class jobs tended to stay in affordable but boring nabes like Bay Ridge, Sunset Park, Windsor Terrace, Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill and Bed Stuy. These nabes get rising prices due to the rising incomes of working professionals – it has nothign to do with artists.”
It is true that the working class stayed in these areas but these are not the type of areas that artists would pioneer anyway because there was nothing to pioneer. Artists tend to gravitate due to necessity and interest to dead areas that are for the most part off limits residentally to most people because of no amenities, surroundings, or just plain fear, but which artist are interested and/or econmically forced to live in.. . All the above neighborhoods you mention were never bad crime ridden, industrial, or previously left for dead neighborhoods. Windsor Terrace has always been an Irish middle class working class neighborhood. Bay Ridge has always been an Italian middle class working class nieghborhood. Fort Green, Bed Stuy and Clinton Hill have always been African American working class neighborhoods, and Sunset Park has always been a Spanish working class area which is now becoming an Asian wofking class neighborhood.
None of these neighborhoods were full of cheap large working space that no one wanted to live in which appealed to artists. They were all full of residents already adn were all fully finctioning middle class residential and commercial neighborhods. Soho and the East Village and Williamsburg in their respective above mentioned times were not fully functioning residential middle calss neighborhoods when the artist settled in.
Please, people.
Some neighborhoods get inflixes of artists – SoHo in the 70s, Alphabet City in the 80s, Williamsburg in the 90s – and that led to the creation of some amenities that appealed to those people’s temperament… i.e. the temperament, by and large, of bohemian suburban transplants. So you get cafes and the like.
(Let’s not try to glorify the artists TOO much… generally they’re not native New Yorkers. And some are definitely talentless hacks mooching off parents and/or girlfriends who just like to ride along on the cool factor of that social scene. Some, on the other hand, are successful working artists of the type most think of when they think of artist gentrification.)
Note that artist-gentrification is very location-specific. The native New Yorkers who grew up and got normal working class/middle class jobs tended to stay in affordable but boring nabes like Bay Ridge, Sunset Park, Windsor Terrace, Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill and Bed Stuy. These nabes get rising prices due to the rising incomes of working professionals – it has nothign to do with artists.
So what happens? The children of the working professionals are priced out of their own neighborhoods, and like the bohemian vibe and amenities in places like the East Village and Williamsburg, so they move there and coexist with the artists. As they grow and their spending power increases, they end up pushing the artists out. The artists then grumble about “damn yuppies” and gravitate toward other neighborhoods they can afford – Greenpoint, LIC, South Bronx, etc.
So the ultimate question is, is this happening along 3rd avenue?
I don’t really think so. Where are these artists? Where are the illegal industrial conversion the made for affordability in the other artist enclaves? Where are the cafes and bohemian vibe? I think this particular area is gentrifying more for geographical reasons than social reasons.
But then, as long as this post ius, it’s still a vast oversimplification of the social, economic, and geographical dynamics of this borough.
“There’s a Mac repair and sales shop on 7th between 2nd & 3rd. The building next to them is being gutted, and I assume it’s going to be turned into upscale-ish retail or office space. Anyone know what’s going up there?”
The guy who runs Brooklyn Artists Gym, which is in the same building next door, told me it will be more rental artist studio space. Hooray!
artists are smart for being poor. Developers are stupid for being rich.
Developers for the most part are a-holes. Rip-off men with a permit.
Artists ruin neighborhoods. They come in to an otherwise fine, dirty filthy crack infested hood and bring in their stupid little boutiques and their fancy ass cafes. I prefer the corner bodega with the bullet holes in the window to the artsy safe muffin shop that replaces it. Gimmee the crack whore hitting me up for mioney any day over the intersting hipster chick with the sexy miniskirt walking by with her eisel..
What’s truly amazing to me on this thread is that there seems to be one guy (or girl) here who has a specific gripe and animosity towards artists in general. Keeps telling them to “get a real job”, claims that artists aren’t ‘real’ have no talent, etc etc etc…..
Either this person is a frustrated, rejected digrunteled artist him or herself, or it is a non artist that must have has some sort of bad personal experience like being dumped by an ex artist lover, or something.
Because, ordinarily, who would have such a problem with artists in general?
They don’t cause anyone any harm, are usually pretty shy and don’t cause a stir after they don’t get any credit after being kicked out of neighborhoods they pioneered…
funny how the business guy developer claims that artists must be smoking to much weed. You don’t hear the artists on this board criticizing the businessmen for their cocaine habits .