Coffee shops may be falling like dominoes in some neighborhoods (Park Slope lost two this year: Tea Lounge and Café Eleven), but in Bedford-Stuyvesant, The T-Cup Café is flourishing. And thus the café represents a shift in Bed-Stuy, a symbol of its reinvention. The NY Times peeks in on the ‘hood this week, finding that there’s much more to it than the two killings (a bus driver, stabbed to death and a 14-year old, shot to death) that occurred within 24 hours last week. “Like many of the city’s low-income neighborhoods with an abundant stock of brownstones, Bed-Stuy has undergone drastic change in recent years. Comparatively low apartment rents have drawn musicians and artists, unbeatable lease terms have drawn shop and gallery owners, and relatively reasonable home prices have attracted a growing number of home buyers, at least until recently.” Besides the T-Cup, a new soul food restaurant owned by the Brookses, a real-estate-owning local family of elevator mechanics, called B Boys Cafe (above), just opened (on the day of the shooting, alas). And then there is the Brooklynite Gallery, over on Malcolm X Boulevard. And before you insist that Bed-Stuy is changing from white flight-reversal, they offer this: “Many of the people driving the changes in the neighborhood are black.”
A Neighborhood in Transition, Sometimes Uneasily [NY Times]