Nostrand Ave: Many Hair Salons, No Cafés
Back in 2007, the New York Sun ran an article with the title Retailers So Far Fail To Follow Homebuyers to North Crown Heights. From the article: While homebuyers see the area’s potential, new businesses are proving harder to attract. Along Nostrand, for example, many stores have old facades and rundown signs. Graffiti covers the…

Back in 2007, the New York Sun ran an article with the title Retailers So Far Fail To Follow Homebuyers to North Crown Heights. From the article:
While homebuyers see the area’s potential, new businesses are proving harder to attract. Along Nostrand, for example, many stores have old facades and rundown signs. Graffiti covers the security gates over the storefronts. While heavy on nail and hair salons and barbershops, the commercial strip lacks basic services such as a bank branch. “People are buying nice homes and spending good money and there are no services,” a project coordinator for the North Crown Heights Merchants Association, who is a sales agent with Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate, Barbara Brown-Allen, said. “They don’t know the spending power that’s here.”
A year and a half later, the blog Nostrand Park decided to try to put some numbers to that assertion by doing a store-by-store analysis of the retail options on Nostrand Avenue between Eastern Parkway and Atlantic Avenue. The five most represented categories were Hair/Braiding Salons (13%), Variety Shops (11%), Caribbean Take-Out (10%), Bodegas/Delis (8%) and Nail Salons (5%). On the flip side, the survey found that there was not a single dine-in restaurant, café, book store or art store on the entire strip.
Nostrand Avenue North Retail Survey [Nostrand Park]
Photo by filmlynx
Brenda, you are a wonder. You should run for Plain Speaker of Brooklyn, and everyone should take notes when you speak…
I have to disagree, M4L. People around here are a lot more tech savvy, and with it than you may think. Almost everyone under 40 is quite conversant with the internet and computer stuff, no matter the income level, and lots of us old farts over 40 are too. I think a coffee shop with internet access would do really well, provided it also had comfortable chairs, enough tables and seating, some basic ambiance, and most importantly, some good food and drink. Go to somewhere like K-Dog in PLG. You see oldtimers and new folks, black, white and Asian, hipster and hip hopper in there because of all of the above, added to a great owner and staff. That could easily work here, and if I had the bucks, I’d do it myself in a minute.
Franklin Ave, technically part of Crown Heights, has a growing successful retail strip, partly because those great storefronts had been more or less abandoned in the last 30 years, and rents are reasonable. Bedford is mixed residential and commercial. Pockets of it could develop commercially, but it is impossible to have a continuous retail strip. Same for Rogers. On the other side of Nostrand, New York is entirely residential, as is Brooklyn Ave. Kingston could also be like Franklin, but now looks like Franklin did 10 years ago. There needs to be a concerted effort to rehab much of the residential space between Atlantic and EP, so that the retail spaces can flourish. Too much of it looks like an urban wasteland at this point, but it has great potential for the future, and this will come.
variety & choices DOES NOT equal SUPER Expensive. There are so many inexpensive (maybe not cheap but certainly not expensive) retail options throughout NYC. Just puzzles me why some hoods get so little of those inexpensive & nice options while some hoods are over saturated with them.
More variety & choices are good to any hood. Starbucks would be good. it’s a choice available to residents if they CHOOSE to spend that much on a cup of coffee, more power to them. Expensive restaurants would be good too. As long as this adds to the mix vs replacing existing retailers. Albeit I thought those expensive retailers would survive but hey, that’s the retailers’ risk to bear and additional choices available for residents to choose from.
Brenda- perfect! and funny.
rrob- that is so not he coffee shops I want or go to. I want a great spot to sit, look at the people, enjoy my friends and say hi to everyone. Over a good cup of coffee with maybe a nice breakfast plate. A place like this owuld get so much neighborhood business it would make their head spin.
And Brenda is right- the neighborhood deserves better than what it has, without becoming park Slope. Even poor people deserve better retail and services. It is insulting to believe that Nostrand Ave. is just want the neighborhood wants. If anyone thinks that’s the case, they haven’t spoken to my neighbors.
i know that more4less, that’s my point. the kind of people who bemoan the lack of whatever the hell it is they seem to whine for on a daily basis are the ones doing that, not the people who already shop in the area and live there. imagine if i won the lottery and moved to beverly hills and bitched and moaned that i couldnt find a cheap 40 ounce? same diff.
*rob*
Rob, wrong hood. if you see a mac in CHN coffee shop, higher odds it’s McD’s big Mac.
such a coffee shop in CHN wouldn’t last
This strip sounds like my adjacent commercial corridor–Church Avenue near the B/Q stop, between Flatbush Ave. and Coney Island Ave. Same mix, same gripes: lots of hair and nail salons, lots of 99-cent stores selling terrifying crap from China even after it’s recalled for being poisonous, a few fast-food joints, and a monster low-end department store called Bobby’s that is destination shopping for, of all things, the Russians of Brighton Beach, as well as our local Caribbean population. Like Nostrand apparently was, this strip was a full-service middle-class commercial hub back in the day, with nice coffee shops and restaurants, a once-famous movie theater, produce stores, butcher, corner pharmacy, you name it. (Read Stingo’s descriptions of his new Brooklyn nabe in ‘Sophie’s Choice’–that’s the actual area right after WWII.) Today, there are still some produce, meat and fish stores, but their quality is sketchy, and the street itself is dirty and choked with illegal taxis doing suicidal U-turns.
So here’s how the debate about these “vibrant urban shopping strips” (Times PC-speak) usually unfolds:
1. “Hey, half the people moving in here would like something decent. Why is there still nothing but crap?
2. “Hey, racist gentrifying Yuppie scum, this is what the local folks want obviously. Who needs a friggin’ Starbucks anyway when we’ve got these tasty meat patties?”
May I suggest a tertiam quid? (that’s Yuppiescumspeak for “third thingie.” How about:
3. Hey, there’s obviously a big market around here for hair braiding, manicures, and 99-cent stuff, but…You know what else this strip needs? A place to get my shoes repaired (NOT a high-end ‘designer boutique’). A nice independent book store with a place to read to your kids. An internet cafe for folks who can’t afford online access or their own PC. A drug store with a real pharmacist to counsel when you pick up your scrip, not a chain with “somebody back there.” A supermarket with great prices and fresh produce, NOT a foofy organic “gourmet mart.” An old-fashioned ice cream parlor where we could have a cheap but fun kids’ birthday party in the back room, instead of an overpriced chain with a few plastic chairs like Haagen-Dazs. In other words, A FREAKING TIME MACHINE BACK TO THE SIXTIES, before “middle class” became weirdly synonymous with “rich, white and precious.”
I’ve said this in threads about Fulton Mall, too: It is so insulting to those of us with tight budgets, whatever our race, to presume that we jes’ want more of that crap from China and that chain-store fried chicken. Why is the only alternative a Park Slope retail Disneyworld of affluence? What is with the damn retail impairment, people? It seems such a failure of imagination. Community organizers of the world (or Brooklyn), unite; let’s start a new breed of home-grown retailers! Festivus for the rest of us!
quote:
For those people who bemoan the absence of a coffee shop on Nostrand Avenue he would say, “What’s wrong with these people?” “Why can’t the sit in their homes and enjoy a cup of coffee and maybe share the time with friends or family?” Do they live someplace without a kitchen or furniture?
the answer is glaringly and pathetically cultural. people like coffee shops so they can sit there all day long on their mac laptops pretending to be avante garde writers and think people look at them and could give a crap. the truth is they just like to sit in coffee shops being narcissistic and browse facebook and twitter all day. you know it’s true.
and yes, id SO rather brew my own coffee at home and enjoy it than sitting self reflexively in an overpriced coffee shop.
*rob*
Brooklynishome- I do drink coffee at home (and I make the world’s worst cup of coffee which I am more than happy to inflict on company 🙂
And I agree- Nostrand Ave. does and should reflect the needs of the community- its their home. But I know many long time residents who have live here for years (indeed many have grown up here and lived through the 70s – the present day) and who would love a great coffee shop. Just a place to sit and visit with friends out and about in the neighborhood. Not because I want trendy- but because i love and enjoy the neighborhood. People get isolated in their houses- restaurants and coffee shops are important places to interact and the ones that have opened up are mostly owned and run ny neighborhood residents who want to invest in the neighborhood and make it better, not disassemble it.
is there another viable block, strip, etc in CHN that is ripe for some new retail?