Development

The Borough's Tallest Building Stands Out Even Far Away From Its Location in Downtown Brooklyn

The tallest building in Brooklyn is certainly a sight to see — quite literally, in fact, because you can see it from all over the borough.

Commodore Barry Park, April 2019. Photo by Susan De Vries

by Craig Hubert

05/29/2019 4 minute 0

The tallest building in Brooklyn is certainly a sight to see — quite literally, in fact, because you can see it from all over the borough.

Brooklyn Point, the 57-story residential tower that recently topped out at 138 Willoughby Street, at the corner of Flatbush in Downtown Brooklyn, is just one of the many new buildings in a neighborhood that is increasingly developing upwards.

It won’t be the tallest building for too long, either — the larger of the two towers planned for the development soon to come at 80 Flatbush, as well as the supertall in the works at 9 Dekalb Avenue, will eventually reach greater heights.

These projects are the result of the 2004 rezoning of Downtown Brooklyn, which, although meant to turn the area into a prime business district, has resulted in a forest of residential towers, many of which are still in various states of completion.

But that rezoning, as you can see in the photos, affects areas far outside the confines of Downtown Brooklyn. With its distinctive orange and massive signage proclaiming its name, Brooklyn Point is easy to spot around the borough. Recently, we started to notice that it seemed like the building was visible from everywhere we turned. So we started keeping track.

Brooklyn was once known as the borough of houses and churches, meaning mostly 19th century wood frames and brownstones. Now development all over the borough is changing its character. For many years, from 1929 to 2009, the tallest building in Brooklyn, once a low-rise counterpoint to Manhattan, was the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower in Fort Greene.