Ikea Update: One Small Step for a Giant Store

red hook is industrial and has its share of contamination (including the asbestos in the building ikea started knocking down without any permits or environmental protections), but the ikea coming in is a lot like the west side stadium – wrong thing in the wrong place – except instead of 12 games a year, you will have that horrendous traffic mess every single day until 10PM at night.

because, you know, the gowanus and the BQE weren’t completely motionless already.

but ikea picked its cheap real estate plum, paid off the two bit pols, and bought the support of the residents for the price of free t-shirts and the empty promise of jobs.

it’s america – we get exactly what we ask for, and no more than we deserve. lots of cheap disposable furniture that often gets thrown out before you can even get it assembled. and a huge mis-placed mega-store in neighborhood that was sold out by pure short-sighted greed.

cruise ships? sure. maritime jobs? hell yeah. a fantastic grocery store? bring it on. more small businesses to build on what is already there? right on.

but ikea? put the damn blue and yellow deathstars where they belong – right off the intersection of a major highway (like 10 feet) – not through a neighborhood with a lot of children, ballfields, a community farm, in a place that is already an inaccessible penninsula (try taking a bus to work some day).

on the bright side, people will actually get to take those fancy SUVs off road now, since the potholes by the waterfront are large enough to swallow small cars (forget about small children).

The point is not that that lot or any other empty lot/derelict building should stay as is. Nor is it that people love the fact that every schoolbus in the tri-state area seems to bed down at night in the neighborhood. But you could do a beautiful reno on the building they’re tearing down (much like what was done on the Beard Street piers) and have something architecturally relevant preserved and keep the character of the neighborhood. At the last community board discussion on this, one of the proposed issues for Red Hook was keeping Maritme related businesses. And here we have a graving dock that was functional until relatively recently, and one of the few as I understand it left in NYC, being filled in to make a parking lot. And yes. The traffic would increase tenfold. There are no trucks going to these buildings now as they’re defunct; and not only will we get their delivery trucks but Ikea is building a lot for 1400 cars. The streets are so quiet now you can walk out into the middle of Van Brunt half the time without checking for traffic. The whole place has a small fishing town feel even with the trucks already going through there and that will surely be disrupted. Everyone on this site bemoans the lack of contextual building in their landmarked neighborhoods. Places like Red Hook that are historically poor, red-lined by banks, and don’t have the benefit of a relatively unified and vocal constituency, nor a swath of landmarked blocks also deserve to have its unique history preserved. Otherwise why do we live in New York when we are more and more willing to give in to interests that would destroy what is unique about it?

What do you mean, out of context…

The bright yellow IKEA is in perfect harmony with lot after huge run-down forsaken lot currently filled to the gills as bright yellow school bus parking. Heck…asphalt parking lots *is* the status quo around there. Or at least dirt parking lots, anyway.

And the trucks, traffic and noise these developments will supposedly bring?

Well, isn’t that already the case? (citing the dairy on Beard by VB that has the neighborhood up in arms, and all the countless other places where trucks already crash around and often sit idling engines alongside side-street residences…)

Lighten up, people. It’s not as if RH is a manicured pristine lakeside meadow that all this destroys. It does have it’s rustic charm, but let’s face it…it is mostly industrial and rough at best, and often just downright raw and decrepit.

Disagree? Please prove otherwise.

This IKEA, when it is built, is going to speed up Brooklyn gentrification considerably. More landlords are going to use the IKEA kitchen and bathroom cabinets, and track lighting fixtures that yuppies prefer. Fewer landlords will use the ugly Home Depot kitchen cabinets, which cost about the same amount. This will improve the housing stock, which will cause many more Manhattanites to be willing to jump over into Brooklyn.

Hold onto those townhouses! The result will be Brookyn real estate prices more in line with those of Manhattan.