Bed-Stuy, Do or...?
About a month ago, an L.A. Times piece on Bed-Stuy had a gentrification-is-happening- not-everyone’s-thrilled take on the neighborhood. Yesterday, our paper of record weighed in with a more nuanced examination of how Bed-Stuy is evolving: “a changing neighborhood not quite changed, transforming not in broad strokes but in half-steps.” The article notes that average sales…
About a month ago, an L.A. Times piece on Bed-Stuy had a gentrification-is-happening- not-everyone’s-thrilled take on the neighborhood. Yesterday, our paper of record weighed in with a more nuanced examination of how Bed-Stuy is evolving: “a changing neighborhood not quite changed, transforming not in broad strokes but in half-steps.” The article notes that average sales prices in the neighborhood have edged down recently, and that it has one of the highest rates of foreclosure in the city. Some well-heeled folks who moved to the neighborhood in the past year or so, meanwhile, say they’re frustrated with the area’s lack of amenities. We just wish there was more variety nearby, for places to go out, says a 25-year-old law student who’s lived in Bed-Stuy for a year and now plans to move to the East Village. You just wish you could go out and have different types of bars and night life nearby. Still, there’s plenty of redevelopment in the area, and Petra Symister, who writes Bed-Stuy Blog, says the neighborhood’s rebirth “is happening in fits and starts, kind of a jerky progression. Henry Butler, 41, chairman of Community Board 3, notes that in his view, more affordable development is particularly welcome: “It’s about income…I’m not looking to Harlemize Bedford-Stuyvesant. My emphasis is on the working people.”
Growing Pains Come and Go in Bed-Stuy [NY Times]
Photo by ultraclay!.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/nyregion/27gentrify.html?ref=todayspaper
Dakota Blair acknowledges that both he and the apartment building where he lives are somewhat out of place.
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“It’s just sad that money can change a neighborhood.â€
ROY VANASCO, owner of All Appliance Refrigerator on Myrtle Avenue, where developers have sought to buy him out.
Mr. Blair, 23, a software engineer from East Texas, pays $1,700 a month for a studio in what he calls the Yuppie Spaceship: a new luxury apartment building on an unluxurious corner in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. After nine months in the neighborhood, which New York magazine labeled the city’s “next hipster enclave,†Mr. Blair is considering moving out.
He figures that for $1,700, he could be living in Manhattan. There is a subway station down the street from his building at Myrtle and Nostrand Avenues, but it is for the G train, which does not go into Manhattan. Other neighborhoods eagerly anticipate the arrival of new cafes or restaurants, but on Myrtle Avenue, the biggest news is the opening of a Duane Reade pharmacy.
“The only thing keeping me here is my lease,†Mr. Blair said.
Even for hipsters, life in one of New York City’s frontier neighborhoods — long-troubled places at the fringes of gentrification — can be anything but smooth, particularly in these uncertain economic times.
New residents like Mr. Blair have grown frustrated waiting for change to come to Bed-Stuy, a north-central Brooklyn neighborhood with high rates of crime and foreclosures, trash-strewn streets and limited night life. And the owners of businesses that have recently opened to cater to this new population wait, in turn, for a surge that has not yet arrived.
Longtime residents concerned about the architectural and cultural fate of Bed-Stuy, the largest predominantly black neighborhood in New York City, relish the slow speed of change. But they still worry about rising rents and have become weary of living and working next to buildings that are new, sleek and, in their eyes, ugly.
Myrtle Avenue, which cuts across the northern edge of the neighborhood, is at a crossroads of the gentrified and the ungentrified. Down the street from where a shoeless man lay on a piece of cardboard on the sidewalk one recent afternoon, a two-bedroom condo was for sale at 609 Myrtle Avenue for $675,000. On one side of Myrtle Avenue are the Marcy Houses, one of Brooklyn’s biggest public housing projects and the former home of the rapper Jay-Z, where the average monthly rent, subsidized by the federal government, is $334. Across the street is the luxury building where Mr. Blair lives, the Mynt, at 756 Myrtle Avenue.
Along the avenue, there are building and roofing supply stores, auto shops and the twin red-brick smokestacks of the Cascade linen and uniform plant. There is a liquor store that advertises a “Birthday Special†— 5 percent off spirits and 10 percent off wines on a customer’s birthday. Into this mix came FreshDirect, the online grocery delivery service, which officially started delivering in April in Bed-Stuy.
There used to be a 12-foot-wide, blue-colored mural at Myrtle and Nostrand Avenues, diagonal from the Mynt. The painting listed the names of neighborhood murder victims inside the chalk outline of a body, an inevitable memorial in a police precinct where homicide was once a weekly occurrence.
Mr. Blair took a picture of the mural in January, but the snapshot is already an antique: Someone covered it up with a thin layer of concrete, and now only one side of it remains, a tribute to lives cut short — Hollywood, Danny Dan, Rocky — itself cut short. It reads “Rest in.â€
The half-covered mural is an apt symbol of Bed-Stuy today: a changing neighborhood not quite changed, transforming not in broad strokes but in half-steps.
The average sales price of residential property and the number of sales in Bed-Stuy, Bushwick and other nearby neighborhoods have dropped sharply, according to a recent report released by the brokerage firm Prudential Douglas Elliman. The report found that from April 1 to June 30, the average sales price in the area was $500,925, down from $539,187 in the same period a year ago. The situation was different in the Greenpoint and Williamsburg area, where the average sales price was $663,946, a 13 percent increase from the same period last year.
There have been other signs of stalled growth.
Bed-Stuy had the second-highest number of foreclosure filings in Brooklyn last year and the fourth-highest of any neighborhood in the city, according to an analysis by the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University. Building permits have also dropped. In the first two quarters of this year, 50 permits for new residential buildings were issued by the city’s Department of Buildings in Community District 3, which includes Bed-Stuy. In the first two quarters of 2005, 93 such permits were issued.
Jonathan J. Miller, the president and chief executive of Miller Samuel Inc., a real estate appraisal company that prepared the Prudential Douglas Elliman report, said the impact of the credit crunch — tighter lending standards imposed by banks that have made it hard for many people to secure credit — is felt more severely in “emerging markets†like Bed-Stuy.
“The pace has slowed considerably,†Mr. Miller said.
Quincy you are right. That area of the neighborhood has a much different vibe than the southern end near Fulton Street. Even the young people that move into that part of Bedford Stuyvesant are more of the Williamsburg East village crowd as to the young new people that move to the southern end are the ex Ft Greene and Park Slope people. My tenants are from Park Slope and Many of there friends are moving to Stuyvesant Heights and Bedford Corners also. I don’t think they ever been near this area in the article.
Brownsville, Stuy Heights, North Bed Stuy. I hate to say it, but I think we should let the realtors work their magic on this one and carve it up into more identifiable entities. Bed Stuy is too big and unwieldy to discuss in any coherent manner. That is why the mere mention of the nabe is good for so many comments. It’s like the elephant being described by the blind men. Perhaps part of the problem is that we insist on such an obsolete definition.
The Pratt-Mynt/ Hassidim/ Marcy PJ corridor has a flavor unlike any in the city. It should have been discussed as such in the Times. There’s a reason Zip Car describes Woodhull as bburg–it’s no longer Bed Stuy. It ain’t bburg, but that’s another issue.
Just got in – great discussion going on, people.
The What says – “Name a couple of these “Moms and Pops” shops..”
What, there are plenty of “Mom and Pop” businesses on the Fulton/Nostrand corridor. Just because they aren’t fancy, or particularly upscale, does not mean they aren’t viable, successful small businesses, which are the lifeblood of any neighborhood. Here are just some of them:
Bushbaby Coffee, Tony’s Country Life Health Food store, Big Brother Hardware, First Vision Optical, The Gospel Den, Jeff’s Express Moving, Nostrand Wine and Liquor, County Pharmacy, Flowerworks, Tastee Pattee Bakery, Dave’s Brisket and Birdel’s Records, which has been on both Fulton and Nostrand for the last 62 years. There are, of course, plenty more.
Next?
I always thought that Ocean Hill was part of Bedford Stuyvesant like Stuyvesant Heights. In the NY times article they don’t include Ocean Hill on the map but anytime someone gets shot in Ocean Hill they say its Bed-Stuy on TV or in the papers. I think Ocean Hill has a lot of charm architecturally.
The idea that people paying $1700/month to live on Murder Avenue are finding out that it isn’t the East Village is kind of not so earth shattering if you ask me.
And, nosleeptil, Bed Stuy might be big, but Ocean Hill still isn’t in it.
ha ha. Thank you, bedstuyhoya.
DING DING DING. KO. Down goes the WHAT! Down goes the WHAT!
Hey What! With a verbal a$$ beating like that! Don’t ever claim bed-stuy again! Never! That was a friggin’ embarrassment!
That is the best you can come up with?!?
But seriously, What. Keep on writing. I mentor a number of kids and I often use your tirades as examples of how not to express one’s opinions. My kids love you and your antics. Please keep it coming…please!
Bravo! Nicely done 11233
You are right, what, we are not in the same league. You are not very bright. Some day, if you ever learn to read and write, you too can join the majors.
You like to make the neighborhood out to be much worse than it is. It makes you feel more at home with people, like yourself, who have no social or English language skills. Unfortunately for you, those days are over.
No one is going to “Gun -But” me. You are just so sad and stupid.