House of the Day: 590 Decatur Street
For a house with a ton of charm and not in need of a ton of work, 590 Decatur Street seems reasonably priced at $699,000. The only drawback we can see is that it’s pretty far east into Bed Stuy–several blocks beyond Stuyvesant Heights. It’s about equi-distant from the Ralph Avenue C train and the…
For a house with a ton of charm and not in need of a ton of work, 590 Decatur Street seems reasonably priced at $699,000. The only drawback we can see is that it’s pretty far east into Bed Stuy–several blocks beyond Stuyvesant Heights. It’s about equi-distant from the Ralph Avenue C train and the Halsey Street J train. The three-story, two-family house in one in a row of charmer, though. Any readers live right around here? What are the services like?
590 Decatur Street [Brooklyn Properties] GMAP P*Shark
No they are not in federal jail… that is for rich white men…. The FG guys have all moved south Charlotte, Atlanta, Virginia Beach etc…
Things take time Bedford Stuyvesant is not going to turn into Ft Greene and Park Slope overnight. Just a decade ago the heavy drug wars ended in BS. When I first moved to NYC ten years ago I moved to Ft. Greene and everyone was telling me to be careful. Now that I am buying in BS people are telling me the same thing… My old landlord in Ft Greene brought his home a brownstone on So. Elliot PL for $7,000 in 1971. He told me that he was one of the few whites on his block; his friends from Manhattan laughed at him and told him that he and his young family will get mugged and robbed. None of those things happened. He sold his home in FG last year for 2.1 million and moved to Maine where that money can stretch really far. In BS the many of the white people that are moving in are from other countries and have no guilt with blacks and vise versa. I have notice that the whites in BS are friendly less snobby compared to where I live now in Park Slope.
As a 30 something black male, BS dose have things about it I don’t like. I do have a problem with seeing healthy black men on the corner all day doing nothing music way too loud. But I saw the same things in FG 10 years ago and today most of that is gone. As downtown BK, FG, PH and PS become the new midtown Manhattan with crowed streets and tall buildings Bedford Stuyvesant and Crown Heights will be the new PS/FG. It makes perfect sense to invest Crown Heights and Bedford Stuyvesant. I am sure AY is just the first stage of devolvement that is going to happen along Atlantic Ave. I will not be surprise if the LIRR get buried in the next 20 years to make Atlantic Ave more desirable to build. For all the ignorant people that talk crazy about BS keep being stupid I just pray that you live another 10 years…
I’d love to have a Target at Restoration Plaza. Lord knows the one at Atlantic Center is going to be unreachable in a few years.
Brenda from Flatbush – your posts are always heartfelt and interesting. I just want to point out that the recent influx of higher-income people (who are both black and white) in Bed-Stuy is arguably helping to preserve the neighborhood’s history and culture. And I’m not just talking about brownstone restoration – I’m talking about people who can afford to spend money at local, black-owned small businesses. Places that celebrate the community and/or black culture, like Brownstone Books and Bread-Stuy, are able to flourish partly as a result of the neighborhood’s increasing income level. BS is right up there with Harlem as one of the most storied black neighborhoods in the country. I believe that anyone who moves in here, black, white, or purple, should be prepared to respect and honor that legacy. Change is happening here, and yes, some people will be displaced just like they have in every neighborhood in NYC. But white folks sticking to white enclaves is not going to stop that economic process; nor is it going to create the kind of society we all want to live in.
I should also note that personally I have not found a difference in the Caribbean vs. AA attitude towards white folks, at least not among our neighbors (who are both), but maybe when you moved into Flatbush years ago it was a different story.
WALMART???!!!! Alexa….ssshhhh! No, we don’t want those kind of stores in Bed Stuy. Better off residents, if I may speak for them, tend to frequent more boutique shop.
/\ Why is it okay to Darken Bay Ridge but not whiten Bed-Stuy?
As a neighborhood, Bed Stuy suffers from a lack of services. There are various reasons for that. But, as a result, you really need a car to live here. I wish there were better food delivery options (at first I thought no restaurants delivered, then I realized that most of them jsut aren’t very good). I wish there were more corner stores that were open late (ish) that had something I wanted to buy and not just low-end junk food. I wish I could get fresh vegetables somewhere. And Asian condiments. Other than that, it’s a perfectly fine place to live. I don’t know why the services part of it seems to be in total stagnancy. Maybe because the better-off residents tend to frequent BJ’s, Sam’s Club, Walmart, Target, COstco and other big box stores in malls in Queens, far south Brooklyn and on LI. Maybe if they built a few of those around here, more interesting sutff would spring up as well. Although it hasn’t seemed to work for Restoration Plaza.
Uhhhh….okay people, let’s calm down. I love Bed-Stuy and yes I love it when I see that white folks are moving in why? because I feel that it will change the face of the neighborhood….DIVERSITY..
we can learn alot about each other neighborhoods that go throught this RACIAL DIVERSITY can be dynamic!!! now I see more white at my train station…KOSCIUSZKO J TRAIN more than I saw two years ago when i first bought my
house…To be honest yes Stuyvesant Heights is beautiful!!! but I love living ON Greene avenue off Patchen B/C it is a small nook of us on the block…at times I see the white hipster kids across the street and my fellow african-american, latino neighbors…the only people that I wish would leve already is section 8 recepients….but diversity is anout change!!! why can’t we all just accept that??I love Brownstoner but you people are very shortsighted…
So sad, the toxic mixture of fear and mistrust on all sides. We moved to (an 80% or so black part of) Flatbush 20 years ago after demanding to be shown houses in “mixed” areas (we were white victims of vigorous racial steering, but couldn’t afford anything “white”). To our relief and pleasure, we discovered that we would be allowed to nest, cuckoo-like, in a black middle-class neighborhood, and have never encountered a moment’s animosity in the next two decades of being, as a rule, “the only white face on the street.” The mugger and the purse-snatcher don’t count; they weren’t neighbors, just underclass predators who could just as easily have been trolling the Slope for a victim. An interesting variable is that our black neighbors are mostly Caribbean–and Caribbeans are generally held to have “less of a problem with white folks” (an impression borne out by my observations going all the way back to high school). So I can’t speak to the Bed-Stuy issue. (Back when we were house-hunting, a black cop I “interviewed” in PLG bluntly informed me that a black Caribbean nabe would be fine for us, a native-born American black nabe, NOT. Never have known how much credence her statement should be given, then or now.) Frankly, my chief reason for not wanting to whiten up Bed-Stuy as a new homeowner would be along the lines of historic preservation–it seems peevish to want to dilute the character of such a historically black community. Sort of like wanting to move to Chinatown–one could, but in the midst of such intense and longstanding ethnic cohesion, one would have to be a very special sort of person to feel completely at home. The joy and blessing of our adventure was in the discovery that our sorry-assed poor white selves could be so open-heartedly accepted into a community based on no other “cred” but good will and hard work. And that’s the news from “racially charged” Flatbush…