On the Map Dept: I live on Eldert Street, a 6 block long stretch on the south side of the Shwick (let's get all the kids to start calling it that!). My end of the block is residential, rowhouses and an elevated train. Children run around the block and participate in activities that can only be described as "wholesome." They roller skate (with or without those shoes with the wheels in the back), jump rope, bike, play basketball, pick broomsticks out of the trash and hit each other with them. It's been pretty startling to see kids act like this, I thought kids just sat in front of the TV all day, absorbing Fritos and Hawaiian Punch while watching reality TV shows about people starving themselves. What I wanna know is, how do these nice little kids transform into the surly teenagers who hang out further down the block?
Anyway, that's life on my end of Eldert Street. On the other end there is an old knitting factory building that's been converted to loft apartments. The industrial side of Bushwick somehow made it this far south, seemingly only along the L train. The building at 345 Eldert is full of artists, and apparently a group of them are trying to get financial backers so they can buy their building from its management company. If successful, they will have a huge space in which the artists call the shots. Nice idea, I guess, but are they serious? The article in the Brooklyn Paper isn't clear how much of a joke this is, but the accompanying photo doesn't lend a whole lot of credibility to their crusade. They need some kind of venture capitalist to provide the dough to buy the place, who's gonna do that? This sounds like the 21st century version of the "Let's put on a show!!" type stuff from the 70's and 80's. I hope they pull it off, though I'm pretty sure this isn't the first time anybody thought of this ("Hey, we all live here, we're all into the same stuff, let's buy the building!"), but I dunno if anybody ever actually went through with it. Aren't there any wealthy, eccentric philanthropists anymore?
Still, the notion of a gaggle of artists trying to run their own building … shades of Lord of the Flies? Speaking of which, are you aware there's gonna be a reality TV show in which a group of children live in the wild without adult supervision? See what the kids on my street are missing out on?
[Photo: Sarah Kramer / Brooklyn Paper]
April 26, 2007 – 11:10 am
Oh no! Okay, I haven't been to the Brooklyn Inn in a long time, so maybe I'm somehow to blame for this, but I always liked that bar. Now comes word that the bar is to be repurposed into a bistro. What the fuck is a bistro, anyway? This sounds suspiciously like what happened to the Sweetwater Tavern in Williamsburg. It used to be a foul-smelling, graffitied-up liquor barn with a surly clientele, and then one day I walked by and it was a 'cute' little restaurant, with curtains and quaint lettering on the window. Eww.
The Brooklyn Inn wasn't all that special, but it had the sense to it that it had been exactly the same for decades. I don't even think it was all that cheap. But I used ot meet a friend of mine there after work, as it was equidistant from our respective homes. So now it's gonna be a frickin' bistro, I've moved to the other end of the boro, and my friend moved back to Cleveland. Is nothing sacred?
UPDATE: The bistro may not be true after all! What? Something on the Internet turns out to be false? What a world. Here's an Eater Update, sounds like it will remain a bar, albeit a lame one like Magician and Tile Bar. Whooppee.
March 28, 2007 – 11:07 am
I'm sure the article has already been linked to death, but I just read it for the first time, and like everybody else who's seen it, have been struck with the similarities in real estate issues now and over 20 years ago:
You can argue what neighborhood most closely resembles what the East Village was encountering in 1984, but the language used and points made are lifted every day to describe a bunch of Brooklyn neighborhoods. This could be an article in 2007 about Williamsburg, Bushwick, even speculation-heavy Clinton Hill. Here's a list of stuff lifted from this article that parallel what we've been seeing happen lately:
- A reminder of how the process tends to work: "The first of these [steps to gentrification] is marked by building deterioration and neighborhood crime, the second by short-term speculators, the third by long-term investors and renovators and the last by full-scale construction."
- Quarrels over the very name of a neighborhood: "As soon as they said 'East Village,' they tripled the rent. It's the East Village to the real-estate brokers," she said of the area that has been her home for 30 years. "To us it's the Lower East Side."
- Quotables from those for and against the changes:
"The area used to be a last-choice area – people thought I was crazy when I started buying here in [insert year]."
"It's finally happened down there. It went through the burnout and the druggies and now there's action."
"I think it's hypocritical of the people who live here who rail against it. They benefit from the changes. We all do."
- The East Village had (and still has) a Life Cafe, as does a certain, other so-called up & coming neighborhood. Okay, that's a stretch, but I like the symmetry.
- And my favorite one-sentence description of a new resident: "The neighborhood is now home to people like Miss Kelley, who graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton two years ago with a degree in art history and works for a Wall Street real estate broker."
But at what price, your rent? If you run some of the the numbers mentioned in the article through an inflation calculator, you get this:
1984/Now
Studio: $570/$1112
1-Bedroom: $700/$1366
2-Bedroom: $900/$1756
Store with Adjoining loft: $500/$975
3-Bedroom: $2000/$3,900
3-story Brownstone: $100,000/$195,153
A cursory search of craigslist seems to show that 3-bedroom apartments are still in that range (those there are tons up in the $4500-5000 range). But most 2-bedrooms are nearly twice what they used to be. Studios seem to be as low as $1500. Sadly, brownstones (even in the bad neighborhoods) go for a helluva lot more than $200K. Feel the burn!
Anyway, that's life on my end of Eldert Street. On the other end there is an old knitting factory building that's been converted to loft apartments. The industrial side of Bushwick somehow made it this far south, seemingly only along the L train. The building at 345 Eldert is full of artists, and apparently a group of them are trying to get financial backers so they can buy their building from its management company. If successful, they will have a huge space in which the artists call the shots. Nice idea, I guess, but are they serious? The article in the Brooklyn Paper isn't clear how much of a joke this is, but the accompanying photo doesn't lend a whole lot of credibility to their crusade. They need some kind of venture capitalist to provide the dough to buy the place, who's gonna do that? This sounds like the 21st century version of the "Let's put on a show!!" type stuff from the 70's and 80's. I hope they pull it off, though I'm pretty sure this isn't the first time anybody thought of this ("Hey, we all live here, we're all into the same stuff, let's buy the building!"), but I dunno if anybody ever actually went through with it. Aren't there any wealthy, eccentric philanthropists anymore?
