Evicting Gowanus

Artists have had their studios in Gowanus since at least the 1970s. For decades, the industrial no man's land between Park Slope and Carroll Gardens was otherwise "undiscovered," known intimately only by the working class people who lived there, the working class people who worked there, and a handful of artists.

All of that has changed in just the past few years, as Brooklyn has become an unaffordable, international brand of luxury and hipness--making every inch of the borough potentially "the next Williamsburg."

Developers have descended on the shit-filled canal.



This past weekend, during Gowanus Open Studios, a group of artists protested their upcoming eviction. More than 250 painters, sculptors, and others are getting the boot from their studio buildings, some of the longest-running artist spaces in the area.

Reported the Daily News: "Developer Eli Hamway, who is involved in condominium projects in Williamsburg and Prospect Heights, leased the three buildings for $21.2 million in April 2015."



But this end of Gowanus is not zoned for residential -- yet. The artists I've talked to suspect the new tenant will be some sort of "maker space." (What is it with New York today that we've got "makers," "artisans," and "creatives," but none of them are artists -- and they're getting all the prime real estate?)

So where will these Gowanus artists go? Many say they'll migrate to Sunset Park, which is also experiencing the first touches of hyper-gentrification. (The Brooklyn Flea gentrification machine has arrived.) I'm also hearing chatter about artists moving to Bay Ridge, one of the last non-gentrifying neighborhoods in the entire city. Ultima Thule.

Meanwhile, at the other end of Gowanus, the Lightstone Group is bringing a bland-looking, utterly massive mega-complex of 700 units, along with amenities like yoga and valet parking, plus a waterfront “esplanade park” complete with boat launch and “water access point.” You know, so you can access that shit-filled water.



In the developer’s renderings of the site, the canal is wreathed in green vegetation. Shiny happy people walk along the verdant paths and ply the blue waters in kayaks. The developers are banking on a clean-up of the canal.



But it's not clean yet. The Superfund site is full of human feces, dead animals, and an array of toxins and diseases, including gonorrhea. A brown goo periodically bubbles up through the sinks, toilets, and shower drains of buildings here.

Christopher Swain knows that goo well. This weekend, while the artists protested, the environmental activist swam the entire length of the canal. 



He wrapped himself in layers of waterproofing, plugged his orifices with wax, and took the plunge. He did it to raise awareness and call for the clean-up of the canal. Which, by the way, he said tasted like metal, gasoline, detergent, and shit.



Gowanus now has a souvenir shop (where you can buy coffee cups that say "Some asshole developer"), a wildly popular ice-cream shop called Ample Hills, bars, restaurants, and a shuffleboard club that seems to cater to hipsters and young investment bankers.

Editors at the Daily News took issue with those who oppose luxury development here, those who "seem to think that a few vacant casket factories are worth going to the barricades for." (For the record, South Brooklyn Casket is not vacant--it's doing a brisk business. People keep dying in Brooklyn.) The editors wrote, "We respectfully send this message the enemies of Gowanus gentrification: You’ve already lost."

Well, they're right about that.


More on Gowanus:
Whole Foods Gowanus
Eagle Clothes
Kentile
Gowanus Wilderness

Whole Foods Gowanus

The Whole Foods recently built on the toxic waste dump that is Gowanus has been cited a second time, reports Brooklyn Paper, for not fulfilling their promise to fix up the lovely landmarked Coignet Building they abut. The Coignet stands crumbling in Whole Foods' grip, a remnant of the past and maybe a thorn in the corporate grocer's side.



I went out to visit this Whole Foods after it opened, knowing well that the chain is a catalyst for change, a tool for spurring on hyper-gentrification, and that the Gowanus landscape surrounding it will soon be dramatically altered.





The mega-chain is trying very hard to look local, with sections hawking "Brooklyn Flavor," bike repair services, and a mini shop selling vinyl, both records and objects made from recycled records, by "a Brooklyn-based design and lifestyle brand."

There's even a mustachioed artisanal knife sharpener who cobbles together hand-made knives from reclaimed materials. And the "Stroller Parking" section speaks to the Brooklynite baby boom. (However, they don't call this store Whole Foods Gowanus, but Third and 3rd. What, is "Gowanus" too evocative of fecal stink?)

Still, all the signs screaming the word LOCAL can't take away the undeniable fact that Whole Foods Gowanus is utterly suburban.





Their parking lot is huge. It sprawls across what had once been a vast and wild vacant lot, apologizing for its existence by sitting under a roof of giant solar panels.



Outside, beyond the parked cars, Whole Foods has landscaped their bank of the Gowanus canal with a path. You can sit on a bench and watch the junkyard across the way, or wait for human bodies and dead dogs to go floating by.

Couples meander, hand in hand, breathing in the stink of raw sewage, a special Gowanus odor that all the fresh mulch in the world can't cover up.



On one of the garden walls--made from scruffy, graffiti-buffed stone--stands a piece of fresh graffiti, surely commissioned by the supermarket. Its hunter green color matches the branded shade of the Whole Foods logo banners just above it. With awkward diction, the "local" graffiti admonishes passersby to EAT MORE OF YOUR VEGETABLES.

Eagle Clothes

The Eagle Clothes sign. You see it from the train as you ride over the viaduct. You catch a glimpse walking on 4th Avenue, in between the condo towers that rise to block the view. Dark at night, still bright in sunlight, brilliant red and green. Maybe, like me, you wonder what Eagle was all about and if their sign will stay.



ForgottenNY explains, "Eagle is one of the many haberdasheries that succumbed to more casual living during the Swingin' Sixties. As more men began to eschew suits, jackets and ties during all but strict business hours, clothing manufacturers had to adapt or die."

Eagle began to languish when the leisure suit, "the kiss of death," came on the scene, according to a former employee interviewed by New York Magazine. For him, the Gowanus sign is "like a tombstone. The end of the world I knew." And what a beautiful world it was:


1940s Eagle ads from goantiques

Eagle had been around for awhile when the Gowanus plant opened in June of 1951. On opening day, Mayor Impellitteri cut the tape and recalled his Sicilian mother's toil with sweatshop work, while Rose Schneidermann, Triangle Shirtwaist survivor, marveled at the safe, modern facility:


New York Times, click to enlarge

In 1957, Rock Hudson posed in their suits, an eagle coming to rest on his shoulder, the epitome of mid-century masculinity. What would Don Draper wear?



Eagle Clothes is mentioned in a 1958 issue of the journal American Speech, in a fascinating little article entitled "Some Popular Components of Trade Names." The article looks at the trend of suffixes like -master, -matic, and -rama (Roadmaster! Futurematic! Glamorama!). "Rama," says the author, dates back to the days of Balzac and means a "spectacular show or display." Eagle jumped on the -rama bandwagon with their Naturama line, as noted in this slice of the article's fantastic and exhaustive listing of -rama usages (click to enlarge):



By the late 1970s, as low-end leisure and high-end tailor-made suits did well, Eagle was failing. They filed for bankruptcy. Then, after a few acquisitions, they turned around and managed to survive most of the 1980s. In 1989, however, they filed for bankruptcy again and that's where the electronic paper trail ends.

Which brings us back to the sign. For more than half a century, the sign has heralded Gowanus. With all the hubbub of development vying for that poisoned land, I'm worried about it.



Over a year ago, Gowanus Lounge revealed that a Karl Fischer design was going to be landing here, a big blue-glass tower like all the other blue-glass towers, developed by the same guy who brought Hotel Le Bleu to 4th Avenue. He told Brooklyn Paper, "This area is becoming modern, trendy and new. The glass is part of that."

So far, all that exists of that glass tower is the sign that says it's coming, accompanied by another sign that says: Future Home of Greg's Express Rubbish Removal. So, who knows?


view from Hotel Le Bleu

With Gowanus possibly slipping back into de-gentrification as Whole Foods dickers, and with the bear economy wearily limping into hibernation, maybe the sign still has a chance.

In the New York Magazine article cited above, a local ironworker sees a long future for the Eagle sign. Despite the city's surplus of cranes and demolition men, he assures us, "It is made of 33 1/4-inch steel pipes. You'd need a crane to take it down. So it stays."

More Gowanus posts:

• Brooklyn's 4th Avenue
• Gowanus Wilderness
• Flickr pics

Meet the Kentile K

When the Kentile Floors sign came down from the skyline of Brooklyn earlier this year, the beloved letters were stashed away, in an undisclosed location in Gowanus, where they await their new life.

Tonight at 5pm, you can get up close and cozy with the letter "K" -- and even have your photo taken with it -- at the Gowanus Alliance's "Kristmas" party.

A rep from Gowanus Alliance tells me:

"The letters are kept in a safe warehouse, waiting for donation paperwork to be completed and for final evaluation before repair work begins. Tonight, we only have the letter K to display--and to let everyone know that the Kentile sign is not forgotten nor forsaken. We hope to start the restoration process very soon, and look forward to community input on the sign's final location. It is not likely that the sign will end up on a roof of a building, due to current building codes and regulations. It is going to be installed in a public area, perhaps a promenade or a park. That decision will be brought before a community discussion forum. A website is in the works."

Toll's Gowanus

Community Board 6 (in Brooklyn's CoCaGoSlope section) recently approved the Toll Brothers' plan to turn Gowanus into a luxury waterside wonderland. I took a walk down there to see what will vanish when Toll puts in their 6 residential and retail buildings, a plan that covers nearly two complete blocks.



It's a quiet, desolate place. One- and two-story brick buildings, painted gray, take up most of the space. In the silence, a man appears out of nowhere, tossing bits of bread to the sky, attracting a flurry of wings. He coos to the birds, "Here they come, here they come."



Down a cobblestoned street, at a crumbling launch where graffitied rowboats wait to take the water, two mated pairs of mallards sun themselves before dipping into the chemical-green canal. Above the trees, across the way, graffiti on the infamous Bat Cave says "OPEN YOUR EYES." (On the other side it says, "No More Corporate Bullshit.")



Robert Guskind wonders if the Toll Brothers are using public art to try and win over public opinion.



As for public opinion, one member of the public has clearly expressed it in spray paint directly across the street.



There are businesses still running here. Will they be blighted and seized by eminent domain?

And this converted cement silo, seen below sticking up over a warehouse, intrigues, hidden as it is behind an artfully made iron gate off Carroll Street. I figured it was some eccentric's private home. A Curbed commenter says it used to be "a fuck-pad for a rich, swinging doctor" before it became the Issue Project Room and, now, The Yard, part of a "curatorial series to highlight the importance of DIY entertainment and alternative venues."



Like another graffitist out here says, "You can't stop it."

See all my photos of the Gowanus Project site

Talking About Gentrification

Recently, I engaged in an email conversation about gentrification with John Joe Schlichtman, formerly of Brooklyn, currently professor in Chicago's DePaul University Department of Sociology, and co-author with Jason Patch of “Gentrifier? Who, Me? Interrogating the Gentrifier in the Mirror." In the article, which prompted me to reach out to Schlichtman, the authors exhort critics of gentrification to examine their own relationship to the process. They are working on a book, tackling this topic, to be published with University of Toronto Press.



JM: Let's start with your paper. What do you see as hypocritical about urbanists critiquing gentrification? Or is hypocritical the right word?

JJS: I see nothing hypocritical about urbanists critiquing gentrification. This was a misreading of my article with Jason Patch, “Gentrifier? Who, Me? Interrogating the Gentrifier in the Mirror,” that gained momentum through the Atlantic Cities piece about our article. Emily Badger’s article was not inaccurate, it was just incomplete, as any brief coverage of our work would be.

The closer one gets to street-level activism, the more you see community leaders who are not exactly seething about gentrification. In fact, in a whole lot of neighborhoods there are left-leaning leaders who would laugh you out of the room at the suggestion that their neighborhood getting a Trader Joes or a Whole Foods would be an injustice. They are not short sighted. They are simply in a very pressing reality.

Jason and I feel that the dialogue about gentrification in academia and beyond has grown hypocritical because it does not acknowledge some critical realities. It seemed to us that the most obvious place to start to address this disconnect was to consider the ways in which those critiquing gentrification are situated in the process.


JM: When I hear that, about community leaders not seething about Whole Foods, etc., I think that they're not quite in reality. Because in reality those businesses help to create and/or intensify gentrification--or what I call hyper-gentrification, or Neil Smith's "gentrification generalized." And that means goodbye to the existing community. I'm thinking of the Whole Foods in Gowanus and the $4 million in support they got from the city to spur more gentrification there, which is happening at a breakneck pace since the grocery chain's opening.

JJS: Let me be clear: I get the injustice. Whole Foods is happily being used as a tool for state-led gentrification. This is true and this is a gross injustice.

Gentrification is already underway in Gowanus. I am talking about all of the areas in the world where no reinvestment is happening. There is a neighborhood in Chicago where an important activist, if I recall correctly, wondered “why can’t we get a grocery store like a Whole Foods? Why are healthy foods relegated to one side of town?” Then the announcement comes that they are. Now, of course, when the realities hit, the issue becomes much more nuanced. This same activist wonders: "Wait a second, why is Whole Foods coming?"

But what is the alternative response in this moment in 2014 when the global overthrow of capitalism is not exactly imminent? What is the socially just, progressive action for city leaders to take? "No, your neighborhood can’t get a Whole Foods. Actually, what is best is for you is to get a grocery store that has old produce from places that allow it to be shellacked with chemicals: that way, hipsters won’t eat it"?

(Just for context, this is coming from somebody who has never understood Whole Foods and does not shop there, so I may be missing something here. I am hardly a connoisseur, as anyone who knows me would attest.)


JM: I was at a gentrification conference in the Bronx, and a local woman said, "We want fresh vegetables at the corner grocer." Of course, who doesn't want access to better things? But what happens is that we get into a false dichotomy: It's Whole Foods or rotten vegetables. It's hyper-gentrification or total chaos and crime. And this woman was trying to get to the middle place, which is where I think we all need to be. How do we help our local businesses better provide to the community and not get displaced by corporate giants? First we have to stop believing in the false dichotomy.

JJS: This “false dichotomy” thing is something that I hear about every day. It has become a cliché. No, the choice does not have to be between gentrification and segregation. And yes, small business creation and development should be the goal of any thinking mayor. Small businesses in disinvested neighborhoods are even more important to protect. So, of course there should be a mobilization to bring fresh vegetables.

But what is going to happen if the bodega gets the fresh vegetables? Middle class people nearby are going to go there because people like good food (and because food quality is becoming a bit of a craze) and--maybe in a few years--Whole Foods will take an interest in the neighborhood. The activists are going to get angry and say "Why do these white folks," because race is what is noticed, not class position, "always have to spoil a good thing?"

So the issue is that we are coming out of a period of middle-class urban disinvestment and entering into a period of middle-class urban reinvestment in which you and I play a part. This is the underlying hairy macro-level issue that is changing the game.

Then what are we talking about? How do we rein this in? Do we implement some type of government control in the neighborhood to monitor who comes in and out, and attempt to control middle-class movement? (Really? Are we to wait for a government that is going to justly administrate that?)


JM: Since gentrification is inevitable in a city where this reinvestment is happening, it seems like a good place for the Good Gentrifier vs. Bad Gentrifier question. Is there such a thing as a good and a bad gentrifier? Or, more accurately, a way to be a good or bad gentrifier?

JJS: This reminds me of Dannette Lambert’s recent article “20 Ways Not to Be a Gentrifier.” While Lambert’s article was very productive in some important ways, it also typifies what I see as a problematic point of view that seems to be gaining momentum.

In a piece I wrote called “Gentrifiers Against Gentrification: ‘Confessions of a Harlem Gentrifier’” about Jordan Teicher’s article in Salon, I likened some gentrifiers to what Patricia J. Williams described as tourists on a “safari” and, as Langston Hughes wrote in 1940, the “fascinated” white patrons of black nightclubs who observe the regulars as if they were “amusing animals in a zoo.” To me, such gentrifiers are actually more problematic than those minding their "privileged" business.

The most problematic element in Lambert’s piece is that it suggests that “it isn’t the mere act of moving into a neighborhood that makes you a gentrifier; it’s what you do once you get there.” It allows residential decision-makers to exonerate themselves from being a gentrifier by transforming gentrification into a mindset rather than identifying it as a structural problem. If you have the right intention, the thinking goes, you are not even a factor in this huge structural issue.

I respect Dannette Lambert as a person from what I have learned from Googling her; this critique is not at all about her. However, this way of thinking has--I can’t even say a veneer--a foundation of paternalism. All of this tiptoeing (as with Teicher) presumes and reinforces a tremendous amount of power in neighborhood dynamics. "These people are vulnerable: tread lightly." I get into all of this a bit more in my blog post “The Tiptoeing Gentrifier.”


JM: While I see the problems in that essay, I don't see the problem with “it isn’t the mere act of moving into a neighborhood that makes you a gentrifier; it’s what you do once you get there.” What we do when we get there is important. For example, what I see newcomers do as they get to my neighborhood, the East Village, is to criticize local businesses and celebrate the chain stores and upscale ("hipster"/"yuppie") businesses. They do this via social media and their wallets. 

I know we differ on this point, but I see intention as powerful. Is the newcomer's intention to assimilate to the existing neighborhood, or to force the existing neighborhood to assimilate to her? Again, there's probably a middle ground there.

JJS: I don’t think we differ in terms of intention. I believe intention is very important. The thing is that the problematic elements and the non-problematic elements are quite often conflated so that "good intentions" render one free to go on his way.

You see people coming in and “criticiz[ing] local businesses and celebrat[ing] the chain stores and upscale ('hipster'/'yuppie') businesses” and that bothers you because you remember a day when the neighborhood was better. The new is foreign to you. But at least part of this nothing new? It is part of change and the resulting sentiment of nostalgia in the city.

Your "better" old Village, according to a previous blog post, was “punk, queer, creative, [and] crazy.” Were old-school Village bohemians more legitimate than hipsters? Says who? Would the displaced Nuyoricans and Boricuas agree with this thinking? I know this argument has become cliché (e.g., "why don’t we just give Harlem back to the Dutch") and I don’t want to fall into this trap, but where does this stop?


JM: It always gets tricky and touchy when we talk about what "people" are doing--meaning the newcomers who are moving into neighborhoods. If we talk about processes, government, corporations, that's safe. Those are de-personalized bogeymen. But if we start looking at what "white" people, or "rich" people, or "newcomers" are doing, we get in trouble (let me say here that I often get in trouble) because people identify with these and other descriptors. But many people are having an impact, often a negative one.

This goes to my idea about increased narcissism and sociopathy among many of the newcomers to the city. Many New Yorkers experience this marked personality difference in newcomers of the 2000s, and that isn't just about newness or unfamiliarity. (For the record, I don't have a big issue with hipsters. It's the hyper-mainstream suburbanites that gall me.)

I often wonder how do we talk about that without triggering knee-jerk defensiveness? And I think this is much the point of your paper--gentrifier, look in the mirror--yes?


JJS: I think we avoid knee-jerk defensiveness precisely by acknowledging how much bigger gentrification is than any one person, neighborhood, or city.

But also, any “narcissism and sociopathy” that we are witnessing is a macro-level change. It is not particular to New York. What is particular to New York is the rate of change because New York is so central in global flows of money, people, ideas, products, etc. "Gentrification" is not defined as a system of “narcissism and sociopathy” and a "gentrifier" is not defined as one who is “narcissistic and sociopathic.” If this is the case, there is not a problem in anyone’s mind because who would see herself in this light?

Let’s consider policy reactions. There are two implicit responses to these “narcissistic and sociopathic” newcomers. One, you give the newcomers some easy steps to start acting right (e.g. Dannette Lambert’s piece) so that the cultural tension or “violence” is less acute. Or, two, you tell them to go back to where they came from. But nine times out of ten, the criticizer would have a problem with, let’s say, a suburban newcomer going back to where they came from too because that --the old order--is spatial segregation. That was the original problem. To which the answer is, presumably, some type of spatial integration, which is messy.

These aren’t new problems. The old gentrification or the old displacement wasn’t "the right way" to go about this. The fact that some thinkers are now looking back at old gentrification as the "good old days" is an indication of the power of nostalgia. The contexts are completely different: economically, culturally, socially, and politically.


JM: I'm thinking this goes back to the gentrification vs. hyper-gentrification issue--and I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. But as it relates to malignant narcissism or sociopathy, I see hyper-gentrification as a sociopathic system, in which corporations and government collude to, as Neil Smith put it, remake neighborhoods for the upper classes. I do think that process is attractive to similarly sociopathic individuals on the ground, so to speak, and they are strongly in favor of turning neighborhoods over to the new and the rich. All you have to do is read the comments on the blog Curbed to see that.

But, putting aside the sticky psychosocial analysis, what are your thoughts on hyper-gentrification? Is this just the same old gentrification we've always had, or something different?

JJS: To be very brief, I would say that:

(a) It is the “same old” gentrification in that the middle class desires to come back to the city;

(b) It is “something different” in that gentrification is now a reliable and codified strategy for corporations and governments; and

(c) Collusion is not part of gentrification, so (a) and (b) can happen without (c).


JM: So you don't see city government and corporations colluding to hyper-gentrify neighborhoods? How so?


JJS: I do, but collusion need not be a part of gentrification. If the concept is to have any meaning, we can’t keeping throwing everything we don’t like into the gentrification pot. This is one of the key premises behind the book I am working on with Jason Patch. We are writing not only to policy-makers and academics, but also the newcomers who I see sharing Lambert’s piece.


JM: Do you see any ways to stop, or at least slow down, the breakneck pace of today's form of gentrification?


JJS: Clearly, as urban inequalities and rents increase, it is vital that units of housing are held "outside" of the full influence of the market through mechanisms such as public housing, community land trusts, community development corporations, and rent control. However, all of these methods can be perversely manipulated without an aware public. The popularity of Lambert’s article suggests that young people are actively thinking about what a just city is, especially when it comes to issues of class, race, and ethnicity. This is important, but where do we go from here?

First, it is imperative to acknowledge the large structural forces making it increasingly unlikely that the programs Lambert highlights in her later points, such as “affordable housing, education funding, re-entry services, [and] job training,” are addressed. In fact, even predominantly middle-class communities are increasingly unable to participate in the development of their neighborhoods without a fight. On this note, I see an emerging potential for alliances here.

Second, as Lambert recognizes, newcomers need to learn and utilize the existing political and organizational mechanisms of their neighborhood. This not only pertains to issues such as “re-entry services” and “job training,” but also the mundane issues that may be more germane to the newcomer’s daily life. One great arrogance of gentrification is a newcomer’s desire to place new political and organizational mechanisms on top of the old; e.g., by starting a non-profit to "help the neighborhood" without any sense of context.

Finally, to take it all home, gentrifiers need to recognize that they are not suddenly outside of gentrification simply because they view themselves as responsible. They are taking part in making a new city, one unlike any we have witnessed. The question, as always, is who will have a seat at the table in the process.


You can follow Professor Schlichtman on Twitter at @JJSchlichtman, and find him on the web at The Urbanist Chronicle.

Sound & Chaos

Sound & Chaos: The Story of BC Studio tells the tale of Martin Bisi and his sprawling Gowanus music studio where he recorded Herbie Hancock's "Rockit," along with Sonic Youth, John Zorn, the Dresden Dolls, and many more. All back in a time when girl gangs (!) and packs of wild dogs (!) roamed the Gowanus landscape.

Much has changed in the neighborhood--and mostly in the past few years--with more major changes to come. Watch the trailer here, see the film at Anthology Film Archives on July 17, and enjoy this special clip below (thanks to co-director Sara Leavitt for cutting it at my request), in which Bisi tours Whole Foods and explains how one "damn grocery store" is bringing on a major land rush that will likely push him out, along with the rest of the artists.

*Everyday Chatter

When did Yonkers get Manhattanized by the real estate machine? SoYo? At least one kayaker/blogger is not happy about this river-blocking development:


The Plaza Hotel/Condo is dead, an abandoned house where the lonely megawealthy roam the halls alone, forced to eat pizza with the security guards. Here we see the future of a city in which, with the poor to middle classes kicked out, much of its population will be out-of-town investors who are simply never here. This is the ghost town New York is destined to become. [Times]

OTBs closer to closing. I've said this before: Will some brave and talented photographer please visit all of the OTBs in town and capture the people and the places before they're wiped off the city map? April may be the deadline. [Gothamist]

Jeopardy answer: Like SOHO before the Bratz turned up. What is the LES? Mmmm...too late. [Curbed]

Rich kids say living on the LES is "like waking up in the apartment you partied in the night before." How about waking up where a bunch of bratz partied the night before? Which I experience every morning. [Observer]

As local grocers are replaced by condos, so says New York to its poor: Let them eat arugula! [Wash Post]

A message from Eisenberg's--It's enough already with the New Year's resolutions, time to eat some good greasy food:


Alex in NYC recalls the first eyesore dorm to land on the East Village, way, way back in 1993. [Flaming P]

"The Neighborhood Is Dying"--says activists in Gowanus/Carroll Gardens. [Gowanus L]

The closing of Sacred Heart School in the Bronx, due to financial constraints, is breaking the hearts of many generations. [NYDN]

Coney Island's B&B Carousell gets whitewashed over as Massey Knakal's trying to rent the space for $9500/month. [Coney I] via [Curbed]

Gowanus Balloons

Now and then, I get over to Gowanus and wind through its desolate streets. You never know what you're going to find in that strange industrial wasteland.



For example, a bunch of silver balloons, filled with helium, rising and falling in the wind. They look like an organism on their own. They call to you, making you wonder how they got here. Did they get lost, drop, and snag on a tree's fallen limb? Did a jilted lover leave them behind?



Venturing down a muddy "do not enter" driveway, past a row of crumbling buildings, a cracked patio where a greasy cat is stalking prey, you come to the toxic waters.



There the balloons are tethered--to an inflatable, gold-painted dolphin, itself tethered to a half-sunken boat stuffed with bright beach balls. (An homage to the dolphin who died here?)



There isn't another human being anywhere in view. It's just you and the balloons. A moment of quiet mystery.

Not for long. More condos are coming. The cafes and Whole Foods. There is little space left for quiet mysteries.

Gowanus Wilderness

It must be in the air--Gowanus Lounge just visited the former (?) Whole Foods site as did I. Who can resist a hole in a fence on an abandoned lot turned wilderness? At the opening, with one foot in, a shiver runs through you. It's like standing at the edge of a zoo habitat and realizing the gate is wide open. You can't see the animals crouching in the weeds, but you feel their presence.



Cement silos, a glittering pile of scrap grabbed by giant mechanical hands, the rib cage of the viaduct silhouetted in the distance...

There is something about industrial wastelands that fires the imagination. Especially when they include graffiti, thick vegetation, and castaway toilets. The decaying and forgotten--these are haunted landscapes, filled with possibility and risk. The danger of nature unbridled, pushing back, erupting from concrete constraints. Who knows what is hiding there?



Blue Jake ventured in earlier this year and got a gorgeously eerie shot that includes the backside of the mysterious Coignet Stone Company building, recently landmarked. The building sits on the edge of the vast lot like a dessicated, once-splendid spaceship landed on a vacant moonscape.

As Brownstoner writes, the building "commands the attention of everyone who passes by it."

ForgottenNY recalls that this is the corner, "thoid and thoid," where the Brooklyn Dodgers were born.



And Laura Raskin at Brooklyn Rail dives in deep, putting it eloquently when she describes the building as: "crumbling and elegant, with steps that widen outward like open arms. An industrial wasteland of nothing surrounds it, as if it has been repeatedly left behind like a lost child in an empty parking lot. And there’s a slightly magical appeal to a building that sits on the corner of Third Avenue and Third Street."

An image of the Coignet Stone building in its former glory hangs on the wall of the Montauk Club, captured here:


photo: davidfg's flickr

We need haunted houses and weird landscapes like these. What happens to the imagination when everything is smoothed over, packaged, Xeroxed, and polished to a uniform luster?

When all of these places have been erased or tamed, where we will go to be inspired and challenged?

With Whole Foods possibly backing out, does that mean there are still some places left in the city that are too wild, too dangerous to be domesticated?

• See more pictures here

Brooklyn's 4th Ave

The super-gentrification of Brooklyn's 4th Avenue has created a bizarre battleground. On the hotly contested borderline between Gowanus and Park Slope, thick-legged condos wrap their thighs around tenements, gripping the old buildings in scissor holds, wrestling them into submission.

The little white walk-up below is already for sale and the absence of substantial windows in the crotch of condo Argyle says it might be waiting for a shaft of glass to fill it.



Le Bleu, the luxury boutique hotel, welcomes guests "to a whole new world of uber chic glamour and luxurious living." Their finest rooms offer a prime Gowanus view: U-Haul lot, concrete silos, sewage:



Enjoy these views from Bleu's balcony. If you squint your eyes, far off in the distance, you can just make out the green figurine of Lady Liberty. Does she still welcome the tired, poor, huddled masses, the homeless, the wretched refuse to her golden door?



The wretched refuse is right here. All along 4th Avenue, glistening towers sprout up from deserts of weeds and barbed wire. They overlook dialysis centers, taxi garages, and flat-fix shops. The sidewalk foams with soap from a humming car wash. Billboards ask the stacks of used tires, "Who wants to be a millionaire?"



"Style and Substance" reads a sales banner draped across a condo's side, windowless, as if closing its eyes to the neighboring greasy Golden Arches. Another sign nearby warns, "Car stripping will bring police immediately."



Riding a wave of irrational exuberance, the development here might be called "flash gentrification," it happened so fast. Instant and massive, it's like a coordinated invasion by a foreign army. Like an attack of alien warships that suddenly drop from the sky. Shock and awe.

But with the economic immolation, some are wondering if 4th Avenue will "crash and burn." As condos convert to rentals and money dries up all over town, who will enjoy those Bleu views? Who will fill those condos with West Elm furniture? Who will make love to the Clover brewer at the Root Hill cafe?



A movie billboard, at first glance, seems to speak for the long-time residents, but maybe it's the newcomers who will think twice if flash-gentrification hasn't succeeded in turning 4th into a sanitized Park Avenue. Either way, on this battlefield, someone will someday be saying, "They're here. We're gone."

• See more 4th Avenue photos here

Like Pigs in Shit

Balazs hotel rises over buckets of bloody, rotting meat

A VanishingNY reader sent in this satire from the Onion, which I think is poking a bit of fun, but does beg the question: When and why did the wealthy start desiring to live, work, and play in the city's most undesirable locations?
A glassy undulation is coming to the malodorous Gowanus [Gowanus Lounge], Balazs' Standard Hotel squats over buckets of bloody offal in the Meatpacking District [my flickr] [NYMag], and in the midst of Holland Tunnel onramp traffic sprouts the Zinc Building [my flickr] [Curbed].


Fashion model and photogs saunter past buckets of melting animal fat

When the Diane von Furstenberg store opened recently in the now super-chic Meatpacking District, abutting a packing plant that hauls giant buckets of bloody, fly-buzzed offal to the body-fluid-slick sidewalk each day, I am sure that the DVF people just figured the meat would be gone in no time. Meanwhile, just pretend the air doesn't stink of rotting death. And they'll be proven right.


DVF Store (with Bentley in garage) abuts fetid, blood-smeared packing plant

*Everyday Chatter

Spotted at the Union Square Craft Fair: "You Killed Brooklyn. Yeah, you." You know who you are. But what would Woody do?:

see more at Urban Cricket

Riding the Nostalgia Train. [FNY]

The demolition of Mars Bar continues. [EVG]

Gowanus Whole Foods--and inevitable hyper-gentrification of the Gowanus wilderness--has been suspended. [Racked]

NYU "has bent over backwards to create a Franco-friendly environment." [Gothamist]

The story behind the little abandoned terra-cotta building. [SNY]

Take a trip back in time to S. Klein's "on the square." [OTG]

Report shows Harlem Wal-Mart would shut down 25% of grocers in vicinity. [Gothamist]

Tonio's of Park Slope now officially another Dunkin Donuts. [HPS]

South Brooklyn Casket Co.

There's something about the South Brooklyn Casket Company. Maybe its the name, the startling word "casket" right out there in the open as you walk along Third Avenue in Gowanus. Maybe it's the fact that you can see right into the warehouse, to its cache of caskets, all gleaming silver and polished wood, waiting to be filled with, let's face it, your future.



The company was founded in 1931 by Thomas Pontone and was more recently acquired by the larger Milso Industries, which is the name on the trucks you will see carrying the coffins out of the low brick buildings in Gowanus and to their customers. But the buildings haven't changed, they're still ramshackle and a bit ominous. You might find yourself lingering there, watching the boxes come out in bunches, and wondering who will lie inside them.



A few years ago, the Times wrote about how the coffin company has inspired writing and art, including a video that appears to have nothing to do with South Brooklyn Casket, and a book filled with stories that Kirkus called, "Mostly about homosexual desire, narcissism, and the fear of physical decay."

If you're so inclined, you can buy t-shirts here.