Tearing Down and Building Up

At the end of this post is a link to an area map in case all the streets and avenues get too confusing.

Once you get south of 7th Street the new construction peters out, at least compared to what is going on in the blocks north of that point. It's spotty; a building here, a building there, some small, some large, but rarely an entire block or even most of one except for that block between North 3rd and 4th Streets and Bedford Ave. and Berry Street. And some have stopped and started and stopped again and started again so many times that it's hard to remember how long they've been going along.


Grand St. at Driggs Ave.

For instance, one project (above) has limped along for at least a year if not longer, one loses track. After the previous building was torn down, a red brick one-story commercial affair, the lot was empty for the better part of a year before construction started up last year. It got this far and stopped again months ago.

Down the block is another small building that seemed well on its way to completion when work on it, too, inexplicably halted.

Grand Street bet. Driggs and Bedford

A few doors down from that is a building that has been worked on continuously and that looks not too far from move-in stage.

Grand Street bet. Driggs and Bedford

The red brick building above is an example of one of the scattered ones in the neighborhood that try to fit in well among their neighbors. If you were casually walking along this block (below) further down Grand Street near Havemayer Street you probably wouldn't notice much difference among the buildings though some were built within the past few years and others have been there for decades. Respect.

Grand St. bet. Roebling & Havemayer Sts.

The balconies are a give away but aside from that they fit into the block perfectly. Two more examples from Bedford Avenue one south and one north. Sorry for the tree in front of one of them, it's the only shot I have at the moment.


Bedford Ave. & South 1st St.

Bedford Ave. nr. North 6th St.

If I were a cynical person, I might say that the smaller buildings were small because the developer was working on a small budget, and if there were more cash available the building would be increasingly larger. But I prefer to think well of these people.

But we do also have our share of towers, besides the obvious examples over along the river on Kent Avenue. It's hard to tell whether or not this one on North 7th near Bedford is actually progressing or not since it looks the same to me each time I look at it.

North 7th St. bet. Bedford Ave. & Berry St.

Whenever I see this building (or that other one I've mentioned in Ft. Greene), a line by Poe that Barbara Tuchman used as the title of one of her popular books on history always pops into my head:

While from a proud tower in the town/ Death looks gigantically down.

I think there's a Fr. Brown story by Chesterton, too, that I recall about some plutocrat who lives at the top of a gigantic city apartment building, far above the common rabble. That's the feeling I get from these giants thrown up among all the low rise buildings of the neighborhood; there's a kind of swaggering, domineering attitude about them.

There is one other building that is very deceptive in its size. When you walk past it along Driggs Ave., it does seem tall but not really out of proportion to the other buildings on the street, because you are just too close to get any perspective. This one is near the Williamsburg Bridge.

South 4th bet. Driggs Ave. & Roebling St.

But check it out from a distance, like maybe from Broadway . . . that's a pretty tall drink of water there. I really like that small white church on the left, though that will probably disappear some day while no one is looking.

Williamsburg Bridge nr. Broadway & Roebling St.


South 5th St at Continental Army Plaza

Yes, believe it or not, that square at the foot of the bridge where a statue of George Washington greets the cars arriving from Manhattan is called Continental Army Plaza. The church is Holy Trinity Cathedral and I have never seen anyone going in or out of it, though perhaps I'm just never around at the right time.

So here, in no particular order are more of the nice and the not-so-hot, the finished, the unfinished, the building sites that have been fallow for years. . .

South 1st nr. Havemayer St.


South 1st nr. Roebling St.


South 2nd nr. Driggs.


South 2nd & Bedford


South 4th bet. Driggs & Bedford

This large hole in the ground (well, you can see just the plywood fencing, imagine the rest) is on South 4th Street between Driggs and Bedford Avenues; it's been that way for quite awhile now with no sign of construction of any kind. Below are the houses on the other side of the street that face the hole. As you can see they get some really beautiful afternoon sun. I wonder how long that will last?

South 4th bet. Driggs & Bedford

In fact, that block just above is as good an example as any of an average block south of Grand Street (Southside). Three- four- and five-story apartment buildings, many dating back to the turn of the last century into the 1920s.

Grand St, & Berry St.

Then we get to that large block between Berry and Bedford and North 3rd and 4th Streets. This one is being worked on piecemeal. I don't know if the same developer has the whole block but it doesn't seem to be developing as a whole. The corner of N.3rd and Bedford is almost complete (see post from Feb. 19); it's where the Duane-Reade is going. The corner below lags behind and as you can see from further photos, the other parts of the block are still just the skeletons of the former structures.

I heard a rumor from someone in the neighborhood last year that Trader Joe's was opening a branch there, but that turned out to be false. It's too bad because we desperately need another supermarket of some kind around there, one that will appeal to the more budget conscious among us. Though budget conscious folk won't be able to afford Williamsburg for much longer anyway so perhaps it doesn't matter.


North 3rd & Berry St.


Berry St. at N. 4th St.


Whythe and Metropolitan Aves.

Well, wood does make a nice change from the glass and chrome or whatever the hell stuff the other ones are made out of. And for a contrast look across the street at the opposite corner . . . It's like a slow rippling tide that washes just a bit further up the beach each time a wave breaks.


Whythe and Metropolitan Aves.


Wythe Ave. & N. 4th St.

It tires me out just looking at these pictures. And consider this, though I'm not good at math, this area from roughly Driggs to Kent Avenues and North 11th to South 4th where most of these pictures came from is perhaps only a quarter of Williamsburg. It is the most popular area at the moment, and the one generally written up in the newspapers, because it had a head start, becoming trendy before the other sections did; the trendiness has seeped out toward East Williamsburg over by Lorimer and Graham Avenues, but most of the tearing down and building up is still concentrated here in the Northside and Southside.

And there are a lot more I didn't bother to add here, the developers will wedge them in wherever someone is willing to sell an old building that can be torn down or an empty lot. With at least one exception that I wasn't planning to add here but might as well.

Grand St. & Driggs Ave.

Around ten years ago, before the huge jump in property values over here, the empty lot above was used for off-street parking. Maybe the owner covered his property taxes and a bit more. Then one day, not unexpectedly, all the cars disappeared and signs began going up on the fence about property suitable for building or development. From time to time over the years there have been people spotted with equipment of various kinds, supposedly doing soil testing. At one point a few years ago the rumor was that a five story glass building was going in there, but nothing has happened and the signs eventually grow limp hanging off the fence are usually removed after awhile.

Grand St. & Driggs Ave.

As I understand the situation, that part of Williamsburg is rife with underground springs and it just happens that there is one somewhere beneath this lot that makes the land unstable for any kind of construction. As you can see, when the spring and summer weeds grow up, it can be rather pretty. Lately however, parts of the fence have been falling in and it's become a parking spot for neighborhood trucks.

All of which (the rampant construction, I mean) leads into another topic that I have no intention of getting into right now; I'll leave it for the next time. Despite the apparent hipness and trendiness of this part of Williamsburg, despite the almost constant construction, block after block after block . . . according to a recent story in New York Magazine rating the different neighborhoods of New York City in terms of popularity and livability, Williamsburg is way down at #20, not only far below neighboring Greenpoint just to the north but even Sunnyside in Queens. Interesting. But like I say, the next time.

I have been throwing around the names of a lot of streets and for those of you unfamiliar with the area, this map (see link below) might help. I am not going to put markers on it locating the photos above like I did with my postings last year of the war memorials because they would be so close together they would obscure the map. But at least you will be able to see where each street and avenue is located . . .

Map of the area.

The Reconstruction of Williamsburg . . . More

Wythe Ave. looking northwest toward Kent Ave.

When the towering apartment buildings were being thrown up along the river on Kent Avenue in Williamsburg, I naively thought that it was just the available space and the river view that was responsible, and that that kind of building could probably be kept to that side of the neighborhood. People will pay for a view of the East River and the skyline of midtown but who is throw away good money to look down on a pizzeria or bodega or some run down apartment building from the turn of the last century.

Bedford at South 4th.

Stupid, stupid. That’s why I am just scraping by in publishing instead of making my fortune in real estate. I don’t think like a realtor; I don’t thinking terms of trends or what’s a hot neighborhood and what’s not. In fact, when I first moved to Williamsburg some nine years ago, I even thought it could go the way of the Village or Nolita or Little Italy.

Grand Street between Bedford and Driggs.

Sure, it would attract the well-heeled who would drive prices up but the neighborhood would remain essentially the same (like Grand Street, above) since that’s what drew people here to begin with, and there would still be places for the not-so-rich since you can’t tear down all the old apartment buildings and drive everyone out.Though as it turns out, you can try. Actually, in the summer of 2001, it hadn't even begun attracting the really wealthy trenderati, it was still a pleasant place with a few bars and some outdoor eateries and nothing too chic in the way of stores.

South 1st near Havemayer.

Now I wonder how long it can last before it’s just another extension of midtown, a high density area full of gleaming metal and glass high rises. It’s going in that direction and I don’t see much to stop it.

Driggs at North 10th.

I am talking mainly about the Northside, from around Broadway north into Greenpoint, and from the river east into, well, there’s really no stopping it going east; the swamps of Maspeth, maybe.

A couple of postings ago when I was talking about the new building in the eastern side of Williamsburg, the Italian neighborhood centered on Graham Avenue, Lorimer Street, and so on, I forgot one really tall high rise I had wanted to show. At the time I was taking the photos, I ran into an older gentleman who had lived there most of his life and who allowed that when these developes started coming in and picking off the lots and small buildings, only two people tried to fight it, he and one other man. Then he pointed to this tall building nearby and told me that that one didn’t even have a permit when it went up; so he told me, I can’t prove it one way or another. He was pretty disgusted by the whole thing.

Richardson and Humboldt Streets.

You don’t really get a good sense of how out of place these tall buildings are until you view them from a distance and see how they tower over their neighbors. It’s like the effect the Empire State Building gives. When you are walking nearby it seems like just another tall building n midtown. You don’t get a good sense of the height in the midst of all the other buildings there. But look at it from New Jersey and you see that there is nothing that even remotely touches it for scores of blocks around. These tall buildings in Williamsburg are not the ESB but the effect is similar.

And then there is this building on Humboldt Street that I confess I have a sneaking liking for. It’s very clean looking. I don’t know if I’d like to live there (I hate a.c. so I need windows that open and most of these new places look like the windows don't) but it’s not terrible. Then too, I really wouldn’t want to live in a neighborhood where this is all there was. But I think that’s likely to happen.

Humboldt between Withers and Frost.

But the real fertile ground for the new Williamsburg begins over around Union Avenue near McCarren Park. There is acre after empty acre waiting for the economy to improve a bit more, probably so someone can develop large chunks of it instead of piecemeal building. This is the intersection of Union Ave. and North 10th St. Stand in the middle of the street and you are almost completely surrounded by empty lots.

This map may give you a better idea of the amount of empty space at that intersection just waiting to be filled in with tall, gleaming new silvery glassy towers. It's the area outlined in yellow. Driggs ave., which I will talk about further on is a block past, and parallel to, Roebling St., out of the picture on the left.




Before I get back to that Northside section of Williamsburg from Driggs to the river, I want to take a short detour up Union Avenue toward Broadway to see another neighborhood facing the inexorable tide of glass and steel and one person's reaction to it.

Ainslie is around seven blocks or so further south from the photos above, on the other side of the BQE and of Metropolitan Avenue.


These are all within the space of two blocks or so of each other on both sides of Union.


The 2- and 3-story buildings in the foreground and background give you an idea of what the avenue was like not too many years ago.





And, further up Union Avenue, closer to Broadway, one person sees what's coming and doesn't appear to care for it.


What do you want to bet they get it in the end?

And a detour in the other direction back to McCarren Park where we just were.


Those three buildings face McCarren Park. I guess that they are actually in Greenpoint, I'm not sure off the top of my head where the neighborhood line is, though in reality there is little difference these days. They are just about the tallest buildings in the vicinity and I wouldn't be surprised if their brothers and sisters were awaiting birth in those empty lots behind the board fence.

Here is a shot from the front.

Driggs and Union Avenues; part of McCarren Park.

Thank god McCarren Park is large and includes the old municipal swimming pool (below) and Automotive High School and some parkland on the west side, otherwise you'd feel you were running on a track at the bottom of a canyon.



Of the streets that run up through the Northside, Driggs Avenue seems to be the center of activity now. Along Bedford Avenue, Berry Street, and Wythe Street the buildings are too well-established to be easy targets . . . for now. But Driggs was always more commercial than residential and a lot of the buidings were old and the owners saw a nice profit in the offing if they sold them. There is feverish activity on almost every block now where only a year or two ago almost nothing was happening. Near the top of this posting is a shot of Driggs looking from North 10 to North 11. Below is North 11 looking from Driggs to Roebling.


These buildings have been going up so fast and I was out wandering so little during the winter that I only noticed them for the first time last weekend. That's when I realized that there was very little to stop the neighborhood becoming this.

North 11th in the opposite direction, toward Bedford.



And when I said that Bedford Avenue was unlikely to see this kind of reconstruction soon, I forgot about this immense empty building site along Bedford and North 12 bordering McCarren Park, seen here from North 11. Something is going in there, but what and how big?


The row of buildings in the background is on Bedford and McCarren Park is out of sight down to the right. You get a nice view of the Manhattan skyline from that far corner.


Looking down North 10th from Driggs to Roebling.

North 9th and Driggs.

North 8th and Driggs.

Well, we do know that nothing is going up in that lot behind the green fence. Incredibly, it is now a beautifully blacktopped parking lot. As New York City found out from decades of Robert Moses-built highways, traffic increases to fill the available space, so rather than taking cars off the street this will probably just attract more cars to the neighborhood. Progress, ain't it wonderful?


North 7th looking toward Driggs.

And just to give you an idea of what parts of the neighborhood used to look like, and what some still do today, below is a stable residential block, North 6th looking from Roebling toward Driggs.



More later.

Stuyvesant Heights Brownstone Saved

An interesting story from today's New York Times about Stuyvesant Heights where I wandered one day during the winter (and where I decided that winter walks weren't worth it):

Stuyvesant Heights Brownstone

See my blog entry from January 13:

No Winter Walks!! Stuyvesant Heights and Other

It was a very nice neighborhood and should be looking nice right around now with the spring flowers and trees in bloom.

In this picture, which is the same one that appears in the Jan. 13 entry, I think the brownstone mentioned in the article is one of those first two or three in the background, framed in the crook of the tree.