Atlantic Avenue Makeover

[Kris]

March 30, 2004

Brooklyn's Mile-Long Makeover

By JOSEPH BERGER

Slide Show: A Changing Atlantic Avenue

Like Wall Street and Delancey Street, Atlantic Avenue is one of those New York thoroughfares whose names conjure up distinctive worlds, in its case an incongruous mix of a Middle Eastern bazaar where you can actually buy frankincense and myrrh and a row of Victorian antique shops.

A livelier Atlantic Avenue has been shaking off that stereotype for some time now, keeping most of the signature stores but gaining boutiques that sell idiosyncratic furniture and clothes and voguish restaurants where the food is as likely to be fusion as falafel.

With the gentry ensconced in the straddling brownstone neighborhoods of Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill and crime down near Flatbush Avenue, the one-and-a-quarter-mile western stretch of Atlantic Avenue - its most widely known section - has blossomed from a sometimes desolate boulevard into a quite smart stretch of pavement.

Now its identity is up for grabs once more. Atlantic Avenue finds itself the spine between several of the city's most provocative development schemes, including a 19,000-seat basketball arena for the New York Nets designed by the architect Frank Gehry, a pier for behemoth cruise ships, like the Queen Mary II, the southern extension of the new 67-acre Brooklyn Bridge Park, the rebuilding of downtown Brooklyn, and the shuttering of Brooklyn's jail.

These prospects, whose realization is by no means certain, have jangled nerves on the avenue, with residents and merchants anxious about coagulating traffic, the thunder of more trucks, a dearth of parking places, and a potential upheaval in the avenue's character from one-of-a-kind stores to chain emporiums and souvenir shops. But the possible changes have also whetted entrepreneurial appetites among those very same worriers.

Many people like Charlie Sahadi are of two minds. Mr. Sahadi's Lebanese immigrant family has owned Sahadi's, a Middle Eastern Zabar's, since 1948. Customers drive from Connecticut and Pennsylvania for its 28 varieties of olives as well as dried apricots in glass jars, home-roasted pistachio nuts and 200 European and American varieties of cheeses aimed at the neighborhood's new homesteaders.

Mr. Sahadi, 60 years old and American born, welcomes the idea of foot traffic stirred by the thousands of basketball fans and debarking passengers - "Anything that brings people to my street, I'm happy," he says. But he worries that customers enchanted by his cornucopia of foods will grow dyspeptic at the lack of parking by his store, near Clinton Street. "You come here, buy a bag of pistachios for $15 and you get a $35 ticket," he said. "You spent $50 on a bag of pistachios! The next time you say, 'Why do I have to come to Atlantic Avenue?' "

He understands some of the changes are organic. The largely Christian Arab quarter between Court and Clinton Streets has shrunk - there are three groceries, one bakery and a half-dozen Middle Eastern restaurants left - not because of rising rents but because the shopkeepers' sons and daughters are spurning the long hours of a grocery for the longer hours of corporate law. (His son and daughter, though, stayed in the business.)

Still, he worries about national chains pouncing on an increasingly bustling avenue, with an Eckerd pharmacy and a Radio Shack already gaining footholds and talk of a Pottery Barn coming.

"Atlantic Avenue has always been a mom-and-pop street," he said.

As a native and current Brooklynite, Joshua Sirefman, the chief operating officer of the city's Economic Development Corporation, which is shepherding several of the projects, has thought about Atlantic Avenue as a "quintessential Brooklyn street" and sees nothing but good coming from the changes.

A cruise ship pier and a park will bring the bustle of Atlantic Avenue down to the waterfront. An arena will start pumping new life into the remainder of the avenue, which stretches beyond Flatbush Avenue for another largely homely nine miles of gas stations and industrial buildings into Queens.

And Candace P. Damon, president of the Atlantic Avenue Local Development Corporation, noted that Atlantic Avenue has safeguards against too radical a transformation. The low-rise buildings along Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill are protected in scale either as landmarks or as a special city district and have storefronts too narrow to appeal to larger merchandisers. Many of the 200 businesses own their buildings and do not have to fear soaring rents.

Ms. Damon's group drew up a master plan last September that focused on small details - more trees, better lighting, safer crosswalks around the ramps of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

"I have neighbors that are concerned we are being Manhattanized," she said. "My feeling is that there certainly will be changes but that the Brooklyn feeling will be maintained."

Residents and merchants are already pleased at the doubling in property values in a decade - brownstones sell between $1 million and $2 million - and an arena and pier may make the neighborhood even pricier. Still, Heloise Gruneberg, a resident of Boerum Hill and a leader of arena opposition, fears the arena in particular will be too much for the street to handle, turning Atlantic Avenue "into a parking lot" and attracting bars and prostitutes.

Sam I. Schwartz, a former city traffic commissioner and a consultant for the master plan, said he thought avenue traffic - now at 35,000 vehicles a day - could be rerouted along Schermerhorn Street should more traffic prove intolerable. "I'm old enough to be hurting from the loss of the Brooklyn Dodgers," he said, "so I'm happy a team is coming to Brooklyn, and I believe the traffic problems are solvable."

Whatever life there has been on the street, one of the most dismal stretches has always been two blocks between Court and Smith Streets. It has two gas stations, the Brooklyn House of Detention, and until recently a five-story municipal garage. In a way, they are remnants of the industrial Atlantic Avenue that in the 19th century included the predecessors of Benjamin Moore paints and Corning Glass Works.

"Historically this street has always been a working man's street, and that's changing," said Dennis Holt, a columnist for The Brooklyn Eagle.

The most prominent example of change arriving even there is a 12-story apartment house rising at the corner of Court Street that will include 321 apartments, a YMCA athletic club, 700 parking spaces, and 20,000 square feet of space for two large retailers. Two smaller apartment houses are going up toward the east, and Brooklyn Law School is building a 360-student dormitory just to the north.

Still, Atlantic Avenue's prosperous makeover does not bode well for one of its longtime fixtures - its bail-bond industry. The five remaining bail offices settled there to be near the Brooklyn courts and the 600-inmate jail. With crime plummeting, the jail was temporarily closed last year and prisoners transferred to Rikers Island.

"They'll push us out, and there aren't many places where we can put our office," said Jack Robbins, who has been lending accused criminals bail for 46 years.

Near Flatbush Avenue, there is a second cluster of Middle Eastern merchants, 25 of them, most of whom are Muslim. Ahsan Habib and Hamed Nabawy can not wait for an arena to be built around the corner and are already thinking of keeping later hours and broadening the variety of their products. Mr. Habib, a Bangladeshi immigrant, runs Madina Industrial Corp. which ships body oils and incense across the country.

Mr. Nabawy, an Egyptian immigrant, is the owner of the Fertile Crescent grocery, a teeming banquet of a store that sells Islamic books, halal meats, dresses, as well as shea butter skin treatment by the cake. He opened the shop 24 years ago, when drug dealers prowled the avenue, but business thrived until the 9/11 attacks caused some New Yorkers to become wary of Muslims. The shops flank the Masjid Al-Farooq, the mosque used by the Egyptian sheik convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Now that business has revived, Mr. Nabawy is not worried that he is an ideal candidate for a souvenir shop. He has a 12-year lease and, in resilient Atlantic Avenue fashion, he may also transform his store.

"I'll make it a more American look," he said.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company


Atlantic Avenue Station Rehabilitation

[BigMac]

New York Times
May 26, 2004

Different by Design, Soon to Be Less So

By DIANE CARDWELL


Built in the early 1990’s with long corridors between stores and no gathering places, the Atlantic Center, on Atlantic Avenue near Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, will undergo small changes, including a paint job and the addition of awnings and new exit markings.

The Atlantic Center mall is not like other malls.

Instead of open, multilevel atriums where dozens of storefronts are easily captured by the naked consumerist eye, there are vast expanses of nothingness and dead corridors leading, it seems, to nowhere. In place of furnished common areas offering respite between purchasing bouts, there are broad stretches of shiny institutional floor tile and walls left bare save a hodgepodge of clown-colored signs advertising stores that no longer exist, or that cannot be reached without wending a route of circuitous switchbacks, or leaving the structure entirely.

And rather than the soothing strains of generic background music or the burbling of a water feature, there is the endless refrain of questions from dazed and confused would-be shoppers: Can you get to Pathmark this way? Have you seen an A.T.M. anywhere? Where is the D.M.V.?

Although critics have long called the mall an eyesore and complained about its seemingly incoherent design, there are reasons for its structure and layout, reasons embedded in both the perception and the reality of race, class, economics and crime in late 20th-century Brooklyn.

Planned and built in the early 1990's, when the area there - at the crossroads of Fort Greene, Prospect Heights and Downtown Brooklyn - was just beginning to emerge from a cocoon of high crime and bleak prospects, the center was intended not as an oasis but as the target of a kind of consumer dive-bombing: customers would dart into one place, grab what they needed and quickly leave.

The isolation of stores and lack of gathering locations inside the building was intentional, said its developer, Bruce Ratner of Forest City Ratner, driven by the needs of skittish national retailers and the notion that urban malls had failed because they became magnets for loitering teenagers who frightened the shoppers away.

"It's a problem of malls in dense urban areas that kids hang out there, and it's not too positive for shopping," Mr. Ratner said. "Look, here you're in an urban area, you're next to projects, you've got tough kids."

Adding that it was not an issue of class or ethnicity, he said: "You know it's kids that cut school. In the burbs, a 15-year-old can't get to the mall without his parents. Here, it's a little different."

As a result, the stores draw shoppers who often find themselves lost in a maze of nondescript corridors interrupted by the occasional sign pointing to a shuttered business or an indeterminate location. "It's difficult, the way that the mall is situated," said Dianne Smith, who works at the Marshalls on the second floor. "You have to go out or go around. I heard a lot of people say that the way the mall is made up is kind of weird."

But now, as Mr. Ratner battles heated opposition for his grand plan to bring a Nets arena to the area, he is trying to fix some of what seems wrong with the Atlantic Center. Although there is little that can be done to the layout itself, there is plenty that can make it more inviting and easier to navigate, Mr. Ratner and his associates said.

The changes should also better integrate it with the Atlantic Terminal mall, which will occupy floors below offices in a new building atop the Long Island Rail Road station at Flatbush Avenue near Atlantic Avenue.

"We decided to redo the interior and do as best we could with the exterior," Mr. Ratner said. "Honestly, it isn't beautiful. It's not architecturally outstanding. It's kept clean, and we do try and take care of it. It's not as bad as a strip center in the burbs, I mean, but it's not something that we would build again."

Back before it was built, the site, part of an area designated for urban renewal, was altogether different. Desolate at night, the neighborhood was known for drug dealing and prostitution; a hotel for the homeless, the Brooklyn Arms, was there as well, said Kathryn S. Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, whose housing subsidiary developed homes there.
Times were also shaky economically. Kenneth K. Fisher, the former city councilman who represented downtown Brooklyn, said it was difficult to convince businesses that the area would draw their target customers.

"You would bring investors over the Brooklyn Bridge," he said, "and they would only see the color of people's skin on Fulton Street, and they didn't see the color of their American Express cards." (In fact, executives at Forest City Ratner said, the mall is now doing $580 in sales per square foot, higher than the average American mall.)

Mr. Ratner said it took near-Herculean efforts of persuasion, plus low rents and say in how the mall was designed, to bring in the original tenants, mainly big box retailers selling a variety of discount goods. So creating a perception of safety was paramount, Forest City Ratner executives said. (Forest City Ratner is The New York Times Company's partner in developing the new Times headquarters on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan.)As crime has fallen, though, the company has become more adept at policing its property, and executives have realized that customers visiting the Atlantic Center want to shop at more than one store. So the developers have revisited some of the old assumptions and are altering the design.

Outside, executives said, many of the more garish elements, like the center's enormous blue-and-beige A logos and multicolored signs, will come off. The outside will be painted to match the brick and terra cotta colors of the Bank of New York building that houses the Atlantic Terminal across the street.

Entrances will be more clearly marked, and awnings will be added to create a pedestrian corridor outside. Plans also call for new columns with clearer and more tasteful directional signs.

It remains to be seen if the changes, scheduled for completion in July when the Atlantic Terminal is set to open, can quell the criticism and calls for demolition.

"It's not very hospitable, and it's not very open and inviting," said Letitia James, a city councilwoman representing the Fort Greene-Clinton Hill area. "And because of the way it's constructed, it's not like malls that you see in other parts of the city or in the suburbs. I'm hoping and praying the Bank of New York building will be a little bit more inviting and more welcoming to the community."

On a recent Friday afternoon, some shoppers echoed that complaint. "From the other level you've got to walk all the way down just to go to Circuit City," said Dionne Goodridge-Primo, who works at a Target store and who was sprinting toward the Burlington Coat Factory through a third-floor corridor. "That shouldn't be." To go between the two stores, she said, "You've got to go back the other way. I've never seen, like, a directory. I was at the D.M.V. and saw a sign for Burlington. That's the only way I'd known that Burlington was there."

But others like the mall just the way it is. "I live closer to Kings Plaza, and I think this is a better environment than that," said Steven Green, a dentist. "I've been here over the years, and it's never crowded, it's clean, neat, friendly and the stores have a better variety, I think." Even the long passageways between stores are a plus: "I like to walk," he said, "so it doesn't bother me."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[krulltime]

B'klyn mall's got a biz-y first day


BY ADAM LISBERG
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Brooklyn shoppers rejoiced at their slice of suburbia yesterday, as throngs packed the new Atlantic Terminal mall for the kind of shopping that used to be a long car ride away.

The borough's first new indoor mall in three decades was jammed with a cross-section of Brooklyn's diversity - Orthodox Jews and Caribbean immigrants shopped alongside tattooed hipsters and stroller-pushing mothers.

The mall, at Atlantic and Flatbush Aves., sits on a once-dilapidated site and has been hailed as a way to pump money and jobs into Brooklyn.

Developer Bruce Ratner is now pressing for approval to build a controversial $2.5 billion complex nearby that would include a 20,000-seat arena for the Nets basketball team.

"It might take away a little bit of the small-town character of Brooklyn, but I'm glad it's here," said Aisha Gayle, a 23-year-old grad student from nearby Boerum Hill.

Shoppers streamed across the landscaped plaza of the $120 million complex, clutching bags from stores like Pathmark, Discount Shoe Warehouse and Daffy's.

But the biggest draw seemed to be Target, the discount retailer with hipster cred and low-price appeal. All 42 registers were open, all 750 red shopping carts were in use, and entire aisles had been swept clean of merchandise.

Target manager Marcus Lewis said it was the best-performing store in the entire chain this weekend.

"It's excellent," said pregnant Tracey Heaton, 35, ofPark Slope, who was able to put her shopping cart on aspecial escalator as she juggled her 2-year-old daughter, Katie.

Originally published on July 26, 2004


All contents © 2004 Daily News, L.P.

[krulltime]

Atlantic Terminal Mall Opens In Brooklyn



Click On Me!

JULY 26TH, 2004


Brooklyn's newest mall opened for business Sunday.

The Atlantic Terminal Mall is the latest step in the revitalization of Downtown Brooklyn. The tenants of the new shopping center include Target, DSW, Guitar Center, Daffy's and the borough's first Chuck E. Cheese.

“This place is built over 10 subway trains and the Long Island Rail Road,” said Bruce Bender, a spokesman for the developer, Forest City Ratner Companies. “This is actually a construction feat. It's in the busiest intersection of the borough. It's called the crossroads of the borough, on Flatbush and Atlantic avenues. And we're sitting on the plaza, 22,000 square feet of open space for the community.”

Sunday’s grand opening festivities include entertainment, giveaways and refreshments.

The $150 million dollar mall, the first to open in Brooklyn in two decades, brings about 1,000 new retail jobs to the area. But some people are concerned about the intentions of the developer, Bruce Ratner, who also wants to build an arena for the Nets nearby.

“The jobs are not, by and large going, to our community,” said state Assembly candidate Susan Metz, one of a handful of protestors outside the mall. “When he put up Atlantic Center there's a housing development right on the other side. The same thing happened when he put up Metrotech.”

But the managers of both Target and Chuck E. Cheese refute that claim. They say the majority of their employees live in Brooklyn.



Copyright © 2004 NY1 News.

[Pottebaum]

Is this the first Target in NYC?


EDIT:
[Nevermind]--I did a quick search, and it looks like there are a few others throughout the city.

[Kris]

August 8, 2004

SQUARE FEET

Downtown Brooklyn: At Site Dodgers Rejected, Target Store Is a Hit

By STEVE VIUKER


The new Atlantic Terminal. An office building rises above the mall, at Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues and houses a new Target store.

IN the last week of July, on a steamy evening, Sandra Bernhard was holding forth in downtown Brooklyn at the new Target, entertaining the hundreds of guests who had come to celebrate the store's opening.

It was a significant moment for a number of reasons. The Target is part of the Atlantic Terminal, a new mall built by Forest City Ratner. It is expected to provide millions in new tax revenue and upgrade the quality of the other stores in the area.

But the land also has a history that is meaningful to longtime residents of Brooklyn. It is part of a 24-acre parcel that in 1956 was designated by the city as the future site of the new Ebbets Field, which was supposed to keep the Brooklyn Dodgers from leaving the borough. It didn't work; the field was never built, the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, and for many decades, the land became symbolic of dreams for the city that were never realized.

The new Atlantic Terminal retail complex suggests a much happier future for that area. The complex, bounded by Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues, Hanson Place and Fort Greene Place, sits atop the newly renovated Long Island Rail Road terminal, which has pedestrian walkways connecting it to 10 subway lines. Above the new stores are offices.

The long-awaited Target store is 194,000 square feet and occupies levels two through four. The shopping complex is four stories high, with an additional floor below grade, with a total of 375,000 square feet. The new center, which will also include Designer Shoe Warehouse, Daffy's, Bath & Body Works, Verizon, Rockaway Bedding, Carver Savings, Starbucks and McDonald's, is adjacent to the Atlantic Center shopping center, which opened in 1996.

The new Target is one of the company's few two-story stores. Shoppers can use a cart-only escalator that runs along side the people escalator as they make their way from floor to floor.

The company recently opened a store in the Bronx, and the new one in Brooklyn is its second in that borough; the other is in East New York. Paula Thorton Greear, a spokeswoman for Target, said the company was gratified by the response to the Atlantic Terminal opening. "We've been interested in the New York market for quite some time," she said. "We were attracted to downtown Brooklyn by the location and by the demographics of the surrounding area. The Atlantic Terminal Target is meeting our expectations and guest traffic continues to remain high."

One of the new store's closest competitors is the K-Mart on Astor Place in Manhattan. While K-Mart has Martha Stewart, Target has Isaac Mizrahi and Michael Graves.

The retail outlets in the Atlantic Terminal center are expected to generate some $16 million in new sales tax revenues annually. "We are on the threshold of making Brooklyn's downtown the most successful new business and residential district in New York," said Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn borough president. He discounted the idea that the new mall might have a negative impact on the stores on nearby Fulton Street. The competition, he said, would be beneficial. "Target and the Atlantic Terminal will force merchants on Fulton Street to upgrade to compete for shoppers," he said. "This makes for a win-win situation for businesses and consumers."

Although the terminal opened only during the last week of July, some benefits already seem visible. Joe Sitt, president and chief executive of Thor Equities and vice chairman of the Fulton Mall Association, said Target had already increased business on Fulton Street, much to his surprise. "I never would have thought that possible," he said. "Our merchants are seeing shoppers who have never been to Fulton Street before. They come after visiting Atlantic Terminal. Junior's restaurant had their best-ever Sunday after that mall opened." He said his company owns the Galleria Mall on Fulton Street and "we are upgrading; we believe our mall will also benefit from Atlantic Terminal."

That doesn't mean there will be no downside to the new stores. George Cambas, a Park Slope real estate broker and Boerum Hill homeowner, said he thought the new stores would be appealing to residents who now may not find what they want on Fulton Street. But, he said, "the traffic problems on Flatbush Avenue can only get worse; they've increased already."

Of equal importance to the downtown Brooklyn redevelopment plan is the Bank of New York's move into its new offices above the retail complex. The 10-story, 396,000-square-foot office tower was developed with the assistance of $114 million in Liberty Bonds.

Before Sept. 11, 2001, the Bank of New York occupied 2.5 million square feet of office space at several locations in Lower Manhattan. Two of them, 101 Barclay Street and 100 Church Street, were severely damaged by the attacks. With the help of a $37.5 million grant through the World Trade Center Job Creation and Retention Program and up to $2 million in sales tax exemptions, the Bank of New York decided to keep 7,700 jobs in New York City for at least 12 years. Tax incentives reduced the rents by $15 to $20 per square foot.

Existing residential projects may be able to exploit the convenient location of the mall. The Toy Factory Lofts, a condominium with 56 units on Johnson Street varying in size from 600 square feet to 1,100 square feet, offers unobstructed views of the Brooklyn and Manhattan skylines. The lofts, priced between $200,000 and $250,000, are near public transportation, Pratt Institute, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, MetroTech and now, of course, Atlantic Terminal.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

March 10, 2006
Brooklyn House of Detention Seen as a Jail With Retail
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER


Part of the Brooklyn House of Detention complex, in Boerum Hill, would be converted to retail shopping space under a city plan.

By almost any measure, the Brooklyn House of Detention, 10 stories of razor wire and wire-mesh windows in Boerum Hill, is a repellent sight.

But, the city reasons, it need not be so. So, to attract people other than criminal suspects to the 760-bed jail, the Correction Department has decided to convert part of the complex into 24,000 square feet of retail shopping space.

"The site is going to be redeveloped," Martin F. Horn, the correction commissioner, said in an interview this week. "One way or another, retail is going to be there."

Under Mr. Horn's jail-with-retail plan, three sides of the block that the jail now occupies, along Atlantic Avenue between Smith Street and Boerum Place, would be converted to one-story retail space beginning this summer. The jail entrance, now on Atlantic, would be moved to the fourth side of the block, along State Street.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Mr. Horn said, "enthusiastically" supports the redevelopment plan, part of a $240 million reconception of the jail that will most likely also add more cell space. Mr. Horn declined to say exactly how many more inmates a bigger Brooklyn jail would hold.

A spokeswoman for the mayor referred questions about the plan last night to the Correction Department.

Which retailers would be asked, or be willing, to open a shop on jail property remains to be seen, several city and local elected officials said. But Mr. Horn and several elected officials in Brooklyn, including Marty Markowitz, the borough president, and David Yassky, a city councilman from Brooklyn Heights, floated a few ideas this week.

An upscale food market, Mr. Horn suggested; a children's clothing store, Mr. Yassky offered; law offices, Mr. Markowitz mentioned.

Mr. Markowitz, who is known to gush about how great Brooklyn is, said that even a boutique hotel on jail grounds would be nice — but only if the city razed the existing structure and rebuilt it from scratch.

"If it's designed in such a way that the guests feel totally comfortable," he said yesterday, "why not?"

Mr. Markowitz added that although he would prefer to see the jail closed permanently, if it is to be open it should also have retail and, preferably, residential space.

"Let's make it something that we never would have dreamed about," he said.

Retail experts said a deluxe supermarket would do well in the neighborhood, a nexus of Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill and Downtown Brooklyn.

"Food would be a very important component there," said Howard Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz & Associates, a retail consulting and investment banking firm based in New York. "Coffee would be critical. From there, you might go to something jeans-oriented, or footwear."

And, of course, Mr. Davidowitz added, "a home store."

"Even a mini Home Depot," he said. "It would be perfect."

The idea of making the House of Detention more than just a lockup was generated months ago by neighborhood groups. Meeting with Mr. Horn in Mr. Markowitz's Borough Hall offices, members of three groups that wanted the jail closed — and it will not be, Mr. Horn has said — said that if it must remain open, perhaps it could accommodate shopping or residential space.

Mr. Horn said he took the idea to the mayor and City Council leaders. By summer, he said, he plans to send out requests for redevelopment proposals; shops under the jail could be open in three years. Meanwhile, Mr. Markowitz's office asked students at the Pratt Institute to draw up a few ambitious designs.

But to some groups, one floor of retail space, comprising just 24,000 square feet, is not enough to veil the architectural grimace they say the jail casts over the neighborhood.

"This is kind of less than what we were expecting," said Judy Stanton, the president of the Brooklyn Heights Association. "We're definitely in favor of retail. It's just disappointing that we spent so many meetings and involved two classes of Pratt students to come up with mixed-use ideas, when the only thing that may come from it is ground-floor retail."

Other neighbors said they worried about shopping under a jail tower packed with criminal suspects. Correction officials, however, said the retail area would be securely separated from the inmate section of the jail. Inmates are not evident to the public; they arrive at the jail in buses that enter the bowels of the complex through a gate.

City officials noted that in New York, jail space is already mixed with retail shops. Along Centre Street, under the Bernard B. Kerik Center, the jail complex in Lower Manhattan, restaurants and other businesses do a brisk business.

The Brooklyn jail was closed in June 2003; most inmates are now housed on Rikers Island, which is connected to Queens via one two-lane bridge. But the Brooklyn House will reopen next year, if not sooner, Mr. Horn said, when the floating barge jail in the Bronx is closed for repairs.

Keeping the Brooklyn jail open makes sense for other reasons, too, Mr. Horn said. "For a lot of reasons, it's not good policy for the city to put all its inmates, including women and babies, on Rikers Island," he said. For instance, in the event of a major hurricane, he said, much of Rikers Island would flood.

"How would I evacuate 12,000 over that one bridge?" Mr. Horn asked.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

March 12, 2006
Prisoners Up Above, 'Nifty-Gifties' Down Below
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER

The Brooklyn House of Detention, bounded by Atlantic Avenue and the criminal courts building, is apparently headed into a mixed-use future.

Soon, it will house not only inmates and jail cells, but also, in a vision endorsed by the mayor, a 24,000-square-foot strip mall on the street level.

The biggest question may now be which businesses the Department of Correction, the property's landlord, will bring to this increasingly residential section of Boerum Hill.

City and borough officials have publicly suggested a high-end food store, a children's clothing outlet or law offices. But retailing experts, community groups and New York City business owners interviewed Friday had their own ideas.

"There's a tremendous amount of potential to sell what I call the nifty-gifties," said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst for the NPD Group, a market research firm. "You have a captive audience, even with the visitors," he added. Forget boutique stores. "Think of it as more of an upscale airport gift shop."

Jesse Masyr, a Manhattan real estate lawyer, said "neighborhood-support retail," meaning small convenience-oriented shops, would have the most success under the jail. Forget about big box retailers. "You're not going to find a Target or Home Depot under 100,000 square feet," Mr. Masyr said. Even Circuit City or Best Buy stores typically require 50,000 square feet.

Anthony Malkin, president of W&M Properties, said the jail should focus on attracting retailers who offer basic services — "a place to get coffee, a place to get a doughnut."

"Could it be a Starbucks?" Mr. Malkin asked. "Is there a need for a FedEx? What about a Kinko's?"

"Just because it's a jail," he said, "doesn't mean that it can't have good retail use."

Whatever the Correction Department decides, mixing the jail space with retail, or even a restaurant, is a brilliant idea, said Gary Alterman, executive vice president of Newmark Knight Frank Retail. "It's a good retail area, it's strong, it's healthy, it's residential," he said. "The criminals are not coming out to go shopping, but certainly there's going to be plenty of visitors there."

Adding retail to the jail, which is currently closed, would be part of a $240 million redevelopment project that would also add jail beds, said Martin F. Horn, the Department of Correction commissioner. He has told community groups that he favors doubling the jail's capacity, to nearly 1,600 beds.

The shopping area would be limited to the ground floor, along three sides of the block the jail occupies south of Downtown Brooklyn.

Many retail chains did not seem enthusiastic. Executives at Duane Reade, the Gap, Dean & Deluca and Old Navy did not return calls on Friday asking if they might be interested in becoming jail tenants.

Representatives from Starbucks, Target, Home Depot and Trader Joe's did return calls, but only to say they had no comment or were not interested. "At this time, in our two-year plan, Brooklyn is not in it," said Alison Mochizuki, a spokeswoman for Trader Joe's, an upscale food market with a store opening near Union Square later this month.

A spokesman for Home Depot said the space under the jail was far too small. "On that alone, we wouldn't consider it," said the spokesman, Yancey Casey.

Some neighborhood residents said they would welcome convenience shops under the jail; there are none in the immediate area now.

But other neighbors are upset at Mr. Horn and Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, for limiting the jail's redevelopment to ground-level retail.

"This is outrageous, what's going on," said Sandy Balboza, president of the Atlantic Avenue Betterment Association, which wants the jail closed permanently.

But others see the potential for retail gold. Mr. Cohen, the retail industry analyst, said the Department of Correction should consider opening its own gift shop. "They might even be able to brand the prison," he said. "The New York correctional facility logo might really take off."

Simon Dinally, the owner of Reliable Hardware, on 18th Avenue in Brooklyn, said he would consider selling his wares — saws, drills, files — and offering locksmith service under the 10-story jail.

He dismissed the suggestion that the city might not rent space to a business like his: "It's a nonissue, not even something to think about. Like a liquor store next to a church."

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

March 12, 2006
Downtown Brooklyn
Jailhouse Blues? On the Contrary
By JAKE MOONEY

The window grate was down last week at American Liberty Bail Bonds, on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, and it looked as if it had been down for a while. The sign out front was intact, but the storefront, across from the vacant Brooklyn House of Detention on the edge of Boerum Hill, was now home to jumbled stacks of chairs, a dusty dryer and a chunk of wood that used to be a bar.

Word has spread that the jail, shuttered since June 2003, will begin operating by next year to help accommodate the city's rising inmate population. That news came too late for some of the businesses, like American Liberty, that made up a jail-related cottage industry in the surrounding blocks, but others are hanging on, and they are a rare breed: neighbors of a jail who want it back.

"We want the jail open; we need the jail open," said Oscar Chiuz, the owner of Bad Apple Bail Bonds. Mr. Chiuz was wearing a sharp suit and sitting behind thick glass in an office that had an exposed brick wall and a carved wooden shark atop the fireplace mantle. An Alcatraz souvenir snow globe sat on his desk.

When the 760-bed jail was in operation, there was a window just inside the front door where a friend, a relative or a bail bondsman could post bail. But since it closed, inmates have generally been shipped to Rikers Island, and posting bail has become more difficult.

"It makes it harder for us, harder for the people, because they're the ones that have to spend more time in jail, because we have to go to Rikers to do all the paperwork," Mr. Chiuz said. His employees were quick to add that the arrangement is also costly to taxpayers, since the city must feed and house inmates during the extra jail time.

Of course, in much of the neighborhood, the plan to reopen the jail — which would have 24,000 square feet of ground-level retail stores and, most likely, more cells — is distinctly unwelcome.

"It's been the devout wish of the neighborhood to get this thing closed and gone, because it does not do a thing for the neighborhood," said Heloise Gruneberg, president of Brooklyn Vision, a local group. She said that convenience for inmates and their families was not enough reason to locate a jail in a vibrant area, and called including jail cells and stores in the same building "harebrained."

In recent years, too, local property values have risen, and nearby blocks are speckled with construction sites, including a row of $2.6 million town houses a block away on State Street. A Brooklyn Industries store, adding hipster cachet, opened last year at Smith Street and Atlantic Avenue.

Arlene Bonner, an office worker at Above All Bail Bonds, remembers with a certain wistfulness a different era, the days when people lined up outside her door. Now, business is steady but slow, so she spends much of her time handling paperwork. Still, she said of a possible reopening of the jail: "It's long overdue, long overdue. And it probably will stop some of the commotion that goes on at Rikers."

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[VDiMiceli]

Check it out: Story on retail and doubling size of jail.

http://www.brooklynpapers.com/html/i...9_09nets5.html

and

http://www.brooklynpapers.com/html/i...9_11nets1.html






http://www.brooklynpapers.com/html/i...11/29_11bp.pdf