any thoughts on bushwick?

*my

brb hiding my daughters

kind of a weird joke

it's that bushwick humor, you'll get it shortly

http://image1.masterfile.com/em_w/05/64/64/846-05646404em.jpg

congrats & good luck treesh

where in bushwick

also seamless delivery has elevated robertas to a solid 3.5 robertas out of 5

Moving to a house with a backyard (!) a block from the DeKalb stop. Definitely hoping to order Robertas delivery on the reg.

roberta's is so 2009

I really like their bread and butter

treesh, i pass thru DeKalb on my commute every day now, let's get a drink

That sounds great. I'll let you know when I'm moved in

ok, so i was walking up and down my street in socks just now talking on the phone and a rat ran across my feet

hey dekalb is my stop too

bushwick rats fear nothing

in socks?

Yeah, pretty foolish. I just stepped out because i wasn't getting cell reception.

Does anyone see any evidence that the endless march toward total gentrification in Bushwick is slowing down a little? I hadn't really hung out in bushwick for like 3-4 years and was around the morgan and jefferson stops this weekend and felt like things hadn't changed as much as I expected they would have. But OTOH maybe I'm just expecting things to happen faster than they really ever do.

the one thing i picked up on this spring/summer is a noticeable uptick in europeans in the area. i think "bushwick is cool" finally traveled across the atlantic sometime early this year.

one of the best things i saw this summer was a group of pale euros standing on the manhattan bound platform at myrtle bway when a queens bound J train pulled up on the manhattan bound track, as often happens on weekday afternoons. the group of euros looked at the train, looked back down towards manhattan, looked at the train again, stepped halfway in the train, craned their neck down towards manhattan again, then decided to get off.

Actually we did notice a lot of people walking around snapping pictures, taking selfies in front of wall pieces, etc. That was different. Also one of the galleries we stopped in had this older, wealthy looking couple talking to an employee in a private room, like they were actual collectors discussing buying something. I guess I was just expecting to see more new condo buildings or something? But when I think about Williamsburg it took a pretty long time to reach a fever pitch of new construction, plus there are probably zoning issues.

i feel like at certain points on weekends, the area around the morgan stop (especially the immediate block off the stop by robertas & momo) can feel almost as crowded as getting off the bedford stop. nothing really is quite that bad but i've had a few days this year where i got off the stop and was just like, what the fuck is going on here

anyway i'm not sure i have a great feel for whether the gentrifying has slowed down. 2 new buildings have gone up on my block in the last year (one of which has a 1 bedroom w/ private patio that goes for 2,700), an apt building two plots down should be up w/in a few months and a new building just got unwrapped on top of my fav bodega. also a few weeks ago i noticed that a tapas bar is opening across the street from me.

it does sometimes feel like we're in the final sprint of bushwick gentrification but there's still soooo many old buildings/houses that are gonna get razed in the coming years

I guess i hadn't spent much time by the Wyckoff stop ever because I felt very old and confused when we headed over there after picking up my wife at an art opening because yelp told me about Lucy's Vietnamese, which I really enjoyed and we saw Boobie Trap and Pizza Party for the first time.

Definitely one thing that prompted the thinking was feeling a little bit
old there, like it doesn't seem to have turned over much toward the stroller crowd. Maybe just never will.

the kids who've moved there haven't had their own kids yet, and the people who have the kids won't move their until they're ok with the schools probably? I don't know anything about that stuff, just speculating.

I was surprised at the extent that wyckoff has changed. my gf and I used to eat at cocoyac, which is apparently now sort of a known destination? I think the morgan stop is probably kind of saturated until new buildings go in, but lots of change is happening further to the east.

I like that the first post in this thread gives a basic description of what bushwick is, which trains go there, where it's located etc. "it's a neighborhood in north brooklyn"

Morgan is a headache

I'm working by Jefferson stop, hearing a lot of French and German. I am a foreigner also

the coffee shop charge £3 for a bagel and 2.75 for a medium coffee, double the price of the health store next door

One thing that occurred to me walking around (mostly in the Jefferson and Morgan stop areas) was that it still retains a very industrial feel, and also does not have much green space afaict. Those are hard things to change and may mean it's just not destined to become park-slopey, at least not for a very long time. Williamsburg and Greenpoint seem to have more park space compared to their area,

Bogart Street felt like a college campus, although I kind of remember it feeling that way last time I was there. It's basically the same businesses around there except the Momenta building has more galleries in it now.

i live down J-wards, between the myrtle and kosz stops. for a while it really did feel insulated from the much more visibly gentrifying bushwick along the L. little skips, the coffee shop, was kinda the only thing that seemed like an obvious tip-off, and even that had a much more low-rent vibe to it - just like an "every coffee shop ever" kinda place that maybe could have been there for years and years on the cheap, serving granola to radicals decades ago and just muddling through. obviously not the case but it had that 'feel.' the clientele has really shifted even over the last couple years - people having like, business lunches about who to hit up for their kickstarter to make their film happen or whatever. and yeah way more european tourists. but meanwhile lots more things catering to college-educated white artist types have opened up. i live in fear that my landlord will finally get the memo and jack up our rent or sell out, but so far things remain stable. he claims he wants to give the building to his daughter when she finishes high school. that's a few years from now so fingers crossed.

but condo construction has by NO MEANS slowed down. it's intensifying. on my five-minute walk to the train i pass 4-5 substantial construction sites. if i go the slightly more scenic way i pass two construction sites and three recently completed horrible buildings. i'm a short walk away from the garishly awful "castle braid" (worst building ever built possibly, and just FLAUNTING the cubic footage it's wasting on like a triple-height super-lobby with piano and suspended bubble chairs etc. - - - no space for affordable units, huh?), and the more banal but more offensive "colony 1209" building. this shit is getting slapped up, fast, cheap and ugly. "castle braid" maybe sums things up best: a building for people with MONEY, who have heard this is an "artsy" neighborhood and expect to see some "art" slapped up on the surface of their building. note that the wretched "art" is obviously easily removable should the day come that the owner realizes the "art" trend is over and they can just be plain old "luxury."

best things in my walking radius: the tacos on myrtle between bushwick and st. charles. in general all the locally owned businesses are great and the ones that have the whiff of some outside operator trying to cash in on the hip new neighborhood are horrid from the moment you cross the threshold. i am however mostly charmed by the hipster alleyway 'flea market' at broadway and lewis, mainly for books and VHS tapes but i've gotten good shit at the record shop too. (northern lights records on lawton is very very good also, esp. for jazz, soul & r&b). maria hernandez park is lovely and well-used but i'm a sap for seeing families doing banal pleasant things with their kids. see also little league at green central knoll. every so often we'll splurge on a yuppie brunch at 983, but you have to get there early to beat the crowds. little skips is still all right (again if you beat the crowds) but i also dig cafe central at central and troutman, which is super quiet and has just the loveliest backyard. all the new expensive shit on/near wyckoff can fuck right off. the even more expensive shit on morgan is just laughable.

lately though my favorite spots are more of a bike ride away. grover cleveland playground is a wonderful place to do some reading and the view of the manhattan skyline is preposterous. the other day i said fuck it and biked all the way to forest park. that doesn't have much to do with bushwick but boy is it nice.

my father in law has a grandiose unified theory of gentrification in nyc based on whether the nypd is in an "imperial" or a "defensive" stance. his current thinking is that they're shifting back to a pre-bloomberg containment strategy, leaving, say, east new york and brownsville ungentrified for now and parts of bushwick in the awkward inbetween stage under discussion here.

i live under the m tracks and there are literally three condo buildings under construction at my intersection, two of them right next to each other and the third directly across the street.

not having heard the complete theory propounded, i couldn't say for sure but it seems a little too "the nation that controls magnesium controls the universe" to me. i mean clearly gentrification is following transit lines and then spreading from those points as rents go up. so people who moved to williamsburg, or would have moved there, 10-15 years ago, at some point couldn't afford it anymore and moved to the jefferson stop, say. now they can't afford that either and they're roaming south towards the J or following the M into ridgewood (which has way, way better housing stock anyway). the key of course has been the rerouting of the M - http://citylimits.org/2013/05/24/how-the-m-train-is-gentrifying-bushwick/ if the depression or the 70s fiscal crisis had hit at different moments, we might have more subway lines, more even coverage, period, and the pressure on specific neighborhoods would be different. (or: the people whose biggest priority is a short trip to wall street might be gentrifying different neighborhoods than the people whose biggest priority is making art and drinking in a warehouse.)

i saw our city councilperson speak a while ago and he had some really interesting slides where basically they can identify the blocks that are likely in the highest danger of being picked apart by a developer looking to consolidate several lots into one big one that makes for an easy big luxury building. sorta common sense but still impressive to see in mathematical map form. are there already vacant lots on the block? is it near a train? etc... it's a complicated mess obviously as many gentrification threads have discussed to death. don't mind me.

oh also the "colony" building is so. stunningly. terrible. like i guess i get what they were going for with the name like it's yaddo or something but for real

you could not MAKE UP a more perfect demonstration of what people hate about gentrification. and then to top it off it's just architecturally bankrupt. i mean 99% of these new buildings are but yowza is that bad. awful in every way.

i've just barely started collecting A/B photos of buildings under construction and the little CAD elevations they're required to put up on the construction fence which supposedly tell you what the building's going to look like. have found at least one smoking-gun 'does not match in the fucking slightest' case but don't really know what to do with it. i guess if i found enough of them that are that dramatic it could be a cool blog post or something. the construction site on my block claims to be for two four-story row-house type buildings side by side (or maybe narrow elevator apartment buildings like those commonly seen around, e.g. on troutman there are several bad ones) but... the site is big enough for three easily, and i can't see why they would build two party-wall buildings when they've gone to the trouble of assembling a big enough site to put a real whopper of an ugly slab like everybody else is doing, so you're devoting as little as possible of the footprint to the vertical circulation. maybe i'm missing something.

Yeah those buildings look terrible and very much in that same awful style as a lot of the Williamsburg and LIC condos/rentals that have been built in the last decade -- multi-colored, junky, and lacking in sense of place. Gentrification has enough problems as it is, but it seems even worse that what's being built looks so shabby and temporary and disconnected from its location.

There are parts of Williamsburg and LIC now that feel like they could be Arlington VA.

If you're going to build a rich neighborhood on top of a poor one, at least make it look worthy of being a rich neighborhood!

Oh huh, stumbled onto this:

http://therealdeal.com/issues_articles/a-new-soho/

But Bushwick’s longtime identity as an industrial area presents obstacles to development, especially when it comes to zoning. Unlike Williamsburg, the city seems committed to maintaining Bushwick’s industrial zoning, experts say, which could prevent the building of large-scale housing developments in the prime northwest corner of the neighborhood.

Not sure what "seems" comes from, but it definitely felt like there were tons of active small factories, warehouses, metal shops etc.

have you guys seen these new buildings that have a front door and then two separate entrances after that essentially halve the building? there's one on my street i believe that says like APT 1-4 on one door and APT 4-8 on the other

yeah the still-active industrial stuff was also an issue in the city councilman's talk. those places are major job centers, not only for bushwick but for the substantial patches of williamsburg that have not seen their longstanding residents forced out. easy for people not from the community, or in different lines of work, to just pass by it as background, a bunch of gray stuff, but it's just a ton of livelihoods up there. also kind of bizarre to imagine it as this prime development opportunity as they have to be some of the nastiest sites in the city pollution-wise. the moment you stick a shovel in the ground up there it would probably dissolve so god help you trying to make it viable for residential. but then, over in gowanus there's a goddamned whole foods overlooking the scenic canal so what do i know.

the double-door thing is presumably that it's a couple of walkups, right? rather than an elevator-plus-corridor affair. frankly that seems more sensible, if people are willing to hoof it up to the fourth floor by all means don't waste your money and space on the elevator - put it into having the floors and walls actually meet at 90 degrees and not being instantly full of mold. it's astonishing how cheap and shitty the new buildings are, especially when so much of these neighborhoods was built out as developer-driven housing for brewery workers and clerks a hundred years ago. obviously the cost of construction has skyrocketed since then but still - all the really excellent housing stock in ridgewood was really just block after block of a handful of building firms cranking out a standardized product.

I'm guessing the double door thing is where a single development was built over two tax lots maybe?

Any bushwick/north brooklyn ilxors free to grab a drink saturday night? I have yet to meet any ny ilxors.

Still want to get a drink w/ north brooklyn ilxors.

i drink in the north sometimes, treesh

word

very big pretzels at gottscheer hall in ridgewood just a couple stops down the M

Would meet up with n bkxors. I'm by the lorimer L stop.

Was at Petes candy store yesterday afternoon, lots of dudes and girls with guitars for open mic