any thoughts on bushwick?

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

anyone want to have a beer and hang at union pool on Sunday night? TEEN record release party there: http://www.union-pool.com/event/1032461-hypnocraft-teen-record-brooklyn/

yeah, that sounds like a good time

Any good places to eat within reasonable walk of the Morgan L that won't be insane on a Friday night? Is Roberta's wait still insane? Momo Sushi Shack?

if you go up to jefferson there are a lot of places. hi hello is good, as is northeast kingdom

roberta's will be crazy but they do have the adjacent takeout spot now

shinobi ramen is small but very good, el cortez is good and usually chill early in the night, okiway has p good non-sushi japanese, king noodle is good chinese, 973 for more american stuff

Yeah I have been to Northeast Kingdom for brunch and it was very good. I also figured waits would be long there on a Friday night, although we might go on the early side and I'm guessing bushwick runs late.

all those places are like 0-5 mins from the morgan L... as treeship says there's a bunch of places if you walk further east

faro is at the jefferson stop (so a quick walk from morgan) and is excellent. it looks like any stupid boring brooklyn restaurant but the food is really really good. sort of pasta oriented but more interesting than that sounds. i've been there 5 or 6 times and haven't been disappointed once.

also they take reservations which is rare and good.

assuming the menu hasn't changed significantly in the past couple weeks get the agniolotti it was real

yeah that place is pretty tight

i like momo

my only prob w/ momo is that it's cash only

the skewer place next to it was disappointing tho

there's a new huge movie theatre/sports bar kinda thing right across the street from roberta's with a menu that seems pretty good for what it is

not only is momo cash only ... http://ny.eater.com/2016/1/25/10827764/momo-sushi-shack-atm-skimmer

manziel?

just don't get caught in the Jackie Gleason centennial parade

wound up needing to not wait and thus had kind of bad pub food at Forest Place, although it was a nice hangout spot and I'd still go back for drinks

yeah that place is :-/

that place sucks, cute (if overdone) re-do of the building/site but the food is super meh, the music is autopilot top hits blah and the decor looks like someone went into a spastic episode while trying to imagine what 'arty' people like. honestly the only place over there where i spend money in the evening is tina's 24 hour diner. do keep meaning to see how the moviegoing experience is at syndicated though. fuck all the other new shit though and most of the people that go with it.

yeah the food was really bad, like I complained about it bad (they were nice enough to comp the food as a result though). I still thought it was a fine place to hang, maybe nothing special but a comfortable not too lit place where it felt lively but I could still have a normal level conversation.

love bushwick a few bad joints don't spoil the pleasure

i went to the three diamond door once when drunk a few months ago, drifting with a cloud of strangers and one close friend. it's taken on a sort of mystical quality in my mind since then, think i'll revisit tomorrow

i mostly just remember the door

i still think there's 2-3 years before an eastern conference team is knocking lebron out