Brooklyn The Borough Posts

October 16, 2008 / / Housing

“Do you hear the crickets?,” asked Ali Jafri, a broker for Prudential Douglas Elliman. We were standing on the ninth-floor balcony of a brand-new three-bedroom condominium for sale at 20 Bayard Street in Williamsburg. “That’s something you won’t get in Manhattan.”

These days, Mr. Jafri might hear crickets more often than he’d like. It was the Sunday before the European markets began to tumble, during peak open house hours, and the buyer traffic through Brooklyn’s newer towers was slow. Just a few days earlier, The New York Times had declared that “the credit crisis and the turmoil on Wall Street are bringing New York’s real estate boom to an end.”

October 1, 2008 / / Observer Original

When the Dow plummeted on Monday after Congress failed to pass a bailout for Wall Street’s many woes, Brooklyn’s creative class was already bracing itself. A downturn at the top of the food chain can’t bode well for those closer to the bottom, like the plethora of visual and performing artists that reside here.

“It’s just a drag,” said Karen Brooks Hopkins, the president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, whose fall season opens this week. “What I feel bad about is that the arts organizations, the cultural organizations, have finally recovered from 9/11, and now this.

September 23, 2008 / / Housing

As a chillier wind sliced through Brooklyn’s popular corridors last Saturday night, it was hard to imagine by the looks of things that anything was wrong with the economy. On North Sixth Street in Williamsburg, young women with Louis Vuitton bags teetered in Manolo Blahniks on the arms of their white-collared dates. Booze coursed through veins as the music at Sea shook passersby with stentorian beats.

But the next day at the sleepy Brooklyn Inn, the 138-year-old Boerum Hill bar frequented by local financial types, The Times’ Sunday business section sat menacingly on the oak bar as Leonard Cohen’s “So Long Marianne” wafted through the air. Two 30-ish JP Morgan employees sat quietly at the bar contemplating the future of the financial industry, fretting a bit about their own jobs.

September 16, 2008 / / Observer Original

“First off, there’s no question—in my humble opinion—that the literary center of New York has moved to Brooklyn,” said our oh-so-humble Borough President Marty Markowitz celebrating the Brooklyn Book Festival in the ornate lobby of Borough Hall this past Sunday. “The authors live here, the illustrators live here, and the energy—there’s that energy!—among residents of Brooklyn.” And of course, Marty is the first to throw a party for them.

September 9, 2008 / / Housing

I love the Q train. O.K., I love the B, too, but it’s the Q that’s stolen my heart.

When I moved back to Brooklyn in January, the biggest factor in finding an apartment was its proximity to this train line, and especially to the 7th Avenue station (a nice change of pace after riding the G train for three years). It’s just far enough into Brooklyn that I am in a quiet, residential neighborhood, but also only the third stop into the borough, easily depositing me anywhere I need to go in Manhattan.

August 26, 2008 / / Housing

Last week, I was invited for beers in the comfy backyard of a gorgeous brownstone in the Slope and we got to talking about what life is like in Brooklyn’s utopian paradise.

August 5, 2008 / / Housing

“That’s Brooklyn Heights over there,” said the 47-year-old driver of a Brooklyn-bound double-decker Gray Line tour bus, pointing across the East River. “Wherever there’s water, there’s money, and I don’t mean a puddle on the street.”

July 29, 2008 / / Housing

“I just thought the whole thing was fabulous – what a great childhood you had!,” responded my mom when I asked her why in the world she ever decided to raise her children in Manhattan. In the 1980s. On Eighth Avenue and 53rd Street. “You got to see a side of the world other kids don’t.” Words of truth from a great mom.

July 22, 2008 / / Housing

While Williamsburg has spent the last decade getting a face lift, Atlantic City did the same, with developers putting up towers on the waterfront. While Brooklyn got luxurious condos, Atlantic City got luxurious hotels: the Chelsea, the Borgata, the Water Club and, tallest of them all, Harrah’s. Crime and drugs are still busy in both, but hidden a few blocks in from the unsuspecting eye, and developers are falling over themselves to draw the young and the hip to the waterfront in both locations.

July 15, 2008 / / Housing