Downtown plan: City University is offering to sweeten its deal with developer Bruce Ratner to build a laboratory and classroom building for City Tech in Downtown Brooklyn, The Brooklyn Paper has learned. Comments (5).
Downtown plan: Downtown Brooklyn is licking its chops over a plan to bring the upscale Morton’s steakhouse to the Brooklyn Marriott next year. Comments (2).
Editorial: Are there problems with all this development going on Downtown? Of course. But on the balance, Downtown’s rebirth is far better off in the hands of the market than in those of the bureaucrats. Comments (1).
Downtown plan: The InterContinental Hotel Group — an extremely high-end chain with lodges from Andorra to Zimbabwe — joined forces with a 25-year-old developer to break ground this week on a $60-million hotel on Duffield Street. Comment.
Downtown plan: The city has said it will redesign a park that is the centerpiece of its plan for Downtown Brooklyn after the owner of a home linked by historians to the Underground Railroad won a court settlement last week. Comments (1).
Editorial: The city’s decision to spare a house on Duffield Street is a good one — but now the Bloomberg Administration must go one step further and ensure that a museum to Brooklyn’s Abolitionist past gets built. Comment.
Downtown plan: Bruce Ratner is planning to build the city’s tallest residential tower — a whopping 1,000-foot-tall skyscraper that would dwarf the 512-foot Williamsburgh Savings Bank building. Then again, maybe he isn’t. “No comment,” the Atlantic Yards developer told The Brooklyn Paper at the annual Metrotech Christmas tree lighting ceremony on Wednesday. Comments (3).
Editorial: The Brooklyn Paper would love to be the loudest cheerleaders for Ratner’s City Tech tower, reportedly slated to be the tallest residential building in the city. But until public officials answer reasonable questions about this backroom deal, we will remain skeptical. Comments (1).
Downtown plan: Tyler Hospitality, the firm building a 32-story Staybridge Suites motel in Times Square, will bring a Holiday Inn to Schermerhorn Street, a thoroughfare that has recently seen a wave of new investment. Comment.
Downtown plan: The city’s memorial to Brooklyn’s Underground Railroad history will sit atop an underground parking lot that will be built where the very Abolitionist history being commemorated is said to have actually happened. Comments (1).
Downtown plan: Despite earlier reports that an apartment project on the site of the McDonald’s at Tillary and Gold streets would consist of just one building, the developer told The Brooklyn Paper this week that he’s actually going to give birth to three. Comment.
Downtown plan: Downtown Brooklyn’s biggest booster said this week that the development the area will experience in the next five years —Â adding more than 14,000 apartments, 1,800 hotel rooms and 1.6 million square feet of office space — is happening faster than some of the neighborhood’s basic infrastructure can handle. But Downtown Brooklyn Partnership President Joe Chan said he and his staff were on top of it. Comments (2).
Downtown plan: Architect Karl Fischer got one step closer to building his dream hotel tower Downtown last month after V3 Hotel Management bought the VIM building on Duffield Street for $9.5 million. Comments (1).
Downtown plan: Downtown planners introduced on Thursday a glitzy vision of Downtown Brooklyn as a 24/7 destination — and neighborhood — putting snazzy window dressing on a retrenchment of the original notion that the Flatbush Avenue corridor and surrounding streets would be a booming business district. Comments (3).
Editorial: A plan for retail stores in the ground floor of the Municipal Building is a major step in the right direction towards revitalizing the entire area — a common-sense move long resisted by Metrotech builder Bruce Ratner. Comments (1).
Downtown plan: Brooklyn’s dour Municipal Building — where generations of lovers have gotten their marriage licenses and tax scofflaws have paid their fines —Â will ground-floor shops on Court Street under a plan being pushed by the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership. Comment.
Downtown plan: The Bloomberg Administration co-named a stretch of Duffield Street in Downtown Brooklyn “Abolitionist Place” last Thursday —Â even as the city is planning to tear down historic houses on that block that may have served as stations on the Underground Railroad. Comment.
Downtown plan: Duffield Street homeowner Joy Chatel believes that if someone would just give her a chance to meet with Mayor Bloomberg, she could get him to abandon a longstanding plan to raze her home — which many historians believe was a stop on the Underground Railroad — to make way for a new park and an underground garage. Comment.
Downtown plan: The developer bringing Trader Joe’s to the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Court Street faced an unlikely opponent this week — the supermarket’s biggest fan, Borough President Markowitz. Comment.
Editorial: A single extra story — 10 feet! — drew the ire of Borough President Markowitz last week when the Beep recommended that the city deny a developer, Two Trees Management, a variance to build a little higher. Comment.
Downtown plan: Oh the irony: After spending more than two years preparing for the demolition of Duffield Street homes that many believe were stations on the Underground Railroad, the Bloomberg Administration now says it wants to “to commemorate abolitionist activity that occurred in Brooklyn in the 1800s.” Comment.
Downtown plan: An health center for women will move into a Downtown that has increasingly become known less for its social service agencies than for its rising population of luxury residential towers. Comment.
Downtown plan: An unlikely trio of Brooklyn politicians wants the city to revisit a three-year-old plan that was supposed to foment a business boom in Downtown Brooklyn, but has instead sparked a luxury apartment gold rush. Comment.
Downtown plan: Brooklyn’s tallest office building was sold on Wednesday for $107.5 million to Manhattan’s largest office landlord — and the new owner immediately distanced himself from rumors that the building be converted to luxury residential use like many others in the neighborhood. Comment.
Downtown plan: Schermerhorn Street — long home to parking lots, litter, a food stamp distribution center, job placement offices and a Hare Krishna temple — is finally joining the rest of the Downtown Brooklyn residential boom. Comment.
Downtown plan: A city-funded report that denies any Underground Railroad activity along Duffield Street isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, said a handful of historians, Councilmembers and ticked off residents at a rally on Tuesday. Comments (1).
Downtown plan: Protesters and elected officials rallied last Friday in Downtown to protest the use of non-union labor in the construction of twin hotels. Comment.
Downtown plan: Albee Square Mall shop owners and community activists vowed to fight a plan to demolish the mall and create a residential and commercial high-rise. Comment.
Downtown plan: A handful of small business owners on Willoughby Street have become the latest victims of Downtown’s booming real-estate market. They’re being evicted to make room a $208-million, 30-story tower. Comment.
Downtown plan: The battle over whether the Underground Railroad passed through seven houses on Duffield and Gold streets made it this week to the City Council, which could block a city plan to destroy the houses for a hotel parking lot. Comment.
Downtown plan: Talk about the Manhattanization of Brooklyn: A new mega-development slated for the booming border of Fort Greene and Downtown is being built by the same real-estate giant that built a luxury Xanadu with a Whole Foods in the lobby on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Comment.
Downtown plan: A new city report has again cast doubt on claims by residents of Duffield Street that their Downtown Brooklyn houses were part of the Underground Railroad. Comments (1).
Downtown plan: Downtown activists are objecting to a city plan to subsidize office construction in a new residential skyscraper in Albee Square — the latest battle against taxpayer-underwritten projects that earn millions for developers. Comment.
Downtown plan: A planned protest of a proposed Wal-Mart at Albee Square turned into a victory rally when a labor leader reported that Wal-Mart actually isn’t coming. Comment.
Downtown plan: A Downtown Brooklyn mall once eyed by Wal-Mart was sold this week — and the new owner says that behemoth of Bentonville is not moving in. Comment.
Downtown plan: Black Facts — a Downtown Brooklyn mainstay — was the canary in the coalmine. It closed last month and Downtown will never be the same — and that’s by design, unfortunately. Comments (1).
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