BROOKLYN — By now, a great many people have answered Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s question to his princess in his 1847 poem, when he wrote:
“Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height:
What pleasure lives in height?”
Now, however, new residents of Brooklyn can add their voices to the pleasures of living in “height.”
In fact, what is happening right now, and has been under way for about three years, is the latest chapter in the long history of the building of this borough ... not the commerce, the parks or the industry, mostly gone now, but where people live.
For about 100 years, the process was evolutionary, following the logical development of Brooklyn from west to east, north to south, but always beginning at the waterfront. Some places became pockets of wealth, such as Brooklyn Heights, Clinton Hill and the streets near Washington Park.
Affluent living came to Fort Greene and then Park Slope, and soon it began to expand closer to Prospect Park. But the real boom began in the last century as the subways began to make southern Brooklyn part of a city, not a suburb.
Today’s process isn’t taking empty fields and creating houses, but areas with a lot of a certain urban emptiness are being redeveloped or converted in Downtown Brooklyn. By doing so, we are reaching for the skies.
This is a whole new thing for Brooklyn, even though we have built tall apartment buildings before. The three tall structures of the Cadman Plaza co-op apartments, built in the 1970s, come to mind.
But we have not done this at this pace and with this seriousness before. In part, it reflects the mayor’s prediction that this city will have one million more residents by 2030. Another factor is the buzz that Brooklyn has been generating for some time now, or, as Halstead Property put it in a recent report, “Brooklyn has now become the first-choice destination for many homebuyers.”
For the first time, Brooklyn is offering lots of views, most of which are simply stunning.
In fact, if you add up the heights of the known development projects, excluding all of Atlantic Yards, we are building the equivalent, with 22 projects, of a 474-story building. Take that, Freedom Tower!
And this staggering number of new residential floors does not include 14 other projects still in the planning stage, nor what may be built as part of Brooklyn Bridge Park. Nor, of course, does it include all the sky-reachers in Greenpoint and Williamsburg. This is strictly Downtown stuff.
In truth, it is probable that at least half as many new stories could be added to that total by the 14 other projects, three of which are expected to be sizeable.
The Albee Center development could turn out to be the tallest building in Brooklyn. But that honor could also go to the new residential units being planned by the Clarett Group at Lawrence Street. On a rather small footprint, Clarett plans to create 400 units of housing.
And details are still missing about the City Tech addition at Jay and Tillary streets, which will rise on the site of the Klitgord Auditorium. Six hundred units of housing are planned there as well as 300,000 square feet for academic-office use.
Well, it’s possible one guesses that Tennyson’s maid may have come down from the mountaintop, but the poet could not imagine how many others are reaching new heights.
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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