By Dennis Holt
Brooklyn Daily Eagle

I wonder how many people in Brooklyn have a positive feeling about IKEA, yet have never stepped foot into its store in Red Hook.

This is not an academic question or one with a catch. There have to be a good many people with a good feeling about the store because the corporation is doing things that few companies do anymore. Simply put, they are helping themselves by helping others.

Although it may sound trite, the first thing they did was to keep their word, not an altogether common habit these days. When they were planning on coming to town and opening their largest store, they promised shuttle buses from subway stops and Downtown Brooklyn.

They promised free Water Taxi trips for customers on weekends. (Some non-customers horned in on that amenity, unfortunately.) They also promised to try to convince the Transit Authority to extend its two public bus routes to the store, an attempt that was made, and to the surprise of many, accepted by the T.A.

Free buses, better public bus routes, free water trips, are not what I’m really talking about, however. Those steps are just good business; they help people get to the store to spend their money on Ikea products. (They also help to keep cars out of Red Hook!)

When they first started looking at the Red Hook site, they did a thorough traffic study of all the nearby street intersections and exits off the BQE. Ikea found several that needed fixing, told the Department of Transportation about them and said, if DOT agreed, Ikea would do all the work and pay for that work. That work was done.

Again, that was just good business. The last thing they wanted was to have someone warn people not to drive there because “it was horrible getting there.� Lesson: Do everything you possibly can, spend whatever it takes, to avoid that kind of indictment. Mission accomplished!

The company also promised to build a public waterfront esplanade on its property on Erie Basin. The final result is more of doing good than simply doing good business. IKEA could have carried out its promise by simply doing an ordinary and pedestrian job; they did far more than that, and I have talked to people who went there on weekends this summer just to enjoy the waterfront and not shop in IKEA.

And early this month, this newspaper’s Linda Collins reported on IKEA clearly “helping themselves by helping others,� when it donated a lot of stuff to the YWCA in far-off Boerum Hill.

The Y had just finished a complete overhaul of its living accommodations, creating 84 new apartments, but these were just empty rooms.

IKEA gave the Y 15 complete beds, a lot of bedding, comforters, pillows and curtains and boxes of kitchenware, including pots, pans, dishes and cutlery. A lot of people associated with the Y think of IKEA now, when they might not have thought of them at all.

And then someone throws a spanner into things. A cement company is building a cement factory across the street from IKEA. The company has the legal right to do so, and no one seems to be able to do anything about it.

Apparently, IKEA hasn’t tried to use its influence, but a cement plant shouldn’t be built near a major destination shopping center, a waterfront park, and close by sporting fields. It really doesn’t belong on this part of Red Hook’s consumer waterfront.

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