Mirabelle Marden and the exterior and interior of 17 Dikeman Street
Photographer Mirabelle Marden, the former owner of the Lower East Side’s Rivington Arms gallery and the daughter of minimalist artist and downtown “quasi-aristocrat” Brice Marden, is trading her native West Village for the still-undeveloped waterfront in the Red Hook area of Brooklyn. [more]
Dustin Yellin and 149 Pioneer Street (credit: PropertyShark)
The artist who bought the 24,000-square-foot former Time Moving and Storage warehouse in Red Hook for $3.7 million has ambitious plans to transform it into an arts center, the New York Times reported.
Even for Dustin Yellin, whose sculptures typically sells to collectors and celebrities for $25,000 to $100,000 and sometimes garners as much as $250,000, the venture is a risky one. [more]
A whole block development site at 110 Beard Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn is on the block, Brownstoner reported. The listing, which will be handled by Massey Knakal Realty Services, has an asking price of $14.95 million.
The current owner is Beard Street Acquisition LLC, which purchased the property for $11.6 million in 2008, according to city records.
The 193,800 square feet of buildable space is zoned for hotel, retail, commercial or industrial development, the listing brokers said.
[more]
Port Authority of New York & New Jersey Executive Director Chris Ward offered somewhat of a strange proposal for the Brooklyn waterfront and Governor’s Island yesterday during a visit to the Time Warner Center at Lincoln Square, the New York Observer reported, calling for the relocation of the Red Hook Container Terminal, currently located at 70 Hamilton Avenue in Red Hook, to Sunset Park.
To fix Governor’s Island, you must first fix Red Hook, he suggested. “Red Hook is in the wrong location if Governors Island is to succeed,” he said.
In Sunset Park, the shipping capacity would be insulated by Industry City, Ward said, and there it could connect with a trans-harbor freight rail tunnel. [more]
Manhattan-based atheists are ready to sue the city for installing a Red Hook street sign endorsing ideas of the afterlife, according to the Brookyln Paper.
The sign, which reads “Seven in Heaven Way,” a renaming of a stretch of Richards Street, was designated to honor seven firefighters who died during the Sept. 11 attacks. The protestors term the sign spiritual “product placement.”
“We see religion imprinted in our culture from the time we’re young enough to remember,” said Ken Bronstein of NYC Atheists, who has met with lawyers and plans to file suit. “Taxpayers are paying for this sign, so we’re paying for this message to be broadcast.” [more]
Pave Academy, a charter school in Red Hook, is closer to getting a building of its own, after crowding at nearby P.S. 15 for the last four years. Brownstoner reported that demolition has begun at the corner of Mill and Henry streets, where the 350-seat charter school expects to move sometime in 2013. Pave Academy’s current location in the P.S. 15 building at 71 Sullivan Street has upset parents and teachers at the public school who claim its hindering their students’ educations, the New York Post previously reported. [Brownstoner] [more]
Scott Spector, a principal with the Spector Group, an architecture and design firm based in Woodbury, NY, sat down with the New York Times to discuss surviving the downturn, defining his firm’s style and his favorite project. The firm is currently designing the new Christie’s auction house building in Red Hook, a high-profile retrofit project. But it’s the firm’s work with the Nasdaq Stock Market, a relatively less-glitzy outdoor signage project, that is Spector’s favorite current undertaking. “We’ve had Nasdaq as a client for eight years, and we have done everything,” Spector said. “We’ll change a light bulb for these guys.”
Real estate developer Joseph Sitt began tearing down a 19th-century sugar refinery warehouse in Red Hook last week, quieting speculation that he might repurpose the building for use as a BJs Wholesale Club. Residents had rallied in favor of saving the building, arguing that it qualified for preservation under the National Register of Historic Places. Sitt had torn down most of the old sugar factory in 2006, but the warehouse had remained untouched since that time. Some had thought that the site of the sugar refinery, on the southwestern tip of Red Hook’s peninsula, near Beard Street, would become a major shopping center for the neighborhood.
The New York Observer profiled 25-year-old Red Hook broker Rachel Shapiro, calling her the queen of Red Hook real estate. There are few big residential developers in Red Hook; most landlords own only one or two buildings, and Shapiro deals with both long-time neighborhood property owners and those who snapped up buildings during the boom. Shapiro said she thinks the market in Red Hook is starting to stabilize, now that property owners have started to lower their rents. Most deals done in the neighborhood are still done by word-of-mouth, she said. [more]
From the July issue: Three years ago, a new high-water mark was set in Red Hook when the
first house in the neighborhood sold for more than $1 million. In the years that followed, a number of other houses in the
Brooklyn neighborhood traded in the seven figures, making the largely
industrial area one of the boom era’s most unlikely Cinderella stories.
Nowadays, however, brokers say sales of homes priced at more than $1 million are generally not in the cards in Red Hook.
While deal volume and prices are down, the market for the area’s
small stock of single-family and two-family houses appears to be back
to pre-2006 values. However, the neighborhood is in the midst of a retail renaissance,
bucking the retail trend citywide. And in a strange twist, it is also
upending the traditional real estate logic that goods and services
follow residents. [more]
