Home to artists and funky professionals, the Brooklyn enclave of Red Hook remained an out-of-the-way industrial backwater as nearby neighborhoods like Park Slope and Carroll Gardens filled up with families and well-heeled denizens.
Despite its isolation from the subway network, Red Hook is a secret no more, particularly since real estate prices in this isolatedécorner of Brooklyn hit an unprecedented benchmark: $1.06 million for a two-family home on the aptly named Pioneer Street.
“It’s a psychological landmark for a lot of people and it has ignited a fire,” said Nicole Galluccio, a broker at Fillmore Real Estate in Boerum Hill, who in June helped sell what has become known as “the house” at 105 Pioneer Street. Like any market, she added, “Red Hook ebbs and flows with spurts and spikes that eventually level out, but this year, there’s been a lot of hubbub.”
Located at the mouth of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, Red Hook is walled off from the rest of the borough by the elevated Gowanus Expressway. Buses are few and subways are far, though a few lines are within (lengthy) walking distance. For car owners, the locale is ideal — tolls and tight parking excluded.
Part of the area’s charm is its isolation. “My typical buyer is a younger couple in their mid-30s from a trendy, overcrowded and overpriced area in Manhattan,” said Galluccio. “They can smell the water and hear the seagulls. The lack of transportation created the development of a unique, sleepy waterfront town that promotes the arts.”
That sense of serenity is threatened and the neighborhood is now likely to evoke comparisons to Williamsburg at the twilight of its hipness. A Fairway supermarket opened in May, after some local opposition. Cruise ships debark at Pier 12. Ikea is clearing land on the waterfront to build a store, expected to open in 2008.
Battle lines are drawn between proponents of reviving port traffic, which began to wither in the 1950s, and supporters of residential development.
Some locals applauded the recent ruling by a judge, who required developer Bruce Batkin to reapply for a zoning variance to convert a former warehouse at 160 Imlay Street into upscale housing. Others revel in the inevitable, supporting gourmet bakeries, art happenings, trendy restaurants on Van Brunt Street and nightlife that throbs in large industrial spaces.
The city’s Economic Development Corporation’s recently issued a request for expression of interest calling for a mixed-use plan for developing the Atlantic Basin terminal from piers 7 to 12, which promises to pit neighbor against neighbor, said Gino Vitale, an active builder who lives in the neighborhood.
“You have some of the best waterfront property in the city and it makes no sense to put a big box store there,” he said. “The cruise lines, the Ikea and the other stuff is not good for Red Hook. It’s a real neighborhood where everyone knows everyone.”
Deliveries to local stores like Ikea will change that. Tractor trailer trucks already rumble down the narrow cobblestone streets, shaking buildings and ripping off the side mirrors of cars, forcing residents to choose between parking on the street and hoping the car remains whole or putting their cars on the sidewalk and risking a ticket. The new stores will only add to that traffic. “Families make communities, not 18-wheelers,” said Vitale.
Vitale, one of about three or four active local developers, is working on a 22-unit condominium on Coffey Street and a nine-unit condominium at Dikeman and Dwight streets. He is also building six Florentine-style carriage houses on Luquer Street, along with four others at Conover and Dikeman streets, which are intended as artist studios or space for small professional businesses.
Though prices continue to climb (condos go for around $500,000, townhouses about $600,000), the million-dollar house is unlike most other residences, since the brick structure has been immaculately restored, said Marsha Yarde, associate broker at Fillmore Real Estate, who helped sell “the house.”
Almost all of the old-stock housing requires work. “It’s an old neighborhood by the water, so there’s termites, rotted wood, nothing but headaches, unless you know what you’re doing,” said Vitale.
Even while the neighborhood began to gentrify in the late 1980s, remainders of its past included Civil War-era homes and the massive Red Hook Housing Project, built in 1936 for local dockworkers. The area, a bustling port that developed as Brooklyn’s second rowhouse district after Brooklyn Heights, mixed shipping magnates and longshoremen. Al Capone hustled these streets.
Always known as a tough place, the negative stigma became seared into public consciousness in 1993, when beloved school principal Patrick Daly died after getting caught in the crossfire between battling thugs near the housing project. Still, artists and bohemians continued to move in. Hubert Selby’s bleak 1964 novel “Last Exit to Brooklyn” was set in its rough and gritty environs.
“That perception of crime and violence is mostly gone,” said Yarde. “It’s like Soho 30 years ago or the Meatpacking district 10 years ago.”
Most of Vitale’s buyers and tenants come from either Chelsea or California, he claims. “Red Hook is famous in certain parts of California,” he said. “Anything I build, I can rent, so if the bubble bursts, the rentals will make the money. People who can’t afford to buy condos will pay the rent just to be in the neighborhood.”
Near the fringes of upscale precincts like Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Boerum Hill and Cobble Hill, which are bleeding over traditional borders, the artist colony will undoubtedly gentrify, he said.
Spurred by the sale of the million-dollar townhouse, Galluccio agrees, and plans to stay in Red Hook for a long time.
“Talk to me 10 years from now,” she said. “I’m buying anything I can get my hands on.”