Tag Archives: closings

Smith St Closings Create Ghostly Carroll Gardens’ Block

They say the economy is on the mend, the worst is over, people are spending again. THEY clearly don’t live near my block in brownstone Brooklyn, where store after store on Smith Street, between Degraw and Douglass streets, has shuttered or moved on.

In just a few recent weeks, Stinky Bklyn has laid out plans to move further along Smith Street to bigger digs, while neighboring Salsa Salon shut up shop. Andie Woo, a quirky underthings store next to Oaxaca Tacos, also faded from existence. I should have seen it coming when I was in there on a Saturday afternoon in late February, taking advantage of the huge half-off sale. When I returned about a week later, the windows were papered over, the signs were down: it was all over.

Adios Andie Woo

There may be one bright spot amid the shutterings though. I’m told the Andie Woo site is poised to reopen but not as a clothing store. Word is that it will be a deli similar to the famed Russ and Daughters on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, selling smoked fish and other deli treats. There’s no news on an opening date yet, but I’ll be tracking this one with bagel in hand.

Meantime, there are now almost half as many boarded up shops or ones for rent on the Carroll Gardens block as there are occupied businesses. On the side closest to Court Street, for example, there are 10 storefronts, including the big empty lot on the corner that promises to become some sort of sprawling residential/commercial development, and only four actually in operation, Refinery and Video Free Brooklyn among them.

Adding to the ghost-town feel, most of the stores are closed by 10pm or earlier, so it makes for a dark, desolate strip heading to or from the subway.

As recently as 2009, the same block boasted the restaurant Patois, which has long been credited as a pioneer in getting Smith Street going. When Patois closed after  more than a decade, speculation brewed that it would reopen across the street, but it never happened and the bistro took its business to Manhattan’s Little Italy instead.

Provence en Boite opened a few years ago on the corner of Smith and Degraw, and the owners said they added sidewalk tables, a bench and flowerpots with hopes of creating a bustling corner and rejuvenating the block. Then came Stinky Bklyn and Oaxaca Tacos, and the block did indeed seem brighter. Thankfully Oaxaca’s original spot – now one of three in Brooklyn and Manhattan – seems set to stay. And Provence en Boite followed up almost a year ago with spin-off  JB’s Burger.

But “it is scary,” said Leslie Bernat, who with her husband Jean-Jacques Bernat owns and runs Provence en Boite and JB’s Burger. “It is hard with the economy like it is, to know what is going to happen next. It worries us very much.”

Not to mention elsewhere along Smith Street where mom and pop stores have been closing for years because of soaring rents and the ever-changing demographic of the neighborhood. They’ve been replaced in many cases with cookie cutter ice-cream shops and clones of stores already across the Gowanus in Park Slope.

The comic book haven Rocketship and the Big Apple Deli across the street both closed recently,  the doomed restaurant of many names – Banania, Porchetta, Carniceria  – hasn’t been able to find a niche that will keep it open, and Brooklyn Camo, one of my personal favorites for rain boots and hiking socks,  shutdown awhile back as did my drycleaner, which was replaced with another innocuous deli.

Add to the list the  Brooklyn Indie Market near Carroll Park, which has a For Rent sign on the weathered tent. They announced last month that after four years on Smith Street they won’t be back, even once the weather improves. And this is just a handful of the businesses that have gone in the few years I’ve lived in the neighborhood.

Comings + Goings

A sign in the window at shuttered Cube 63 on 234 Court Street announces that another eatery, Brucie, is coming soon. No further details yet.

Strong Place gastropub has just opened (July 26) in the old Shakespeare’s Sister location at 270 Court Street. The team at Cobble Hill’s Bocca Lupo is behind the new spot, which boasts a seafood-meat rich menu and some 24 beers on tap. Word is a garden area is planned as well, possibly through September.

On Smith Street, there is a new Mediterranean-style restaurant in the works, adjacent the Big Apple deli that has just shutdown after a speedy “buy one, get one free” clearance sale.

This is especially annoying since it’s where my husband has long picked up icecream for me on his way home from work late at night, and it was really the only well-stocked deli on the stretch between the subway station on Warren Street  and Degraw Street that opened late.

Across the way at 208 Smith there is another casualty. Rocketship – the geeky comic/anime store is finally gone for good after a string of lengthy, unexplained closures signaled something was wrong in the land of graphic novels. It’s a shame – my 7 year-old-son loved stopping in there on weekends to choose some quirky book with great drawings and impossibly small print.

BKLYN Yard Shuttered

It is bad enough that it is crazy hot and I have been outside at my son’s Field Day since 9.30am, but now I get word that BKLYN Yard is closed for business. As quickly as I fell in love with that oasis on the stinky Gowanus Canal, it is gone.

The folk at Mean Red Productions, say last weekend – which was a bonanza with events including Score! Free Pop-Up Swap and Parked, where some of the city’s hottest food trucks gathered and fed thousands for the holiday weekend – was the finale. The landlord apparently won’t honor or even renegotiate the lease on the Carroll Street property and has told Mean Red to take their four-year vision elsewhere.

The landlord “requested that we take what we have built, and terminate all of our confirmed plans and schedule for BKLYN Yard this summer, ” Mean Read, the production, marketing and promotions company that dreamed up the yard concept, says in a posting on the BKLYN Yard web page.

They may be down, but definitely not out: “Rest assured our renegade spirit and love for pop-up spaces will come alive again this summer — very possibly with the same collaborators and programming you see on our current schedule… And very possibly even better than we had planned before,” says Mean Red.

Meantime, Doug Singer, Eamon Harkin and Justin Carter’s Sunday Best series will continue on at another location, including this Sunday with DJ Koze. To find out where, keep an eye on www.sundaybestnyc.com.

Just when it looked like there was a grassy patch to loll about on through hot summer days … good luck Mean Red and keep us posted …