Red Hook residents are bracing to see if Ikea will do what no other controversial project has been able to do — reinvigorate the hardscrabble neighborhood or wipe it off the “up-and-coming” map for good.
The Swedish furniture company may be the granddaddy of all retail ventures, but it’s been preceded by other commercial projects in recent years, like the opening of the Fairway supermarket and the city’s ballyhooed cruise ship terminal. Then again, Red Hook has been a dumping ground ever since Robert Moses’s Brooklyn–Queens Expressway cut it off from the rest of South Brooklyn in the 1950s. What followed was the construction of the city’s largest public housing project and, perhaps just coincidentally, a city plan to open a garbage transfer station in a port neighborhood with a rich history going back to the Revolutionary War.
Despite this colorful past, the opening of Ikea will, no doubt, bring thousands of people to Red Hook for the first time. Lacking any context, it would be tough to know whether Van Brunt Street, the commercial spine of the neighborhood, is a strip on the rise, with several trendy bars, good restaurants and eclectic entrepreneurial businesses, or a boulevard of broken dreams, what with the empty lots and decrepit structures.
Just a few years ago, developers saw the cheap land in “Dead Hook” as ripe for the taking, a renaissance just waiting to happen. But its cachet fell, symbolized by the closing of the trendy bistro 360 and the rock club The Hook, as well as the stalling of a fancy apartment building on Imlay Street.
And, of course, the 20-minute constitutional to get from the heart of the neighborhood to the Smith–Ninth subway station didn’t help make the area attractive to Manhattan-bound commuters, either.
Now, Ikea portends to be the lynchpin for a retail corridor boom that might attract national giants like Bed, Bath and Beyond, Wal-Mart or Target to an area famous for Civil War-era architecture and, perhaps more important to those would-be retailers, a deep pool of unemployed within walking distance.
Depending on whom you ask, a round of retail development could ensure the area’s salvation or demise, just as the cruise terminal, which opened two years ago, had its legions of detractors and boosters.
“It’s gone from being a humble hamlet by the sea to being a consumer destination, and we can’t handle it,” said Ellen Norris, a six-year resident, on Sunday afternoon in the Bait and Tackle bar on Van Brunt. She and several companions watching European Cup soccer said they dread the coming influx of 17,000 Ikea shoppers every weekend day.
One of her friends who has lived in the Hook for 20 years dating back to “when Red Hook was a war zone,” as he dubbed the era of high crime and urban neglect — is ready to pack it in because he doesn’t want to experience the crowds and consumerism concomitant with Ikea on Beard Street.
“I’m thinking about selling,” said Jens Veneman, a sculptor.
Veneman said the only comparable time in local history that he’s experienced was in the late 1990s when then-Mayor Giuliani proposed a new trash station in the neighborhood.
Though unified then, the same community is divided now over the latest flashpoint: Ikea.
“It’s good for the neighborhood. It’s going to create jobs they desperately need in the Houses,” said developer Greg O’Connell, referring to the Red Hook Houses, where roughly 7,000 of the area’s 11,000 residents live.
Meanwhile, over beers at the Veterans of Foreign Wars clubhouse on Van Brunt Street, some of the old men didn’t expect their neighbors in public housing to benefit from their proximity to Ikea’s human resources office. They said they’d heard that many locals were fired after short stints at the Fairway supermarket, another purported economic engine. And the cruise ship terminal also created hundreds of jobs fewer than the city predicted.
Bartender Sal Meglio said there would certainly be some short-term benefits, but thought it would die down after customers got what they needed.
“How many times do you need to buy furniture?” he asked.
