Downtown Brooklyn is licking its chops over a plan to bring the upscale Morton’s steakhouse to the Brooklyn Marriott next year, setting the stage for a commercial explosion of along the heavily trafficked auto approach to the Brooklyn Bridge which, until now, has been devoid of retail establishments.
The 300-seat restaurant will open in the ground floor of the Marriott’s new annex tower on Adams Street by the end of 2008, said Joshua Muss, the hotel’s developer, who has also inked a lease for 40,000 square feet of unused retail space in an adjacent former courthouse.
“Morton’s will … serve as a model of what types of retailers can thrive at the newly created Adams Street retail corridor,” said Muss, president of Muss Development.
For its part, Morton’s announcement barely touched on the red-meat fight between the Chicago-based steakhouse chain and Peter Luger, choosing to emphasize the retail strip over the strip steak.
“Morton’s has identified an outstanding location in the heart of Downtown Brooklyn in one of the city’s most popular hotels,” said Morton’s Restaurant Group Chairman Thomas J. Baldwin.
The Morton’s announcement is the first since Downtown Brooklyn Partnership President Joe Chan told The Brooklyn Paper in October that he was intent on turning unused municipal spaces — including the former courthouse and the ground floor of the Municipal Building — into retail destinations.
Since then, real-estate insiders have drooled with the possibilities of luring a Nordstrom or the borough’s first Apple store to Downtown — whose population is expected to surge with 30,000 new residents and 1.6 million square feet of office space in a series of towers that are already under construction along Flatbush Avenue Extension.
