Posted Jan 11, 2012, 9:10 PM
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New Yorker for life
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Borough of Jersey
Posts: 51,869
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http://www.observer.com/2012/01/whos...to-begin-with/
Whose Mall Is It Anyway: Will Brooklyn Flock to Fulton Street’s New Chain Stores?
Isn't That Why We Left Pittsburgh Behind to Begin With?
Comings and goings across from Shake Shack. (Matt Chaban)
CityPoint takes shape
By Matt Chaban
Jan 11, 2012
Quote:
Like generations of Brooklynites before him, Joseph had come to the Fulton Mall to do some shopping. Some historians credit the centuries old strip with pioneering urban department store shopping, with the opening of Abraham & Weschler in 1865 and the many stores that followed, all now long gone but for the Neo-Grec and Beaux Arts temples to retail they erected.
When he arrived on the mall this day, Joseph had passed by the T-Mobile, Sprint, AT&T and MetroPCS outlets and come here for his new-enough phone. “They don’t want so much here,” Joseph said, a Dodgers cap—L.A., not Brooklyn—resting on his head. “It’s a good deal.” But for how much longer? It is getting to be that they want more and more on the Fulton Mall. Just like the rest of Brooklyn before it.
H&M is scheduled for a new glass building on the corner of Hoyt Street being built by Mr. Laboz, below which will be a TJ Maxx. Aeropostale opened across the street in the fall of 2010, around the same time the new Shake Shack was announced, which opened in December, a month after the Gap announced plans to take space on the mall. Express is coming, too. The gleaming new first phase of CityPoint will open in the first half of next year, quite possibly with a Target inside, so successful is the one half-a-mile away at Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Center Mall.
Yet, venture inside that mall, and it is largely devoid—except for the aisles of Target—of the kind of clientele Mr. Laboz and his cohort talk of attracting. It remains to be seen whether the brownstone babies and their cousins in the condo towers will ever migrate to the mall, giving up on Bird, Greenlight Books or the newly arrived Barney’s Co-op.
Part of the problem with developers, politicians and the media talking about the transformation or revitalization of Fulton Street is that it suggests there was something wrong in the first place. Unlike Smith Street or Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, which were largely empty, the Fulton Mall has always been packed. With its 110,000 patrons a day, it is the third busiest retail strip in the city, besting Madison Avenue and behind only Fifth and Times Square.
...a pack of screaming teenagers could be heard from a few blocks away. At least a hundred of them were packed around a pair of men, there was shouting, it seemed perhaps a fight. It turned out to be the rapper Drake, who stopped into Quick Strike, one of the strips remaining hat-and-shoe outlets. He picked up a Toronto Blue Jays cap, representing his hometown team. Even in Canada, they know the Fulton Mall. Would Drake really have come to shop at Lids down the block?
Lauri Cumbo, a Fort Greene fixture who founded the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, argues that the loss of the mom and pops is bad, but worse is the erosion of the mall’s culture. She points out that while the Bronx may have been the birthplace of hip hop, the Fulton Mall is where it grew up, with Biz Marquee and Biggie Smalls rapping on the corner. “The way things are going, entrepreneurship will be smothered all together,” she said. “There will be no room for creativity or originality. People may still shop here, but there will be no community.”
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NEW YORK is Back!
“Office buildings are our factories – whether for tech, creative or traditional industries we must continue to grow our modern factories to create new jobs,” said United States Senator Chuck Schumer.
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