Before commenter 11 spoiled the fun by posting the link to Corcoran (where it's now the most-viewed property of the day), the third guesser nailed the $999,000 asking. As another commenter correctly noted, this place has been on the market for awhile, listing in May at $1.175m before a chop to $1.1m in July and then to $999k in late September, per StreetEasy. But we're hearing whispers the property may finally be sewing up an owner, just in time for the return of Pioneer Bar, if not 360.
· Listing: 256 Van Brunt Street [Corcoran]
· Live from Red Hook: Red Hook Townhouse PriceSpotter [Curbed]
In his New York piece on the degentrification of Red Hook (have you heard of this story?), Adam Sternbergh divided gentrifiers into "seeders" and "harvesters." Of the seeders, he wrote:
The seeders are drawn to a neighborhood like Red Hook precisely because it’s not Carroll Gardens or Boerum Hill or whatever Williamsburg has become. They like the idea of a new frontier. The irony of gentrification, though, is that while the seeders drive the cycle, they plant the seeds of their own obsolescence. They arrive to be eventually driven out.
So the big question is, when these seeders—hipsters, artists, hipster artists—return en masse to Red Hook (which will be the end result of all this, surely), where will they make their hipster art? The answer is above, 201 Richards Street, an industrial building now carved into commercial lofts. Some are already occupied by woodworkers, dress makers, potters, painters and, um, a psychiatrist. The building owner wants to blast open those ground-floor windows and lease out the 3,500-square-foot area as gallery space. Six lofts are still available, and Red Hook Realty's Rachel Shapiro showed us a few of them.
In advance of this little experiment, we asked some Red Hook folks to alert us to possible topics of interest. This little piece of intel stood out:
I'm not sure if this fits your criteria for interesting red hook fodder, but there is a building on Van Dyke Street (right next to the methadone clinic building) that has been mysteriously gushing water for months. originally, it was just spewing out from the foundation of the house somewhere....then they built some sort of gutter that shoots it directly out into the street. regardless, there has been a constant fountain of water coming out of that dilapidated building since at least the spring. there was actually algae growing on the pavement for a while when it was warmer.
Folks, we chased the lead, and there is the proof in all its moist glory. Please say a kind hello to 130 Van Dyke, the Water-Gushing Building.
From 2005 through September 2006, The Guttersniper ruled over The Gutter, Curbed's late lamented architecture blog. Today, from the ether, his stunning return. Read on.
Oh my friends. There is, it seems, no corner of this dim, misery-seethed metropolis where one can find true peace. There is no last place untouched. This very afternoon, as I pursued the course of exile that I have chosen and you have so successfully endured lo these sixty-one weeks, I raised myself from the comforts of the Villa van Gut--a tidy enough tage for this hermit (I will miss it)--combed the starfish from my beard (for I have, you should know, gone there), and ventured forth into the broken-cobble streets of my busted and beloved quarter of the city. You should know that I never left you. I merely turned my back on the world. Until it washed up, laptop-lit, smelling of last night’s fancy, at my front door.
Curbed Inside visits the interior of a structure with an eye towards revealing the design and architecture. If you've got a project you'd like Curbed to consider, email us.
[Top, inside Jim Clark's apartment/gallery; bottom, roofdeck looking towards Erie Basin]
Born in the 1860s as the Red Hook Stores warehouse, the swarthy structure is perhaps now better known as the Fairway Building. Because, hey, it's got a Fairway! The building was restored by Red Hook's answer to David Walentas, Greg O'Connell, who coincidentally just drove by in his truck (hi, Greg!). But it was Jim Clark, the proprietor of Inuit art gallery Look North who was kind enough to let us check out his live/work space on the fourth floor of the building. Someone kindly alert Paige Rense, because this place has got it going on.
Don't remember Red Hook when the wild dogs were still around? Here's a trailer for a new documentary about the neighborhood called A Hole in a Fence. It looks at gentrification-related changes in the neighborhood and a site next to the rising Ikea store with an interesting back story. It was a home to people living in makeshift housing and to some of the wild dogs, among other things, and it is overrun with wetlands vegetation and painted up with walls full of graffiti. Just this week, the property acquired a for sale sign pitching it to a big retailer.
· A Hole in a Fence [aholeinafence.com]
· A Hole in a Fence Trailer [YouTube]
Real estate tsunami Barbara Corcoran lit the fuse on the Red Hook bomb, a bomb that—depending on your belief system—either went off, sputtered out, has yet to go off, or will never go off. In April 2005, Babs famously purchased 293 Van Brunt Street for $1.075 million, a building with two apartments and a storefront. Two years later, the storefront still sat empty after a hefty pricechop. The New York story on Red Hook degentrification reported that Barbara finally rented the space out at the reduced tally of $1,800/month, but has the process soured her on the Hook forever? We asked, and she responded, rather candidly:
I'm still holding the property and will for a long time to come. I paid a lot for it and sat with an empty storefront for over two years reducing the commercial rent inch by inch. I finally rented it a few months back to nice tenants who also own the wine bar ‘Tini’ farther down on Van Brunt. I have a fabulous piano player as a tenant on the top floor, which has guaranteed a high turnover on the floor below, but they’ve all been nice and have paid their rent on time. Now that I have a real paying tenant on the ground floor, which gives me a shot at breaking even, we’ve discovered a water seepage problem in the brickwork and I’ve just ok'd a $15,000 repair job in hopes of fixing it for good. It’s just great to be a landlord of an old building that sits on the water. And by the way, to get the commercial tenant I had to put in a whole new kitchen.
With the nearest subway access at Smith-9th Street (due to be closed for a bit around 2010, give or take), the B61 is a necessary, but highly maligned fact of life. What's surprising is that there's a constituency in the Red Hook for keeping B61 service crappy. Per a neighborhood source: "There is a meeting today to protest changes in the B61 service - but people in RH have been tearing down meeting notifications with the thinking that the shittier bus service is, the lower your rent stays." Just in case anyone was doubting Red Hook is a little different.
· The Shameful Bus Called B61 [Lost City]
We've already laid out some theories on the current state of Red Hook, but when you're dealing with a topic as loaded as degentrification, the hits just keep on coming. Here, some other thoughts on this charming-yet-gloomy (today, at least) square mile of Brooklyn:
The Detroit Theory: Burnlab filed a response to the New York story, and the sentiment is that—like Detroit—Red Hook is "stalled" but not "dead," In Burnlab's words: "I don't see either Red Hook or Detroit ever being truly gentrified places, due to blatantly obvious but seemingly insurmountable barriers. Red Hook is a bit simpler: a subway stop less than twenty minutes away would all but change everything (all but housing projects, crumbling infrastructure, etc.) Detroit is more complicated and an awful lot bigger, but there are perhaps quixotic yet theoretically plausible solutions there as well."
The Soul Theory: Meanwhile, what would a weighty social topic be without an opinion from David Byrne? Writing in his online journal after a trip to the Ball Fields in August, the Talking Head said: "I recently heard about an upcoming forum called 'New York: Is it in danger of losing it’s Soul?'. Red Hook, much of it anyway, still has plenty — but as the waterfront gets developed there is always the danger that the lure of big bucks will carve big chunks of that soul away. There are plenty of vacant lots and crumbling warehouses here — there were some suspicious large fires last year. As beautiful as dead tech is, I’m not suggesting that the areas with crumbling concrete and rebar spikes sticking up be kept intact, but that development be allowed to take place on a human scale and at a human pace." Red Hook: capturer of human souls.
· Live from Red Hook: A Curbed Network Blogathon [Curbed]
What/Where: Three story Red Hook townhouse Square Feet: 2,142 Taxes: $1,100 annual The Skinny: Time to test your knowledge of the degentrification zone. What we have here is prime Red Hook, a brick townhouse smack dab on Van Brunt Street. It's currently configured as an upper duplex over a floor-through, meaning we've got rental potential here, people. And both the interior and backyard look to be in pretty damn fine shape. So how much? Answers in the comments; official answer later today. (And, yeah, we'll get back to the Upper East Side tomorrow.)
The chain of events that led to the dropping of the degentrification bomb on Red Hook can be traced back to the closing days of spring and early days of summer:
July 10, 2007. Red Hook resident Chris Curen posts a "quiz" on Gowanus Lounge, listing all the businesses that are failing, closing or moving.
July 21, 2007. Citing businesses like 360 that are closing or on the market, the Brooklyn Paper asks if Red Hook is "turning cold."
August 11, 2007. The "uncertain future" of LeNell's, a staple of Van Brunt Street gentrification, makes the Times. The paper asks if Red Hook is slumping.
August 13, 2007. The New York Post reviews Red Hook's "down period," including the prominent closures of some of the restaurants, bars and stores on Van Brunt Street and the slowing of real estate sales. It famously proclaims the neighborhood "Dead Hook."
August 28, 2007. The Times visits the Columbia Street part of Red Hook and details a long list of dashed hopes, saying that it "still waits for its promised gentrification."
November 19, 2007. New York Magazine declares that Red Hook is so over that it symbolizes "degentrification." One of the people quoted lamenting the failed promise of gentrification, an emailer notes, is "a resident of the only building in Red Hook with a doorman. Not exactly a force of degentrification."
King foodie Peter Meehan weighs in: "I think the Good Fork's success is pretty cool. That place should have flopped like the rest of 'em, but I think instead of reading their own press and flying their 'Kings of Red Hook' flag high, they hunkered down and kept the restaurant good and appealing." [Eater]
[The industrial revolution comes to Red Hook! c. 1982 1870]
To look forward, one must first look back. Right? Per our good friends at Wikipedia, the village of Red Hook was settled by the Dutch colonists of New Amsterdam in 1636, and named Roode Hoek. In Dutch "Hoek" means "point" or "corner" and not the English hook (i.e. not something curved or bent). Today, the area is home to about 11,000 people. Rather than continuing with this blatant cut/pasting from Wikipedia, let's take a look at the evolution of a little place called Roode Hoek from them to now, by way of a series of maps and such we've unearthed.
Earlier this week, New York's Adam Sternbergh dropped the degentrification bomb on Red Hook, a Brooklyn neighborhood that remains, as ever, on the brink. In search of truth—or some semblance thereof—the Curbed, Eater and Racked teams have today decamped for The Hook, setting up shop at the delightful Baked on Van Brunt Street. All day today, we'll be reporting on the neighborhood, conversing with neighborhood personalities, and taking the pulse of things (if you're in Red Hook and want to say hello, please do stop by). And yes, as promised yesterday, famed Red Hook investor Barbara Corcoran will make an appearance.
If there's an overall purpose here—which, frankly, there may or may not be—it's to find our own answer to what's really going on. Let's take stock of the preeminent theories about Red Hook, c. November 2007, shall we?
The Degentrification Theory (as formulated by Adam Sternbergh in NYMag): What if gentrification isn't self-sustaining after all? What if, in fact, it's exactly the opposite: a self-extinguishing phenomenon? What if it's less a flood than a forest fire—wild, yes, out of control, absolutely, but destined to consume itself by burning through the fuel it needs to survive?
The Media Hype Theory(as formulated by Curbed's own Bob Guskind on Gowanus Lounge): Red Hook was never gentrified in the way that the press made it out to be and it is not degentrified now. Red Hook gentrification, as defined in the media has always been about a few blocks on Van Brunt Street. A few places have closed. A few have opened and a lot of spaces are still being renovated. The rest of Red Hook is a place where 2/3 of the people live in public housing, where there still isn't a bank branch or a pharmacy of any scale (in the heart of the neighborhood), that has functioned as a Brooklyn dumping ground for unwanted things like trash transfer stations for generations. The neighborhood's industrial character—and there's still plenty of it—is ignored.
The Ikea Theory: The Golden Age of Red Hook will be seen as the period between the opening of 360 and the debut of Ikea—or the closing of the Good Fork, evidence that the neighborhood runs out of money before Ikea finally opens. In either case, the point is it's all about Ikea.
The Locals Theory(as formulated by a Van Brunt Street resident): Adam Sternbergh made Red Hook look so wonderful (to a certain class of consumer) in the New York Magazine story this week that we'll be buried in condos and cocksuckers, as per previous predictions, within six months.
The Pupusas Theory: Make sure you order two pupusas at once, because you're just going to want another one anyway once you finish that first one.
Thoughts, ideas, concepts, story tips? Do let us know. And if Red Hook's not your thing... well, maybe you'll enjoy Curbed more tomorrow? [illustration by Jim Cooke]
Oh my friends. There is, it seems, no corner of this dim, misery-seethed metropolis where one can find true peace. There is no last place untouched. This very afternoon, as I pursued the course of exile that I have chosen and you have so successfully endured lo these sixty-one weeks, I raised myself from the comforts of the Villa van Gut--a tidy enough tage for this hermit (I will miss it)--combed the starfish from my beard (for I have, you should know, gone there), and ventured forth into the broken-cobble streets of my busted and beloved quarter of the city. You should know that I never left you. I merely turned my back on the world. Until it washed up, laptop-lit, smelling of last night’s fancy, at my front door. 
Real estate tsunami Barbara Corcoran lit the fuse on the Red Hook bomb, a bomb that—depending on your belief system—either went off, sputtered out, has yet to go off, or will never go off. In April 2005, Babs famously purchased 293 Van Brunt Street for $1.075 million, a building with two apartments and a storefront. Two years later, the storefront still sat empty after a 
We've already laid out some 
The chain of events that led to the dropping of 
