YOU knew it was coming, Brooklyn. Maybe it was Sarah Jessica Parker’s recent suggestion that her “Sex and the City” clan would’ve cavorted there were the HBO series filming today. Then again, it might have been when the Beckhams named their kid after the borough. Or perhaps it began when posh new clubs and hotels below East Houston Street started drawing Meatpacking District miscreants ever closer to the
East River.
Whatever the case, the city’s night-life scene is seeing a
Brooklyn-bound shift thanks to an influx of bars and clubs with deep Manhattan roots.
Around this time last year, Bowery Presents, which operates lower Manhattan’s Bowery Ballroom and Mercury Lounge, debuted the Music Hall of Williamsburg on Sixth Street. A few blocks away, the proprietors of TriBeCa’s defunct Wetlands are planning to open Brooklyn Bowl toward year’s end. Early in the new year, the Knitting Factory will vacate its TriBeCa digs to reunite with its old
neighbors.
And that’s just the tip of the ‘Burg. The Gowanus area and DUMBO are seeing similar night-life migrations, which has night owls wondering if this spells the end of Brooklyn’s cultural sovereignty, not to mention its relative affordability. Or, you know, if the city’s capital of new bohemia has simply become more fun than Manhattan can afford to be.
“Fifteen years ago, when the Knitting Factory arrived, it made perfect sense,” recalls Knitting Factory president Jared Hoffman, whose storied 21-year-old music venue left Houston Street for TriBeCa in the early ’90s because TriBeCa was “a warehouse and industrial neighborhood that was in the process of emptying out. It certainly wasn’t a destination for the wealthy to live.”
But it’s part of the urban life cycle that art scenes become victims of their own success.
“When artists arrive, it creates the venues for their expression,” says Hoffman of neighborhoods like TriBeCa.
“The things that made it a very cool and hip desirable place to spend the evening began to draw people who wanted to live near those things . . . now it’s one of the most expensive places to live in the city.”
It’s an expensive place to do anything, according to real-estate firm Newmark Knight Frank VP Jeffrey Roseman. He says a commercial square foot in TriBeCa that rented for $35-$50 in 1993 would now fetch $150-$200. In Williamsburg, that square foot still costs $35-$50.
Hoffman says Manhattan’s pricey real estate not only makes it improbable for music fans and musicians to live there – try finding cheap apartments, let alone rehearsal spaces – but it also prohibits clubs from taking chances on genre-defying acts like Sonic Youth, Soul Coughing and Yo La Tengo that played his club in their infancies.
Hoffman doubts there will ever be another CBGB or Knitting Factory in Manhattan because, “that level of creativity and the ability to experiment requires inexpensive real estate. The bills you have to pay tightens the straitjacket.”
It isn’t just the music scene that’s heading east. The nouveau classic cocktail movement has crossed the river, too.
The proprietors behind Manhattan’s Flatiron Lounge are having great success in Carroll Gardens with Clover Club. And the team behind The Randolph at Broome is preparing to open a bar/lounge in DUMBO this spring which will have “a Rusty Knot feel,” according to a rep who asked that his name be withheld to avoid salesmen who flock to new construction projects.
The Randolph rep, a Brooklynite, claims he’ll be able to charge 15-20 percent less per drink in his new Brooklyn space and won’t be displacing painters and poets by opening it.
“Artists are already priced out of DUMBO,” says the Randolph rep. He also says locals needn’t worry the dreaded “Sex and the City” crowd will take over Brooklyn.
“The people those women are supposed to represent, I think they love Brooklyn,” the Randolph’s rep says. “It’s the people who watch the show who live in Tennessee, they’re the ones who think Brooklyn sucks or whatever.”
Reps for both The Randolph at Broome and Knitting Factory insist their new venues won’t require cheesy laser-engraved membership cards or purchases of $400 liters of vodka, nor are Paris Hilton sightings likely.
“If we get to a point where bottle service is successful in Brooklyn, we all need to move out of the city because we couldn’t afford it,” says the Randolph rep. “I think everybody’s very cognizant of keeping Brooklyn Brooklyn,” says Collin Raymond, general manager of the Knitting Factory.
“No one wants it to be Manhattan in that regard.”
But will the Williamsburg crowd now be pushed further into the abyss and have to create new outlets for their experimentation in Coney Island or Bensonhurst?
“I hope not,” says Hoffman. “TriBeCa is somewhat unique in that it’s immediately next door to the Financial District, so there was a greater inevitability to the conquest of TriBeCa real estate than there is to Williamsburg.”
While realtor Roseman says New York can make “rock stars out of neighborhoods overnight,” he agrees an outer borough is unlikely to birth another TriBeCa or Meatpacking District. “It’s sort of apples and oranges.” Or more accurately, hipsters and bankers.