PROSPECT HEIGHTS — In its 30th year, the North Flatbush Business Improvement District presides over arguably one of the fastest-changing and most expensive commercial strips in the borough: Flatbush Avenue between Atlantic Avenue and Plaza Street.
Bookended by the Barclays Center and Grand Army Plaza — and located on the dividing line between Prospect Heights and Park Slope — the avenue is situated directly in the middle of booming Brooklyn.
But for years, the avenue and the group that stewarded it was hardly high-end. In fact, for decades, the neighborhood was viewed as a “dead zone,” said longtime BID president Regina Cahill who has lived on Flatbush near Sixth Avenue since the mid-1970s.
“It was only really around 1998 or so when people stopped saying to me ‘You live where?’” she said.
At left, a view toward the Williamsburg Savings Bank on Flatbush Avenue photographed by the North Flatbush BID in the early 1980s shows the former Plaza Theater, now an American Apparel store (right). (Photo credits: NFBID; DNAinfo/Rachel Holliday Smith)
This week, the BID will celebrate its 30th anniversary at its annual board meeting set to take place at the Barclays arena on Thursday.
But the history of the board started well before the BID’s first official meeting in 1986, Cahill said. It really began in the late 1970s with the North Flatbush Betterment Committee, a group of business owners and residents concerned with “quality of life” issues, she said— not least of which was prostitution.
“Pacific Street was just like a drive-through,” she said. “People don’t realize. We had the [New York] Daily News plant operations, the [78th Precinct] police station which was also central booking back in the day … the meatpacking area where Target is now and the train station. So this was, you know — if you needed to 'get any', you went to Pacific Street. It was really that crazy.”
Overall, the vibe of the avenue was “fairly depressed,” she said. Businesses included mainly trade shops — hardware stores, a tile depot, etc. — and a handful of second-hand stores, travel agents, bodegas and cafeterias that closed up at night. Foot traffic was very low.
“My daughter is 32. When she first learned to walk … we could come out on a summer evening and get all the way to Eighth Avenue without passing a single person,” Cahill said.
The triangle at Fifth and Flatbush avenues, photographed in the early 2000s, remains largely unchanged as shops changed around it and the Barclays Center rose across the street.
But the Betterment Committee, active through 1982, worked hard to promote the avenue and add “street amenities” like clocks, banners, trees and benches. The BID, officially incorporated several years later, continued that work, organizing sanitation services, annual neighborhood events and holiday lighting for the avenue.
Changes came to the avenue all the time, Cahill said, marked by “cycles of wars” between similar businesses, such as video rental spots.
“We probably had five of them at one point,” she said. “Then we had 15 hair salons that were active. And of course now, we’re into the iteration of restaurants and fitness, which is kind of interesting. It’s like high-end food and fatty stuff and then a gym.”
Only a handful of shops have stuck around for the entirety of the BID’s history, including the longtime sushi favorite Geido, the Dominican restaurant El Gran Castillo de Jagua and Pintchik Hardware.
In the early 1980s, left, the Carlton Theatre became the home of the Brooklyn Tabernacle church. It was demolished in the early 2000s. Currently, a residential building and urgent care center are located on the site.
Throughout it all, Cahill said she thinks the BID’s goal has been to preserve a neighborhood feel as much as it could. But continuing to do so in the future could be challenging, said the BID’s executive director James Dean Ellis, who views the group’s 30th year as a “very critical moment.”
“With the major development happening nearby, where do we want to be in that setting?” he asked, sitting with Cahill in the organization’s Flatbush Avenue office.
“There’s really, really a lot of shift and rather than being what this organization started [as],” which was mostly a “support group” focused on cleanliness and safety, he said, “we need to really look at where we want to be in this environment."
In particular, focus for the next 30 years will be on the effect of the nearby 22-acre Pacific Park development, once known as Atlantic Yards, which could include a one-million-square-foot tower located inside the BID’s borders. Though only a fraction of the project’s expected 15 buildings are now under construction, the development has already begun to affect the BID, though not exactly as expected — yet, Ellis said.
A photo from the BID's archives shows young people cleaning up a vacant lot at Atlantic and Flatbush avenues in the late 1970s.
“There’s this anticipation of 6,000 new apartments and new residents that come with that, so everyone’s banking on these new residents,” by driving up commercial rent prices, he said. “But they’re not here yet.”
That means high prices for small businesses (rates on the avenue range between roughly $85 and $125 per square foot annually, depending on the location, according to Ellis), but not necessarily the customer base to match.
“The restaurants that moved once Barclays was announced probably got slammed the hardest on their rents because it was major speculation,” Cahill said.
In the immediate future, the BID is working on more improvements for the avenue — a project to renovate Flatbush’s “triangle parks” is currently in the works — with assistance from board members and friends of the group who now include the children, and in some cases, grandchildren, of those who started the Betterment Committee, so many decades ago.
“I think we have a fairly fortunate density … of legacy properties,” Ellis said.
But in the more distant future, the commercial strip’s fate is a bit more hazy.
“‘Neighborhood’ was what we really wanted to have and I think that’s our challenge going forward,” she said. “With all that’s going on around us, how do we preserve neighborhood?”
