SHELLING IT OUT: The Carriage House at 17 Dikeman St. sold for an eye-popping $1.55 million — $775 a square foot — in April after just five months on the market. “Buyers are not scared,” says Corcoran Group broker Eva Zurek. “They’re looking at coming here and paying whatever is comfortable. They want to stay in Red Hook for 20 years.” (Christian Johnston)
RED HOOK ON THE MARKET: $650,000: 176 Richards St. is a 1,500-square-foot mixed-use townhouse built in 1925. Agent: Tina Fallon, Realty Collective, 917-379-7903
RED HOOK ON THE MARKET: $2.45 MILLION: 386 Van Brunt St. is a 2,800-square-foot, mixed-use building that has a single-family residence with a second-floor deck and a rooftop cabana. Agent: Eva Zurek, Corcoran Group, 718-923-8033
RED HOOK ON THE MARKET: $1.35 MILLION: 98 Pioneer St. is a two-family home including a duplex with a chef’s kitchen, two fireplaces, skylights and a landscaped terrace. Agent: Tina Fallon, Realty Collective, 917-379-7903
Artist Dustin Yellin (above) has opened a not-for-profit community-based arts center in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where artists have started to swarm. (
)
To the casual observer, Red Hook appears to be a sleeping neighborhood. Sure, on the weekends there’s a line of traffic snaking in and out of Fairway and IKEA, and a constant cluster of hungry people lined up at the food trucks parked around the Red Hook ball fields. But the trickle of foot traffic up and down Van Brunt Street (the Brooklyn hood’s main drag), and the largely burned-out blocks with gargantuan warehouses amid empty lots in between, can make Red Hook feel like a waterfront hamlet in the off-season — or an area forgotten.
Look a little closer, though, and you might be surprised: Those seemingly sleeping buildings are actually in use.
There’s a Snapple warehouse and Linda Tool’s metal-fabrication factory and — even more interestingly — hives of artisan activity: furniture-crafting, glass-blowing, pie-baking. In fact, there’s a whole industrious community working behind the bricks.
The O’Connell Organization, which owns 1.3 million square feet in 50 properties in Red Hook, has leased space to the Liberty Warehouse, a catering facility used for weddings; the Mile End delicatessen’s production facility; and the Still House Group and Hot Wood Arts, both artists’ residencies. It’s also given free space to the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition and offers “below-market rent” to more than 75 individual artists and artist groups in the area.
“It used to be that the guy who bought the warehouse [in Red Hook] would be a plumber, a contractor, using it as a workshop,” says Massey Knakal senior vice president Ken Freeman, who has been selling land and commercial space in Red Hook for a decade. “Now you’re seeing fewer of those types of buyers and more artists or creative types . . . They have the money; they want the space; they want the light and the funky feel of the neighborhood.”
After purchasing what was once the Time Moving and Storage Building at 159 Pioneer St. for $3.7 million, the painter, collagist and sculptural artist Dustin Yellin turned the space into the Intercourse, a not-for-profit, community-based arts center and exhibition space with 26,000 square feet inside and 20,000 square feet outside. The newly unveiled multi-level space with 40-foot-high, beamed ceilings will have a residency program for artists and a sculpture garden. (Manhattan scenesters including Macaulay Culkin made the trek to the Intercourse’s private preview of former Moldy Peaches singer-turned-painter Adam Green’s “Cartoon and Complaint” exhibit on Saturday.)
“Someone brought me out [to Red Hook] in the ’90s, and I was crazy about it because it was surrounded by water. It was a fishing village with one road that terminated in the ocean,” says Yellin, who has been a Red Hook resident for seven years and is representative of an influx of artists interested in living and working in the neighborhood.
“The amount of artists who have been moving to the neighborhood is unbelievable,” Yellin continues. “It’s one of those things, 10 people do it and another 10 and then 40, and now it’s happening so fast.”
This interest coupled with the extremely small residential inventory in the area — a result of the neighborhood’s zoning, mostly for manufacturing and commercial — has fueled a spike in local home prices.
Most notably was the sale of 17 Dikeman St. in April. Mirabelle Marden, a photographer and former art-gallery owner herself, paid $1.55 million, or $775 a square foot, for the 2,000-square-foot carriage house. To put this into perspective, according to Trulia.com, the average price per square foot in the amenity-laden and much more convenient Cobble Hill over the last three months is $764.
Granted, 17 Dikeman had been completely renovated (by German architect Thomas Warnke, who lived there), but this is a neighborhood without a subway station.
“The people who are coming to Red Hook . . . all know each other, and they love the fact that there is no train,” says Corcoran Group broker Eva Zurek, who sold 17 Dikeman and who has lived in Red Hook herself for eight years. “They’re running away from places where there will be high-rises. There’s very little that can be built here; this will never be like Williamsburg.”
There are potential residential developments in the neighborhood, but uncertainty surrounds many of them. The redevelopment of 160 Imlay St., a Red Hook warehouse, has been on the table for at least eight years now. Originally it was going to be condos, then rentals, and now the plan calls for about 150 units with a mix of condos and rentals.
Bruce Federman, managing director of Industry City Associates, which is developing the project, says construction will now start in 2013.
Over at 82 Lorraine St., a condo project, sales appear in a state of arrested development; the Corcoran Group listings disappeared from the Internet, but the building is very much standing. Phone calls about this project were not returned.
Meanwhile, David Maundrell, president of Aptsandlofts.com, says that he is working on “a large-scale rental development” in Red Hook but can’t offer details yet.
And Freeman is marketing a residential site at 146 Conover St., but so far developers aren’t swarming.
“It’s a residential site and there is industrial all around it, so a lot of people go and look at it and they think, ‘Do I really want to build a brand-new building with a big parking lot across the street?’ ” Freeman says. “There’s definitely a tension between residential use and industrial use.”
All of which is to say that the tight residential market in Red Hook won’t loosen anytime soon.
What is changing is the type of amenities in the neighborhood. Brooklyn Crab, a seafood shack — with a forthcoming mini-golf course — opened last week. Saturday at Brooklyn Crab, at 24 Reed St., across from Fairway, saw two-hour waits at 5 p.m. and a patient crowd including actor/comic David Cross.
With so much space, this quiet artists’ community could eventually be disrupted in more ways than one — more residential units or more big-box stores.
Freeman is marketing a 97,000-square-foot piece of land at 110 Beard St., between IKEA and Fairway, which is zoned for retail. Thor Equities owns a piece adjacent to IKEA that’s large enough to house multiple tenants or even a shopping center.
“The neighborhood wasn’t psyched about the IKEA; that was controversial . . . But those fears about traffic have not been realized,” Freeman says. “That doesn’t mean that anyone loves having IKEA next to them, but it’s not a nightmare scenario. But do you really want another big-box destination?”
“There are a lot of empty lots and I’d be interested in seeing smart zoning,” says Tina Fallon, an agent at Realty Collective and a Red Hook resident. “It would be nice if some of the infill lots could go mixed-use. But that’s me, and everyone you talk to will have a different opinion.”