A story of Dumbo, Fort Greene, Williamsburg, Gowanus and Red Hook, by George Fiala

I was working at the Phoenix, a community newspaper headquartered in Boerum Hill that was known as the newspaper for Brownstone Brooklyn, when a funny term started floating around the office.

This was in the late 1970’s, when formerly industrial neighborhoods in lower Manhattan began changing their names to SoHo, Noho, TriBeca, even LoLita. These terms were understood to be generated by real estate people looking to upscale these neighborhoods. That’s what it did.

The funny term I heard  was the name of a Disney elephant with big floppy ears—Dumbo. It was said to stand for “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass,” and at least in the beginning, it was meant as a joke.

In those days DUMBO was  an industrial area with hardly anybody living there but artists who needed cheap studios. Scott Pfaffman told me that in those days you could have a loud band practice in the middle of the night because there was nobody to disturb.

Around then a young real estate developer started buying up old buildings. One day he threw a party for the press at 45 Water Street. The building was under renovation with only the top floor being finished, with walls and everything. It was weird taking the elevator and going up bare beams, but I remember the views were good from the top and so was the wine and cheese.

But for many years people didn’t move to DUMBO, but the developer used connections and made  a deal with Governor Mario Cuomo who had NY State agencies take leases in his empty properties. Buses were made available to take people from Montague Street to DUMBO, but still nobody was very interested.

But eventually things coalesced and the neighborhood turned. The developer was David Walentas, his company Two Trees. His next neighborhood was Williamsburg. In both, Two Trees had fights with the community and had to convince local leaders and politicians to agree to zoning and other changes. Which they did.

A couple of things. Walentas’ initial money came from Ronald Lauder (he married someone who worked at Estee Lauder), a prominent Republican who was once appointed as an Ambassador by Ronald Reagan. David’s son, Jed, who now leads Two Trees, got his first job with the Trump organization, and according to what I read online, loved it.

Fort Greene is the next part of this story. The company is Forest City Ratner.

Back in the early 1980’s, I remember that my boss held the newspaper up on press night to wait for our reporter who was at a late night meeting where the Regional Plan Association presented a plan for Downtown Brooklyn. Big corporations were starting to move headquarters to New Jersey, partly to save money. The goal was to keep them in NYC by having them move to Brooklyn instead, downtown Brooklyn being just across the river.

Bruce Ratner had been in government under Mayor John Lindsay and also Mayor Koch. He formed a real estate development company, Forest City, and won a bid to develop Metro Tech

When first built, Metro Tech seemed like a gated community, with long lists of prohibited things written on stone

I attended an event at St. Francis College where James Stuckey, another Koch appointee, recently hired by Forest City, stood before a roomful of local business people, many of them Blacks with stores on Fulton Street, telling them that they will have to upscale their businesses and start selling high class lingerie instead of boom boxes and hot dogs. That was around 1988, and possibly the first time I was face to face with gentrification, and I didn’t like it.

After completing MetroTech, the Atlantic Center was next. That’s where the Barclay Center is. The first thing they built was the shopping mall. On the outside they made it look like what Ebbets Field might have looked like had they relocated there, complete with pennants on top.

But on the inside, it was like a prison. A giant mall with one way in and one way out, hallways between the stores with no windows, and guards all over. To me it seemed like a company trying to figure out how to make money from people (Black people) they were scared of.

But they ran into trouble as they started the rest of the project, called Atlantic Yards. A community movement started by local resident Daniel Goldstein called Develop Don’t Destroytried to get a better deal for the neighborhood.

As Juan Gonzalez explained perfectly in the NY Daily News in 2010, “Goldstein, a Web designer, was refusing to move. Only two years earlier, he had bought a new condo in the neighborhood for $590,000. He had this wild-eyed idea that the people of a community should be consulted before the government condemns their property to make a rich developer even richer.”

Develop Don’t Destroy spent six years trying to stop the project, but eventually lost. As Gonzalez  continues:

But another powerful grassroots movement was backing Ratner. The developer was a big contributor to ACORN. He had promised ACORN head Bertha Lewis that one-third of the housing would be affordable and that her organization could manage that portion.

Ratner also spread his money to other black organizations and businesses in Brooklyn, and the conflict over Atlantic Yards sometimes took on racial tones.”

In addition he actually backed a candidate to run against Leticia James, then the local City Council member and just about the only politician to challenge him.

The treasurer on that campaign was Charlene Nimmons, the Wyckoff Gardens TA president. Because I began reading Norman Oder’s blog on Atlanci Yards, as well as articles in the Brooklyn Paper, I came to know Nimmons as, one the one hand a respected tenant leader, but on the other hand someone who used the influence she had representing tenants in exchange for charitable donations to non profits and political campaigns that did not seem very active, with most of the expense being payroll.

In Gowanus, the Fifth Avenue Committee (FAC), led first by Brad Lander and then Michelle de la Uz, is a non-profit housing organization that has a vested interest in the Gowanus rezoning.  They have been co-developer of a large plot of land by the Gowanus called Public Place, or sometimes Gowanus Green. But that plan depended on the Gowanus rezoning.

Karen Blondel was hired as a environmental organizer in 2016. It was important for politicians to have support from the public housing community for the rezoning, and much of that was gained by $200 million promised for apartment improvements as part of the rezoning agreement. Blondel helped fight for that as a FAC employee.

I first saw Blondel and Nimmons together around that time at a community meeting held by Thor Equities seeking public support for a project they wanted to build on land they owned in Red Hook. That’s the land that eventually became an Amazon warehouse.

I was surprised to see someone that I respected together with someone that I didn’t. When I asked, Karen told me she was there to learn from Nimmons.

Some years later she worked for local developer Alexandros Washburn, who was similarly seeking city approval to build a 15 story building in Red Hook, which was eventually denied.

The David Prize is named after David Walentas. The billionaires divide a million dollars each year among 5 applicants who are deemed “extraordinary New Yorkers.” It is part of a slick package that must cost as much as the grants. The winners become part of a sign by the Manhattan Bridge. As part of the deal, they have to sign a non-disparagement contract, meaning they can’t ever badmouth Two Trees

It is not a grant, nothing special need be done with the money—it is advertised by the Walentas Family Foundation as a “no-strings attached” gift.

There are some big vacant lots in Red Hook. I hope they don’t think of their gift as a bribe.