The Brooklyn Factor

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by mhays

You make good points.

However any static density, even Brooklyn's, merits far less retail space than it used to. The switch to supermarkets and big boxes was step one. Internet retail pre-Covid was step two. The wreckage of Covid is three, including the sped-up shift to online buying.

If you can add density, you can add retail or at least offset these effects. But it takes a huge increase to do this. If the internet and Covid are cutting long-term neighborhood retail by 25%, then you'd need a 33.3% increase in residents/workers/etc (or spending power) to offset that.

That seems farfetched for most of Brooklyn, so retail dispersed along commercial avenues will continue to thin out....while continuing to remain viable due to density.

I don't think Amazon is the biggest risk to Brooklyn neighborhood retail. Amazon will never be able to compete with the convenience of having a full service grocery store a 5-minute walk away (or a bike shop/book store/restaurant). But low margin retailers often get pushed out by landlords, in favor of tenants with deeper pockets, when neighborhoods show signs of transition.

[Crawford]

Even pre-pandemic Brooklyn had no doubt been affected by e-commerce, big box, etc., but it has some very unique, insular communities that kind of play by their own rules.

The Orthodox, for example, are nearly 20% of the borough population at this point. Their commerce is almost entirely insular. There are no WalMarts, there's basically one fully suburban big box complex, only around 50% car ownership, and this is for a borough with the population of Chicago. Retail vacancies, outside of gentrified areas, were pretty scant pre-pandemic. There are lots of anonymous retail corridors that would be a huge deal elsewhere.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

Whatabout Paterson, Passaic?

There are definitely demographic and cultural similarities (working class Carribean Hispanics, West Indians, Mexicans), but those NJ towns don't really look similar.

Much of the Bronx is a corridor of 5-10 floor apartment buildings extending from the Harlem River north through downtown Yonkers. It doesn't really look much different from Upper Manhattan (West Harlem, Washington Heights, Inwood). Urban NJ, even at its densest, is at a lower scale.

[eschaton]

As an aside, excepting Hoboken and downtown Jersey City, Northern New Jersey has perhaps the absolute ugliest urban vernacular in the country. Its just a complete jumble of frame housing, sometimes attached, sometimes not, with seemingly random setbacks, building heights, massing, etc. Which could be cool and eclectic, except almost every one of them have been remuddled through replacing wood cladding with aluminum siding, removal of ornamental trim, oddly-sized windows being plunked in to "modernize" etc.

Of course, there's plenty of cities with run-down, shitbox frame housing. You can find it all over urban New England, Upstate NY, around the Great Lakes..also in a lot of Queens and Brooklyn. The difference is in those cases there's often plenty of nice neighborhoods as well, and even in cities where the urban vernacular is universally pretty ugly it's at least spaced wide enough and well treed enough to be somewhat camouflaged.

[edale]

Originally Posted by eschaton

As an aside, excepting Hoboken and downtown Jersey City, Northern New Jersey has perhaps the absolute ugliest urban vernacular in the country. Its just a complete jumble of frame housing, sometimes attached, sometimes not, with seemingly random setbacks, building heights, massing, etc. Which could be cool and eclectic, except almost every one of them have been remuddled through replacing wood cladding with aluminum siding, removal of ornamental trim, oddly-sized windows being plunked in to "modernize" etc.

Of course, there's plenty of cities with run-down, shitbox frame housing. You can find it all over urban New England, Upstate NY, around the Great Lakes..also in a lot of Queens and Brooklyn. The difference is in those cases there's often plenty of nice neighborhoods as well, and even in cities where the urban vernacular is universally pretty ugly it's at least spaced wide enough and well treed enough to be somewhat camouflaged.

A Pittsburgher talking about ugly urban vernacular?! What's that they say about throwing stones in glass houses?

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by edale

A Pittsburgher talking about ugly urban vernacular?! What's that they say about throwing stones in glass houses?

Oh, we have some godawful stuff. But that's nowhere near all of it.

[edale]

Originally Posted by eschaton

Oh, we have some godawful stuff. But that's nowhere near all of it.

Of course. The burgh has some beautiful neighborhoods!

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by edale

Of course. The burgh has some beautiful neighborhoods!

But as I said in my original post, what I was saying is just urban Northern New Jersey basically lacks (outside of DT Jersey City and Hoboken) nice looking urban neighborhoods. All of Newark, Passaic, Paterson, New Brunswick, Elizabeth, Union City, East New York, Perth Amboy, etc...it's all "ugly but functional."

[jd3189]

At least it’s urban. Since the US as a whole barely has any widespread continuity of urban development, the ones in the NE ( especially Northern NJ) is something we should all be proud of despite its ugliness. If you want beauty, Europe is the place to go.

[benp]

Originally Posted by jd3189

At least it’s urban. Since the US as a whole barely has any widespread continuity of urban development, the ones in the NE ( especially Northern NJ) is something we should all be proud of despite its ugliness. If you want beauty, Europe is the place to go.

How can "ugliness" be measured when comparing cities? It is a subjective quality, not similarly defined by everyone. I have seen San Francisco and NYC described both ways, for example. On top of that, no place is uniformly "ugly" or "beautiful" everywhere. One can usually see the flaws if you look closely, and conversely one can miss the beauty if you don't look close enough.

[edale]

Originally Posted by eschaton

But as I said in my original post, what I was saying is just urban Northern New Jersey basically lacks (outside of DT Jersey City and Hoboken) nice looking urban neighborhoods. All of Newark, Passaic, Paterson, New Brunswick, Elizabeth, Union City, East New York, Perth Amboy, etc...it's all "ugly but functional."

Nonsense. Urban NJ has lots of charming and nice looking urban neighborhoods. Taking away Jersey City and Hoboken is also a bit of a strange restraint to put on the discussion of NJ urbanism, as they are hands down some of the most functionally urban (and often attractive) places in the US. Anyway, are these ugly to you?

Kearny:
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7650...7i16384!8i8192

Cranford:
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6560...7i16384!8i8192

Montclair:
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.8184...7i16384!8i8192

[bossabreezes]

While eschaton is not wrong that there are plenty of ugly urban areas in New Jersey, I think he vastly misjudged. I think it's very apparent that NJ does urban better than pretty much any other state in the country.

Actually, I can't think of any other state that has so many dense, urban and attractive small and midsized cities in it. A good chunk of ''Suburban'' Northern New Jersey puts 95% of the rest of the country to shame in terms of its urbanity, wealth, education and quality of life. Probably the most universally successful state in the country.

It's also going through an urban renaissance. Single Family construction in the entire state is pretty much unheard of at this point and if it exists, it's very expensive.

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by edale

Nonsense. Urban NJ has lots of charming and nice looking urban neighborhoods. Taking away Jersey City and Hoboken is also a bit of a strange restraint to put on the discussion of NJ urbanism, as they are hands down some of the most functionally urban (and often attractive) places in the US. Anyway, are these ugly to you?

Kearny:
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7650...7i16384!8i8192

Cranford:
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6560...7i16384!8i8192

Montclair:
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.8184...7i16384!8i8192

No, but those are all commercial strips. It doesn't take much for them to look nice - and they look similar across most of the country. I typically use back residential streets to judge urban vernacular, because those vary a lot from city to city (from triple decker to rowhouse to two-flat).

Regarding those examples, Kearny is fairly ugly once you get off the main drag. Typical northern NJ vernacular of detached wood-framed structures which have been heavily remuddled. Cranford and Montclair are more streetcar suburban in terms of their building typology and lower-levels of structural density.

A lot of the issue, as I said, is just the use of wood rather than brick as the vernacular building material. It's a lot easier for wood structures to be functionally ruined in downscale areas. A brick building can survive up to 50 years of neglect as long as the roof is sound, but a wood house starts to decay if it's not painted for ten years. This means wood tends to be replaced by siding in poor neighborhoods. Worse still, often ornate trim is removed, porches are lopped off (or filled in to make more room) or poorly-proportioned windows (horizontal sliding windows, or those all-in-one bay windows) are stuck on a house. All of which can and does occur on brick homes too, but in those cases remuddling is more expensive, so it's less likely to happen. Add to this close setbacks and few street trees to obscure things, and you have a pretty brutal streetscape.

[edale]

Dropped into a random street on the Southside. Amazing business district, but ass ugly residential:

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4271...7i16384!8i8192

I'd take your Kearny example any day.

[sopas ej]

Originally Posted by eschaton

A lot of the issue, as I said, is just the use of wood rather than brick as the vernacular building material. It's a lot easier for wood structures to be functionally ruined in downscale areas. This means wood tends to be replaced by siding in poor neighborhoods.

Off-topic from the thread, but it's interesting that you would say that. Here in southern California, in poor neighborhoods, instead of synthetic siding, wood tends to be replaced with stucco or gets stuccoed over. I often get horrified when I see a Craftsman home stuccoed over. Blech!

On the topic of "suburban" New Jersey, I had relatives who lived in suburban New Jersey---Rockaway, to be exact, so when I think of "suburban New Jersey," I think of Rockaway, which in my opinion was practically rural, and not the Google Streetview examples that were posted. Those relatives have since moved back to California.

Their street looked like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.9082...7i16384!8i8192

[dc_denizen]

whats not to like?

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by edale

Dropped into a random street on the Southside. Amazing business district, but ass ugly residential:

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4271...7i16384!8i8192

I'd take your Kearny example any day.

As I said, Pittsburgh has plenty of ugly urban vernacular. It's basically a 50/50 split between frame and brick - and the frame neighborhoods are all ugly. So lots of South Side, Bloomfield, Troy Hill, Polish Hill, and Upper Lawrenceville (to give examples) are fairly ugly

However, there are lots of beautiful neighborhoods too, like Allegheny West, Manchester, the Mexican War Streets, Deutschtown, parts of Lawrenceville, etc.

Occasionally you find a stand of well-preserved frame houses, but this is rare. I wish this was more common, but without significant expansion of historic districts I don't think much will be done with our old frame housing stock.

[mrnyc]

Originally Posted by eschaton

No, but those are all commercial strips. It doesn't take much for them to look nice - and they look similar across most of the country. I typically use back residential streets to judge urban vernacular, because those vary a lot from city to city (from triple decker to rowhouse to two-flat).

Regarding those examples, Kearny is fairly ugly once you get off the main drag. Typical northern NJ vernacular of detached wood-framed structures which have been heavily remuddled. Cranford and Montclair are more streetcar suburban in terms of their building typology and lower-levels of structural density.

A lot of the issue, as I said, is just the use of wood rather than brick as the vernacular building material. It's a lot easier for wood structures to be functionally ruined in downscale areas. A brick building can survive up to 50 years of neglect as long as the roof is sound, but a wood house starts to decay if it's not painted for ten years. This means wood tends to be replaced by siding in poor neighborhoods. Worse still, often ornate trim is removed, porches are lopped off (or filled in to make more room) or poorly-proportioned windows (horizontal sliding windows, or those all-in-one bay windows) are stuck on a house. All of which can and does occur on brick homes too, but in those cases remuddling is more expensive, so it's less likely to happen. Add to this close setbacks and few street trees to obscure things, and you have a pretty brutal streetscape.

sure weehawken/union city up the river to the nys border is definately functional and blue collar, but it also has nice neighborhood areas and is very liveable. even those parts that are a real visual mish mash, like 'downtown' fort lee for one example, are fine. i enjoy going to the waterfront, hiking and poking around over there once in awhile. its better than the blander, wealthier parts just to the west of it.

[JManc]

If I lived in Brooklyn, I'd want to live in the Gerritsen Beach area. Very New Englandish.

[Crawford]

Gerritson Beach is very Irish and German. Super-insular. Families living there for generations.

Nearby Sheepshead Bay has, in some respects, a New Englandy feel, with lobster shacks and real commercial fisherman, but inland has a totally different feel. Very former Soviet and lots of new condo construction.