Downtown Brooklyn
The history of Downtown Brooklyn is inevitably tied to the evolution of the Fulton Mall, a bustling shopping district that runs along Fulton Street from Brooklyn Borough Hall to Flatbush Avenue. The area has been a shopping district as far back as the mid 1850’s, shortly after the completion of Borough Hall. It hit its peak during the post-World War II years, when it catered to the periods blooming middle class. Shoppers flocked to the area from the flourishing shipyards and new veteran housing in what is now the Walt Whitman Projects. At the time, Fulton Street was home to four large department stores and served as Brooklyn’s premier shopping area. But with white flight of the late sixties and throughout the seventies, the area declined. But a decline that did not deter a large amounts of working class shoppers who made up a sizable portion of the reported 100,000 shoppers a day who passed through Fulton Street. Still, the decline led Mayor John Lindsey in his 1969 campaign to promise to revitalize Downtown Brooklyn with the heart of the program focusing on renovating Fulton Street, converting it into a covered car-free shopping district with overhead walkways. Much of the renovations to Downtown Brooklyn never came, but Fulton Street did in 1977 become the Fulton Mall with wider sidewalks and fewer cars though without the proposed coverings and overhead walkways.
The idea that the shopping district held the key to bettering the area begs the inevitable question, better for who? Even at its low point in the mid-1980s, the Fulton Mall was the third most successful commercial district in New York City, trailing only Herald Square and Fifth Avenue, according to the U.S. Census. This made it the sixth most lucrative commercial district in the country. Yet 30 years on, city officials and developers were still trying to fix the Fulton Mall and revitalize Downtown Brooklyn. Real estate would be more valuable, the theory went, if Fulton Mall catered to a more affluent customer. “The great profitability of the mall is belied by its appearance," commented the New York Times in the 1980s. "Teen-age boys loiter around the many sneaker stores, women with children in tow sort through bins of cut-rate sweaters and sale signs never go down.” During the same decade, the Ratner family built Metro Tech, a corporate office park on Flatbush Avenue to house giant companies like Chase Bank that were looking to avoid the high rents of Manhattan. But the area still catered to Brooklyn’s working class and poor populations more interested in "racks of t-shirts with gold-sequined tigers" than the designer goods of Fifth Avenue, as The New York Times lamented.
By the end of the 1990s, the stock market exploded, and a new migration of the affluent moved into Fort Greene, Prospect Heights and Clinton Hill, all within walking distance of the mall. These were people who did want designer goods more akin to Fifth Avenue than, as The New York Times had put it a decade earlier, “gold caps for teeth.” The tipping point toward gentrification came on July 1, 2004, with the rezoning of the area around Fulton Mall for residential towers and denser commercial and mix-use projects. Within two years the area even found itself rebranded with the demoralizing realtor short hand of DoBro. And with gentrification came a decrease in the population of lower income residents and people of color. Residents of color in the area dropped 50% between 2000 and 2010, according to the U.S. Census, and the trend has not visibly slowed in the last four years. Over the same period the medium income in the area increased by 43%. No one will miss, the frequent shootings and visible gang presence in the Fulton Mall of the early to mid-90s, but as usually happens with gentrification, the people who have been saved from crime are not the same people who had to endure it. With its almost completely different demographic, residents who once shopped at Fulton Mall can no longer afford to live nearby and are being pushed further and further out of the way.
Hopefully the project creates a certain affection for the traces of old Downtown Brooklyn. But doesn’t aspire to accurately document the changes, the intention of the project is not documentary in nature. Instead, a tribute to the area the people and the scenes as subject matter for art that might hold some truth about changes in the neighborhood. Or more specifically what a revitalizing of the area could have been and what it is now unlikely to be, that is, a modern and diverse area that includes the swank brownstones of Clinton Hill as well as the low-income housing hugging the BQE, where a clean, modern Fulton Mall plays home to an intersection of Chase Bankers, LIU students and homeless street prophets. It is a vision of urban redevelopment that exists only in the fictional reality of art and maybe in Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz's stump speeches.
“In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Fulton Street was a retail environment for people of low income, people of middle income and people of high income. Then, over the last many years, Fulton Street no longer offered a shopping environment that represented Brooklyn’s diversity. Finally, we are going back to the future, if you will, going back to what Fulton Street used to be.”
