4th Avenue Is Still Ugly

Fourth Avenue in Park Slope was rezoned in 2003 to allow for residential development—buildings up to 12 stories—that Marty Markowitz and others believed would spur the thoroughfare's metamorphosis into Brooklyn's Park Avenue. Some ugly apartment buildings were constructed and then the recession hit. Developers lost their funding and Fourth was stuck for years in limbo between its past as a light industrial corridor and its supposed future as a grand boulevard.

The resumption of construction on Fourth starting a couple of years ago was solid evidence that New York was coming out of the recessionary woods. New ugly luxury buildings have since been finished. More are under construction and still others are in the early stages of development.

Today Fourth Avenue is a bizarre witch's brew of ugly things. With all due respect to the folks who call these places home, the new residential buildings are monstrous. Bland and cheap looking. The gaps between them are plugged up with the vestiges of the old Avenue—tire repair shops, plumbing supply houses, gas stations, laser hair removal parlors, car washes. Many of these are now derelict and/or up for sale as landlords are taken with the idea that their properties might fetch development prices.

Several subway lines squeal from underneath the pavement. Traffic is heavy, always. Fourth Avenue is South Brooklyn's main north-south artery and so is steadily jammed with tractor trailers and livery cabs. It is home to nary a tree, and trash has a way of accumulating in great mountains along its curbs.

A couple of articles from the Wall Street Journal in 2010 claimed that the city made a huge mistake during the rezoning process in not requiring new residential development on Fourth to include ground level retail space. Many of the new buildings have air vents, parking garage entrances, or straight up brick walls at street level, making them unfriendly to pedestrians.

At the risk of stating the obvious, I would like to point out that the Avenue has more overt factors stacked against it in its bid to become a sunny promenade. It is a loud, dirty, and dangerous highway (even despite recent efforts to make it safer for pedestrians) serving a vital function as just such a roadway in the traffic infrastructure of South Brooklyn. It is devoid of anything green. All of its real estate stock, new and old, is depressing.

Then again, development continues. To the extent that Park Slope has good bars, they are on and around Fourth Avenue. Mission Dolores, Rock Shop, Cherry Tree, Pacific Standard, Fourth Avenue Pub, and so on. Good restaurants have cropped up. They have done a nice job with the park at the Gowanus Stone House.

People in New York have shown themselves willing to build a flagship Whole Foods Market on a federally classified toxic waste site, so the continued development of Fourth Avenue doesn't seem like such a stretch. The 2003 rezoning was undertaken in the first place to ease pressure on the torrid Park Slope housing market without overdeveloping the pretty parts of the neighborhood. That pressure has not relented, and shows no sign of doing so, thus we can expect many more bland apartment high rises in the years to come. If all goes according to plan, in ten years Fourth Avenue will blossom into a sunless high-speed deathtrap loomed over by wall-to-wall faceless condos. The sullen residents of Fourth Avenue will make for 5th and 3rd Avenues for merriment and essentials.

These photos try to capture some of the weirdness of Fourth Avenue. I think that a lot of this will be gone in twenty years.

schmutz

the abandoned KFC

just paint over it.

pro bono proboscus

spires

old stone house

geek