The site of four planned towers, for 1,600 Jehovah's Witnesses, in hip, happening Dumbo.
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Side by Side
New York Times, United States - 7 hours ago
... At the moment the site is a vast, unpaved parking lot owned by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, more commonly known as the Jehovah's Witnesses; their ...
Side by Side
By JAKE MOONEY
As Jehovah' s Witnesses establish an ever larger presence in an ever more chic Dumbo, how will the two worlds coexist?
May 21, 2006 New York and Region News
By JAKE MOONEY
Published: May 21, 2006
THERE are fences along both sides of Jay Street on the block that is most visitors' first view of the Dumbo section of Brooklyn. One, backed up against the Manhattan Bridge just outside the F train stop, is ramshackle blue plywood, covered with photocopies of building permits and signs for construction companies. Through peepholes and gates, passers-by in recent weeks have been able to see the frame of the 33-story J Condominium, the neighborhood's newest luxury high-rise, growing taller by the day.
Across Jay Street to the east, toward the Brooklyn Navy Yard, is another fence, 10 feet tall, of gray corrugated metal. It is impenetrable, except for a small metal door tightly locked, and featureless, except for a blue-and-white sign marked with its address: 85 Jay. At the moment the site is a vast, unpaved parking lot owned by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, more commonly known as the Jehovah's Witnesses; their plan is to build four residential towers ranging from 9 to 20 stories and housing about 1,600 people.
If there is a steel-and-concrete metaphor for the future of Dumbo, the patch of land down under the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, it is here, on the stretch of Jay Street between York and Front Streets: headlong private development on one side and the Jehovah's Witnesses on the other.
And what is notable about this and other Witnesses buildings, in the eyes of many local residents, is the extent to which they stand apart from the life around them. A particular sore point has been the Witnesses' refusal, on religious grounds, to include ground-floor retail space in any of the buildings.
"The issue," said Michelle Whetten, president of the Dumbo Neighborhood Association, who has a perfect view of 85 Jay Street when she looks out her living room window, "was just that they weren't willing to share or intersect with us at all within the site. It's really that they don't interact with the community. So to have such a big piece of the heart of Dumbo just for them, that's what's frustrating."
Responding to criticism that shops should have been incorporated into the buildings, a spokesman for the Witnesses, Richard Devine, said: "It's not retail because we're a noncommercial entity. We don't engage in commercial business, so retail on the site we can't do. But the idea of blending it in with the streetscape, making it open, well lighted and comfortable, that's what we're interested in doing."
Whose Dumbo is it, anyway? Twenty years ago, the question was easier to answer. Dumbo belonged to the factories and the handful of loft-dwelling artist pioneers sprinkled among them, with the Jehovah's Witnesses perched warily on the edge.
Today the artists remain — though, given real-estate pressures, their numbers are dwindling — and with 85 Jay Street the Witnesses are poised to establish a beachhead in the heart of the neighborhood. But in place of the working factories, there are new apartment buildings and loft conversions, filled with residents who are prosperous, highly educated and comfortable in well-cut business suits.
This small patch of land hemmed in by bridges, a highway and the water is in demand from several directions. There are grocery stores now, and plenty of places to get a fancy meal, but for the first time there is not enough space to go around.
Mr. Devine, who arrived at a Witnesses residence in Brooklyn Heights from Detroit in 1979 and moved into the group's largest housing complex, 90 Sands, on the edge of Dumbo, in 1993, remembers the old days.
"In the late 80's and early 90's," he said, "it was empty. It was a ghost town."
Now there are shops like Prague Kolektiv, which opened last fall on Front Street near Pearl, around the corner from 85 Jay. It specializes in furniture made in Czechoslovakia from the 1920's to the 1960's. Giovanni Negrisin, an Italian architect who is the store's co-owner, said he and his business partner, Barton Quillen, settled in Dumbo because of the large spaces, the closeness to Manhattan and the neighborhood's reputation as a design-oriented place, a reputation that has spread far and wide. As he put it: "I had people from Europe, from Italy, from Japan even, come in with articles: 'This is Dumbo; we heard this is the new SoHo.' "
Red Wine and Hyper-Realism
On a recent Friday night, it certainly looked like the new SoHo at Jan Larsen Art, a gallery on Pearl Street almost directly under the Manhattan Bridge. Jan Larsen, the owner, was tidying up for his weekly open house. Around the room were pieces by artists whom Mr. Larsen, bald and wearing a crisp white shirt and a tie, described as "some of the most talented in the neighborhood." Toward the front hung sculptures of animals — an eagle, some fish and a piece that was half fish and half machine — that had been bolted together out of metal. On the walls were hyper-realistic close-up paintings of padlocks.
Among those admiring this display was Eric Hoisington, a dancer who has lived in Dumbo on and off for six years.
"There's a lot of dance here," said Mr. Hoisington, who lives downstairs from a dance studio. He held a cigarette and a plastic cup of red wine in one hand while gesturing with the other. "There's a lot of cooking here, a lot of fine restaurants, and a lot of painting, furniture making, a lot of craftsmen. And a lot of fine art."
Not to mention room. The vast living space available in the former factory district is what drew Michael M. Thomas, longtime columnist for The New York Observer, to the neighborhood. Mr. Thomas, also a novelist and a former Lehman Brothers partner and
Metropolitan Museum of Art
assistant curator who grew up on Park Avenue, was living in Sag Harbor on Long Island in 1999 when he decided to move back to the city. Flipping to the lofts section of the real estate ads, he noticed a place at 66 Water Street, for rent by Two Trees Management, a company owned by his old friend and business associate David Walentas.
Intrigued, Mr. Thomas got out his map of Manhattan and searched, fruitlessly, for the address. He called Mr. Walentas and asked, "Where the hell is this place?"
On his first visit to the building — where Two Trees says a one-bedroom unit with an office would rent for at least $3,400 a month — Mr. Thomas was struck by the noise from the highway and the two bridges. But when he saw the long, spacious apartment, Mr. Thomas fell in love. In April 2000 he moved in, and within months he was comparing Brooklyn to Paris.
"The water's right here, the light is fabulous, the buildings are low — look at this space!" Mr. Thomas said, gesturing to a vast expanse of books and paintings, and a window that looks out over an old warehouse toward the Brooklyn Bridge. "I couldn't get anything like this space in TriBeCa for what I'm paying. I've got a big bedroom!"
The Paris comparison may be apt, because he lives upstairs from the chocolate shop run by Jacques Torres, the former pastry chef at Mr. Thomas's old hangout Le Cirque, and across the street from Almondine, run by Mr. Torres and Herve Poussot, a former pastry chef at Le Bernardin.
Liked or Just Respected?
Long before Michael Thomas or Jacques Torres arrived, the Jehovah's Witnesses were a force in Dumbo, or at least on the edge of the neighborhood. For decades, four tan buildings with green trim west of the Manhattan Bridge and south of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway have been at the heart of the group's mission: translating its version of the Bible into hundreds of languages, and printing it and distributing it worldwide, along with supporting texts such as the magazines Watchtower and Awake!
One of the buildings, 117 Adams, was a printing plant when Tom Combs first arrived from Oregon as a Witnesses volunteer in 1958. Next to the building, in an area ringed by the expressway and the on-ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge, sat an area of chest-deep brush that Mr. Combs helped clear. After a while, he started to cut the grass there in his free time, and now, at age 67, on warm days, he still does.
In the beginning, he said as he gazed from the building's sixth floor, the only people he saw in the neighborhood were day laborers arriving in vans to work at local factories. Mr. Combs, who lives in a Witnesses residence on Livingston Street in Brooklyn Heights, would walk down to the water even then, when the Witnesses had the neighborhood mostly to themselves.
"A lot of us are from out of big cities, so just to get anywhere there's a little quiet is nice," he said. "You can get the same thing in a park, but there wasn't a park then."
There wasn't much of anything but factories, and the streets were littered with trash and industrial debris. In the last few years, things have changed significantly.
"We're seeing a lot more people walking dogs or baby carriages," he said.
Mr. Combs, who has tidy white hair and pale blue eyes smiling behind bifocals, has grown accustomed to seeing people out on the lawn — one man greets him as Papi, and a woman, who knows he is a minister, sometimes asks for advice. Still, he realizes that some people are less eager to approach a Jehovah's Witness. "To say that we're well-liked by everyone. ..." His voice trailed off. "I'd say respected by most, liked by some."
The World of Brooklyn Bethel
In 1909, when Charles Taze Russell, founder of the Jehovah's Witnesses, moved the organization to Brooklyn from Allegheny, Pa., it was the area's hospitality and reputation as a borough of churches, along with its access to shipping lanes, that impressed him. Over the years, the group grew to worldwide prominence as a religious organization and became one of the city's largest landowners.
Brooklyn Bethel, as the Witnesses call their headquarters, soon spread across Brooklyn Heights, and in the early 1980's, the group finished its sixth building in the area, the towering residence at 90 Sands, on the southern border of Dumbo, that houses 1,000 residents.
Halcyon, a record store on Pearl Street, is two blocks down from the Witnesses' buildings, and its owner, Shawn Schwartz, sometimes sees groups of the Witnesses' volunteers — recognizable because of their dark suits and short hair — headed to the waterfront. They don't stop in; the store caters mostly to D.J.'s. But Mr. Schwartz, who moved the store to Dumbo two years ago from Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, says he bears the Witnesses no ill will.
"They were here in a large way before any of the others of us were here," he said, "so if anybody's got a claim to the neighborhood, they invested in this neighborhood a long time ago."
Still, the presence of so many Witnesses, coupled with their low profile, strikes some Dumbo residents as odd. "They are silent in the neighborhood," Mr. Schwartz said. "I've told a couple of people that their giant buildings up there are like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory: Nobody ever goes in, nobody ever goes out."
But in the opinion of Robert Warren, 36, a volunteer in the Witnesses' communications department, the group is misunderstood.
"I think one of the misconceptions that people have about us in this area is that because we have our own dining rooms and take care of our own services, that we don't go to places out in the neighborhood," Mr. Warren said the other day over a communal lunch of whitefish scampi, rice and asparagus in the basement of 90 Sands.
"The thing that's important to remember about why we have the functions in here," Mr. Warren said, referring to the regularly scheduled morning and weekend prayers and the group meals, "is that it saves us a lot of time, so we can concentrate on what we're here for, which is our assignments."
A Change of Focus
The Jehovah's Witnesses are in the midst of a large-scale recentering, away from Brooklyn Heights and toward Dumbo and upstate New York. Their last printing press in Brooklyn, in a building on Dumbo's southern edge, came to a stop in April 2004, replaced by printing facilities in Wallkill, in Orange County. Last year, the organization sold its laundry building at 360 Furman Street in Brooklyn Heights and moved those operations into space vacated by some of the old presses. Plans are for the new buildings at 85 Jay Street to house Witnesses currently living in Brooklyn Heights.
Jan Larsen, the gallery owner, wonders if the organization's low-key, professional approach to relations with the neighborhood, particularly during the contentious approval process of 85 Jay Street, was a mistake.
"I was always surprised that they didn't see it as an opportunity to have interaction with a vibrant community," he said.
J. R. Brown, the Witnesses' national spokesman, sees an irony in complaints that the group is not outgoing enough, given its weekly door-to-door outings around the city. And he said the Witnesses had a lot to offer as neighbors. "We try to get people to be fair and look at what's being contributed here," Mr. Brown said. "You're going to know for a fact that you're going to have good neighbors who are going to be honest, they're not going to try to break into where you are or start a petition against you. But we're going to pursue our mission."
Mr. Larsen, walking around his studio on a chilly day in late March, thought back to all the time he spent cleaning, painting and putting up walls four years ago. "You're creating your own world," he said, "similar to what the Jehovah's Witnesses have done. They created a world around the way they see the world, and I'm doing the same. The same goes for Prague Kolektiv, and Halcyon. We're all creating our own scenes."
Occasionally the scenes intersect. One evening earlier this spring, in a basement studio across Front Street from Mr. Larsen's gallery, an artist named Jaimie Walker was applying chalk and silver spray paint to a canvas as she sipped from a glass of cabernet. Jamie Jared, a burly plaster restorer and Jehovah's Witness, watched the proceedings with interest.
A native Oregonian who lived and worked at the Witnesses' headquarters for six years in the 1980's before settling in Brooklyn for good, Mr. Jared is building a series of display and work spaces downstairs from the restaurant Superfine, to sublet to local artists like Ms. Walker, who might otherwise be priced out of the neighborhood.
To Mr. Jared, the biggest threat to the neighborhood's current mix is not 85 Jay, but the development of luxury condos. "By the time the Witnesses get down here," he said, "there's already going to have been a cultural shift that's going to have happened, from all the Manhattanites moving in."
One of those Manhattanites is Jill Montaigne, who moved to 70 Washington Street in October with her 7-year-old son, Schuyler. After living on the Upper West Side for 19 years, she looked at 85 places up and down the West Side before buying a 1,400-square-foot apartment in one of Mr. Walentas's buildings. Units that size in the building are being offered for at least $1 million.
Ms. Montaigne, who is a partner at a consulting and design firm in Manhattan, appreciates Dumbo's funkier side. "This is not a sterile neighborhood," she said. "It's very vibrant in terms of the arts community, and the mix of people is so much more citylike than in the city, where the neighborhoods feel so homogeneous."
Her concern about the new construction is outweighed by the positives of her new home. One of those is the view, which includes the Statue of Liberty, just beyond the Witnesses' Brooklyn Heights headquarters. "There's not a day that goes by," Ms. Montaigne said, "that I don't walk into this apartment and thank God I live here."
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