The houses near Montague Street are among the most expensive places to live in New York City. But the street itself is oddly, intractably unglamorous. LysandraO reports
Coffee and sandwiches, plus a lot of empty storefronts. Photo-Illustration: Curbed. Photos: Google Walk down Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights on a weekday morning, and the private-school drop-off crowd — Grace Church, Packer, St. Ann’s — is as chic as can be. Dads with bushy beards and in Red Wing boots push $1,400 Bugaboo strollers. Moms wearing Rachel Comey jumpsuits and Vejas pedal their kids to school on cargo bikes. The other day, I saw Emma Straub lugging a Pokemon-hatted kid along.
Not lately, for sure. But a generation ago, Montague Street was at least a functional, useful resource for its neighborhood. Before Smith and Court Streets took off or Fulton Street had a Shake Shack, Montague was the bustling, eminently practical commercial heart of gentrified Brooklyn — mostly mom-and-pop shops plus a scattering of national retailers that met the needs of the neighborhood while making their rent by serving the middle-class office workers of Cadman Plaza.
“The complicating factor with Montague,” explained BHA executive director Lara Birnback, “is that you’ve had a push-and-pull or a tug-of-war between the businesses who felt they were reliant on a customer base of daytime workers, and I think a lot of property owners geared their leases towards businesses that would support that crowd.” She continues, “I would love to see a Montague Street with a greater diversity of retail and services.
Restler thinks that the city should be doing more to penalize prolonged vacancies. “I think that some of these guys have creative accounting practices where they come up with ways to write off their losses. They are waiting for the perfect corporate tenant,” he told me.
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