Another Look at Downtown Brooklyn- Part 1: Background

Flatbush Avenue is the diagonal street on the right, leading up to the Manhattan Bridge.
Fulton Street is the 2nd or 3rd cross-street from the bottom.
Metrotech clusters around the tall brown buildings in the upper right third of the photo

Downtown Brooklyn has been quite the hub of re-development activity for the last 4-5 years.
I'm going to be visiting some of the activity there in a series of 3-5 posts (not sure how long it will take).

First: a primer

Downtown Brooklyn really has two components:
1. Downtown proper (Atlantic,State, or Schermerhorn Street on the south, Tillary on the north, let's say Adams/Boerum, Court St and/or Boro Hall on the west, Flatbush Avenue on the east.
2.The Flatbush Avenue corridor.

{My personal memories of downtown Brooklyn are confined to the old A&S on Fulton Street, particularly those magnificent elevator doors, which are still there in Macy's, and of the giant Woolworths next door (or across the street), where an aunt of mine used to take me to the lunch counter in the summer.  It seemed like the coolest thing to eat lunch in Woolworth's!}
 
 
Obviously this was the central business district of Brooklyn.   Before MEtrotech there was little of what i'd call class  A (or B!) office here, but in additional to the courts, Boro Hall (once Brooklyn City Hall), there were a lot of professional offices,municipal offices, as well as the main department store shopping district for the entire borough.  Fulton Street Mall today is shadow of what Fulton Street used to be, but then again, it no longer needs to serve the same role.  

We know the short of it: hard times, then fulton street pedestrianized, then metrotech in the 80's, a giant back-office Class A/B office complex built by Forest City Ratner.

Fast Forward:
A whole re-development plan, more commercial and now residential development.
Over the next two weeks, we'll be discussing the activity there and showing some photos