Published By: The Village Voice
Link: Village Voice Article Source Link
Photo By: Fillip Kwiatkowsi
Written By: Tom Robbins and Students in the Hunter College Urban Investigative Reporting Class
The Second Battle of Bushwick
Thirty years after the blackout riots, it’s getting hot all over again
Tom Robbins
Tuesday, June 19th 2007
From the top of the spanking new steel-and-glass 14-story condo tower now open for inspection on Grove Street just off of Myrtle Avenue, you can see most of Bushwick—the landmarks of the neighborhood that was, and the one that’s fast being remade, the sites of the bad old memories, even of some of the good.
This is the Brooklyn neighborhood’s first major luxury residential construction project, but the marketers of the 59 condominium units for sale here steer clear of the name Bushwick as much as possible. Promotional materials aimed at luring hipsters with the means to buy a one-bedroom for $270,000, or a three-bedroom penthouse for $682,000 refer to “ever-expanding Williamsburg” or “East Williamsburg” as the building’s locale. This despite the fact that the tower at 358 Grove Street is in deepest Bushwick; look it up on any map.
