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The New York Times

Living In: New Roots in Carroll Gardens

By: John Freeman Gill
Published: 3/16/2014Source: The New York Times

154 President Street [Cheryl Nielsen & Cara Sadownick, Corcoran Group]
A two-family brownstone with central air-conditioning, listed at $2.99 million.
(718) 923-8027 Credit Katie Orlinsky for The New York Times

162 Huntington Street, #4R [Tom Le, Dennis McCarthy, Michael Pacifico, Corcoran Group]
A two-bedroom two-and-a-half-bath duplex condo with a balcony, listed at $895,000.
(718) 422-2524 Credit Katie Orlinsky for The New York Times

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Nick Donovan chose Carroll Gardens twice. When Mr. Donovan, a lawyer who had just married, first moved to this leafy part of brownstone Brooklyn in 1993, it was very much a front-stoop community, where older neighbors, usually Italian-Americans with deep roots in the area, would gather outside their homes to share pastry and news of the day.

Though newcomers, the Donovans found themselves running a gantlet of Old World hospitality every time they took an evening stroll. “Strangers invited us all the time: ‘Would you like coffee? Would you like pastry?’ ” Mr. Donovan said. “Sometimes they would invite us to dinner.”

After stints in Queens and Manhattan, the birth of two daughters, and a marital split, Mr. Donovan returned in 2006, buying a brownstone on Second Place for $1.85 million. The main draw, he said, was the stoop-front camaraderie he remembered, so he was disappointed to find that that way of life had all but vanished.

“It’s an offshoot of Manhattan now, an offshoot of Park Slope,” he said. “It’s largely become an urban professional neighborhood.”

The area still has an Italian-American flavor, particularly along the low-rise commercial corridor of Court Street. Italian is still spoken at Damian’s Hair Styling, and lard bread, an Italian specialty, is still sold at Caputo’s Bake Shop, Mazzola Bakery and G. Esposito & Sons Pork Store.

“I can still walk down Court Street, and it’ll still take me an hour and a half,” said Alex Calabretta, an agent with Douglas Elliman Real Estate, “because I know everyone and have to stop and say hi to everyone who passes.” Mr. Calabretta grew up in the area and works down the street from the spot once occupied by his grandmother’s candy store.

But the proportion of Italian-Americans has been dropping for decades, census data show — to 22 percent by 2012, from 52 percent in 1980. In that time, median annual household income more than doubled, in 2012 dollars, to $95,600 from $40,663. Not surprisingly, businesses have popped up to serve the changed population: Kidville, Area Yoga and Brownstone Tutors.

“It’s a trade-off,” Mr. Donovan said. “You miss some of the old neighborhood, but you also have high-end organic stores, so it balances out.”

One big change on Court Street was the construction, on the site of a former longshoremen’s union medical clinic, of a nearly blocklong seven-story condo with a brownstone-colored facade, windows of varying sizes, and a glass top. Part of a development called Sackett Union, which includes 11 townhouses, the 32-unit condominium was a bold — some say out of place — addition to a quaint, low-rise strip.

But one neighbor, Christopher Pardo, was so taken with a sixth-floor two-bedroom’s eye-popping view of Lower Manhattan that he bought the unit for $1.2 million and moved in last September.

Mr. Pardo, a real estate developer who grew up in the area in the 1980s, is glad that he and his wife, Sofia Zeno, are raising their young son in a building, and a part of Brooklyn, so full of children. “It was a neighborhood back then, with deep blue-collar roots,” he said of the Carroll Gardens of his youth, “and it’s a neighborhood today. Just different roots.”

What You’ll Find

Considered part of South Brooklyn until 1964, when its current name was adopted by a civic group, Carroll Gardens runs from Degraw Street on the north to Hamilton Avenue on the south, between Hicks Street and either Hoyt or Bond Street — 45 or 53 blocks, depending whom you ask.

The area’s signature feature is its deep front gardens, often bordered by decorative wrought-iron fences and occasionally ornamented with the Madonna statuettes that some call “Mary on the half shell.” This verdant streetscape was the vision of the land surveyor Richard Butts, whose 1846 plan called for 33.5-foot-deep front yards from First to Fourth Place, between Smith and Henry Streets. This pattern was then repeated for several streets between Smith and Hoyt. As money has flowed into the area, the culture of caring for these gardens has begun to change. Katia Kelly, a 29-year resident who blogs about the area at pardonmeforasking.blogspot.com, said that tending her garden had always been a social event that kept her close to her neighbors. “But a new neighbor asked me a couple of years ago who my landscape architect was,” she said, “and my Italian neighbor was really rolling his eyes about that.”

Neighborhood “agita” over the recent development of unusually large buildings like the 85-foot-tall Sackett Union condo and a jarringly out-of-context 11-story building at 100 Luquer Street led to a rezoning of the area in 2009.

“Carroll Gardens was always a sleepy little neighborhood that didn’t have the cachet of Cobble Hill or Brooklyn Heights or Park Slope,” Ms. Kelly said. But once developers set their sights on Carroll Gardens, she added, “it really unified the neighborhood in terms of getting City Planning to do a contextual rezoning.”

New zoning protects the urban-small-town atmosphere, restricting building heights to 50 feet in most of the area, and 70 feet on Court and parts of Clinton and Henry. But to the east of the rezoned area, between Bond and the Gowanus Canal, from Carroll to Second Street, a 700-unit rental complex is planned by the Lightstone Group. The buildings, six stories along Bond, will rise to 12 along parts of the canal, a Superfund site. Construction is to begin by late June, Lightstone says.

What You’ll Pay

The area is rich with brownstones and brick townhouses, selling in the low- to mid-$2 million range, for a house in need of work, said Mr. Calabretta of Elliman, but “it will creep up to $3 million or $4 million.” Condos sell for about $1,000 a square foot, said Victoria Hagman, the broker-owner of Realty Collective. An exception is Sackett Union, whose 32 units sold last year for an average of just under $1,100 a square foot, said Kenneth Horn, the president of Alchemy Properties, the developer.

A four-story condo is being built at 241 Carroll Street, replacing a brownstone that collapsed in 2012. Its four units will come to market by summer for $1,000 a square foot, said Ms. Hagman, whose company is handling the sales. A search on Streeteasy.com found 26 residential properties for sale.

Two-bedroom floor-throughs in brownstones rent for $3,200 to $4,000, Mr. Calabretta said.

What to Do

Smith Street is a genuine restaurant row. Interspersed with old delis and new boutiques are dining spots like Kittery, which serves dollar oysters during happy hour, and Dassara, known for its Jewish-Asian “deli ramen.”

Among restaurants on Court are Frankies Spuntino, on the site of an Italian social club, and Buttermilk Channel, an American bistro named for the waterway between Brooklyn and Governors Island. Caputo’s Fine Foods is regularly packed with customers snatching up its fresh cheeses.

The Schools

The elementary schools may be as good as the mozzarella. Some prekindergarten through fifth-grade students are zoned for Public School 58 on Smith Street, others for P.S. 29 in Cobble Hill; both got A’s on their most recent city progress reports.

The Brooklyn Secondary School for Collaborative Studies on Henry Street teaches Grades 6 through 12. Its middle school received a C. SAT averages last year were 403 in reading, 390 in math and 394 in writing, versus 437, 463 and 433 citywide.

The Commute

The F and G trains run beneath Smith Street, with station entrances at Second Place and President Street. The ride to Lower Manhattan takes about 20 minutes, with a change to the A; Midtown is a half-hour trip.

The History

Carroll Park was laid out in the 1840s as a private garden. In the 1980s, a softball league played there, and Victor J. Masi, now a doctor who is opening a medical institute in the Sackett Union development, was a star. “He used to hit bombs out of that park,” said Mr. Pardo, who recently bought in Sackett Union. “No joke.”

Copyright © 2014 The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission. Katie Orlinsky/The New York Times. 

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