Dekalb Market - As If There's Not Enough Going On

Good golly miss Molly there's been a drought of posts here. Sorry you 30 readers of this miniscule blog!

Dekalb Market, somehow sandwiched along Flatbush between Willoughby and Fulton, will be opening July 23rd. What is it you ask? Shipping containers. It's full-sized Legos. With stuff inside.

As City Point is starting to finally move along and Willoughby Park at Albee Square shows signs of life with blinding colors and labor protests that have died down since a few weeks ago - Dekalb Market is looking to bring a stable of food, retail, and more to the area. Just in a really odd way. From the minds of Urban Space - it's another market that Brooklyn seems to be really enamored with these days. At least they'll have pickles right?

In other news, Brownstoner reports that a Gap....outlet will be coming to the Fulton Mall. The only Gap I like is a Gap outlet. You know why? Wanna guess? The gap in prices that's what. I wonder if the Gap was like, "Fulton Mall, let's go there and start small...with an outlet".

Shake Shack is finally getting started - the gut renovation of the pizza joint on the corner visibly began this week - and if it's anything like the Times Square one - this thing is going to be nasty flashy. I wonder if Wendy's and Burger King are going to fall on tough times. Not that I think Shake Shack is that great....

All the ellipses are due to it being the morning...random thoughts float by...

Speaking of Gaps:

Metrotech Chillaxes on the Security, Now Allowing City Busing Plus Other Newsies

Conan is better than ever by the way, or if you want SEO-optimized I guess I should say Conan is the funniest late night show on TV.

Nope that dog run for Downtown Brooklyn might not get going until there's a little more oomph in the petitions, however, ever since the Metrotech here in Downtown Brooklyn decided to open up to vehicles (if there was a hospital in there and your wife was going into labor they STILL probably wouldn't let you in) I'm curious to see how traffic patterns will change.

The B54 bus that bobs and shakes to Ridgewood in Queens but also travels down Myrtle will be cutting across the Metrotech Center, part of a diversion and also part of a future revamped Jay Street-Borough Hall subway station. You know, because the areas a changin'.

What's awesome is that there is so much good stuff happening on Dekalb and Myrtle in general. I could cross over Flatbush in about 3 minutes but it's pretty awesome to add yet another transportation arm; it's what makes this area really fantastic, given we have all the subway lines except 3 (not including shuttles) and a gazillion buses at Fulton.

In more news, Filene's Basement is coming to the Fulton Mall, as well as a long-awaited Shake Shack. All that hubbub over the changes is definitely starting to come to pass. CityPoint is setting up shop online with a new One Dekalb retail center (in the old Albee Square about two blocks away), which actually will be close enough to the point where the quiet blocks of the Metrotech are probably going away over the next couple of years.

That was the most interesting thing about the B54, starting to see more traffic through the Metrotech, I gotta make sure I look both ways again. It was nice to have a super quiet block, serene next to the mall. It's still quiet for sure, but I definitely want to not only see the changes, but feel them as well.

Our Ecstatic Neighbors at Toren Are So Ecstatic, Like, Totally

Curbed has a little ditty about a Toren microsite that has some truly useless video footage that would probably make me not consider the pristine, Transformers-looking building after a while just based on the level of obnoxiousness in some of the segments.

Not quite as inconvenient as the Oro, and now with a schmancy new grocery store coming soon which for all intensive purposes could bring more rats to an area already plagued by the construction on Willoughby, it's on the east side of Flatbush a couple blocks away from me and I've been hearing about it for years now. It's that big ass mirror coming out of the north side of Dekalb QBMR station.

Anywho, back to this microsite that someone thought was clever marketing but just not executed quite so well. The Curbed article points out the probable highlight, this woman Val who obviously isn't ready to see the bigger picture, and has a reader who suggests a drinking game out of it. Now after a while it would get stale, but if you need a quick reason (and plenty of shots) to pre-game before you go out to Perks or Kevin Barry's to get your groove on (or just stumble around Flatbush) it could be worth it.

My other favorite is "The Gym Equipment". There's nice equipment, but the video was taken pretty poorly, and if you're marketing this from a layman's perspective, the last thing I want is some woman not in workout clothes not knowing how to use the machines. Although anyone would probably balk at the weird looking cable stations.

Sure, it looks like a nice building. Just don't have cast offs from MTV's Made as your building reps.