A while back, Google Alerts spat out a trade publication article about the Bushwick Generator (215 Moore St.), just off the Morgan L. and across the street from Bushwick Houses (273 Bushwick Ave.). It was supposed to be a tech hub, occupied by a tech incubator of the same name, with hundreds of thousands of feet of office and retail space inside a more beehive-forward iteration of the nearby Rheingold (10 Montieth St.).

It was designed by the architectural firm HWKN and to be developed by Heritage Equity Partners, which purchased the former warehouse in 2014. It was all news from 2020, and none of it came to be.

As a “tech hub & community center,” it closed in 2023. Out west, the Domino Sugar factory completed the idea. Heritage ended up in a legal dispute with a private equity funder that took over the warehouse, which has since become a film studio backed by Bain Capital.

The idea of this place is constantly changing. By the time you’ve documented it, it’s different again. Our geography is a wasteland of futures, and there’re new futures every day.

So here are the newer futures that developers are coming up with:

• A housing lottery at 343 Himrod Street (an eight-story tower off the DeKalb L, taking the place of an ambulance service) ends this month.
• A $20 million state injection is coming to East Williamsburg, per Greenpointers, and promises upgrades to Cooper Park and NYCHA housing.
• Developers filed permits to convert the former Hebron Baptist Church (599 Willoughby Ave.), three blocks from Myrtle Broadway, into “ten residences, most likely condos… and a 23-foot-long rear yard.” Not a good time for churches.
• In East Williamsburg, permits were filed for 877 Grand Street (off the Grand L) for a 115-foot building (8 to 11 stories) that promises “55 residences… and a 33-foot-long rear yard,” while off the Graham L, permits were filed for 73 Kingsland Avenue, which is slated to have “six residences… and a 39-foot-long rear yard.”
• Century-old pillar maker American Wood Column Corporation (913 Grand St.) is closing, per Curbed. CEO Thomas Lupo, grandson of an Italian jeweler who set up shop there in 1916, tells the site that his outfit “is one of the few compo-ornamentation outfits still operating in the United States.” This land is too valuable to be productive.
• The MTA announced elevator access will come to the Jefferson L station.

All’s quiet in Ridgewood because everyone there hates new development. North Brooklyn lacks the scale of downtown BK or Gowanus, though the greater Williamsburg area leads the city in new housing, in part due to Bloomberg’s aggressive rezoning of the area, which transformed industrial lots into luxury units. Rents in Williamsburg, like most of Brooklyn, have doubled in the last 25 years. The aggressive permit filings in East Williamsburg are cultural infill. Redevelopment, as codified in Williamsburg, continues to spill east over the BQE. East Williamsburg is a pipeline of futures.

These buildings wait to be logistical nodes of cultural production. These are the streets where, on a lunchtime walk, you’ll drive-by Shazam a local argument to see if it’s been had before, but a passing Camry will drown out so much beautiful, public hate, and you’ll be stuck with more bachata.

The new buildings, all shells for the fantastic lives of gnats and white women eating tin fish; behind it all, one big dormitory devolving into cast iron skillet politics. The grated gate closes on a barbershop. It reopens as a dog grooming studio. You’ll meet another Burning Man acolyte with this as their ringtone, and you’ll have to smile and nod. You own maybe three precious things, and your walls are none of them. 

At night, try to find a ley line, then give up and end up eating the charred and the raw at whatever new restaurant might shake off your migratory vibe. Wonder if you’ll be stuck here long enough to watch the dawn at the 35+ orgy that looks like “Ballad of a Thin Man.” All your older brothers couldn’t afford Fort Greene either, so maybe you should go back to California or the Ass Northeast or Midwest and engage in the all-American tradition of crashing a car into a retaining wall. You’re better off here. You always were because you self-selected all aspects of yourself to barely fit in here.

It’s summer again. Basketball shorts will be paired with hooved Tabis. “I live in a new construction home / I live on the strip behind the dealership, yeah,” David Longstreth sings on “Temecula Sunrise:” “I live in a greenhouse and I am getting wasted, yeah.” The appeal is still in the tension (combustibles beside the club), though you won’t find Longstreth around here anymore. North Brooklyn lends the sense that one is on the bleeding edge of things, as if one can internalize relevance by being in its proximity. It’s all the paperwork and downstream journalism of so many futures, and you live in a beautiful spreadsheet cell.

Photos by Andrew Karpan.