Block #4: Livingston Street between Smith & Hoyt Streets—Downtown Brooklyn
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Perhaps less celebrated than some of the major thoroughfares surrounding it, this block encapsulates the history of Downtown Brooklyn from its location adjacent to the major retail stretch on Fulton Street, just north of the nightlife on Smith Street, and a five minute walk from the nation’s largest urban industrial center.
Unlike the major commuting corridor or the hip shopping haven that we’ve covered in the past, this block doesn’t present any singularly-attributable usage pattern. While this may sometimes point to a lack of unique character, in the case of Livingston between Smith & Hoyt, it is entirely because of its unique character.
While we see some traits associated with office-dense areas, like local peaks during lunchtime and evening rush hour, other observations seem counterintuitive. Sustained volume on weekdays suggests that most of the traffic can be attributed to shoppers or people not confined by typical work hours (Empire State University is on this block), and late evening activity is a sign that people live nearby.
But how can there be a strong evening commute with no morning commute to speak of? Our theory is that this block is neither the origin nor the destination for much of its commuter traffic, and people tend to take different routes in opposite directions. This paper from Northwestern University offers an interesting discussion of this phenomenon.
Three weeks of daily traffic volumes broken down by direction of travel confirms our hypothesis: between January 28 and February 17, westbound traffic was consistently higher than eastbound, by an average of 20%.
Downtown Brooklyn originally developed as a commercial area with two major benefits: providing local options to serve the people living in New York’s first commuter suburb, and convenient access to the busiest port in the Western Hemisphere. Our block was right in the middle of the two, as embodied by 180 Livingston Street, built in 1900 as a warehouse for then-major department store Abraham & Straus across the street (but with its main entrance on Fulton).
By the second half of the twentieth century, Downtown Brooklyn and Livingston Street were subject to the same forces typical of American manufacturing cities. People began moving from cities to the suburbs while urban manufacturing witnessed a drastic decline.
In 1983, our friends at Regional Plan Association, an influential planning organization, released a seminal report for the area, lighting a path to revitalization and achieving the status DoBro (is that happening yet?) now enjoys as the third-largest business district in the city behind Midtown and Lower Manhattan — it attracted 190,000 people per day by subway alone last week according to MTA data.
Subsequent formation of MetroTech Center in 1992, focus on design and access for pedestrian areas like Fulton Street Mall, and a major rezoning in 2004 attracted over $9 billion of private investment and contributed to 200% increases in both housing units and food & beverage revenue. As one of the few streets in DoBro to historically include housing, Livingston between Hoyt and Smith has enjoyed every part of the cycle where housing brings offices and retail, which in turn bring more housing (a virtuous circle indeed).
The old Abraham & Straus warehouse at 180 Livingston is now home to a bustling Dallas BBQ outpost (surely responsible for a chunk of our weekend brunch and lunch crowd) but also some of the most expensive office space in New York.
Meanwhile, the department store across the street is now home to Macy’s’ second-largest store in NYC. Macy’s entrance on Livingston accounts for as much as 37% of the daily foot traffic on the north side of the block.
With housing and office development continuing to pour in, Livingston may eventually settle towards traffic patterns more closely resembling areas like 60th & 3rd in Manhattan. So, if you’re prone to nostalgia about places — or the data that describe them — best visit soon!
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The BONY Team
Click here to download the dataset (.csv)
Sources: PLUTO, MTA Turnstile Data, Mapbox, Placemeter Data
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