Downtown Brooklyn and the Dime

The Brooklyn Tower, built by Michael Stern’s JDS Development Group, is Brooklyn’s first supertall, rising from the landmark Dime Savings Bank, and this cluster describes the district surrounding the former bank. Downtown Brooklyn was the civic and commercial center of an independent city until 1898, and its streets still carry the marks of each era that tried to remake it.

Shopping defined much of it. The Fulton Mall, eight blocks of stores on Fulton Street, has been implicated in nearly every plan for the borough since the Brooklyn Bridge opened; a review in Places Journal describes a street that thrives with a diverse crowd of shoppers while never matching the unified, upscale vision that planners kept drawing for it.¹

Traffic reshaped it too. The Flatbush Avenue Extension carries cars from the Manhattan Bridge into the district, and in 1941 and 1942 the Works Progress Administration straightened a hazardous bend, added lanes and built three safety islands between Lafayette Street and Fulton Street, according to the Living New Deal archive.²

Culture is the newest layer. In 2004 the city set up a cultural district around the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of its Downtown Brooklyn plan, and a State Comptroller’s report counted the renovated 80 Arts building, with twelve nonprofit groups inside, as the district’s opening project.³

The entries follow those threads. Dime Savings Bank of Brooklyn covers the domed bank itself, and the entry on the borough’s savings banks sets it among the borough’s other banking halls. The Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower had the borough’s skyline to itself for decades. Fulton Mall, the Flatbush Avenue Extension and the Brooklyn Cultural District cover the street, the road and the arts, and the Brooklyn skyline brings them together. Two further entries study how the tower’s plan answers the bank and what lies beneath the neighboring blocks.