Square Feet: On Flatbush Avenue, Seven Stories Chock-Full of Ideas
January 11, 2011
But Mr. Attara’s plans languished, in part because the bank building was declared part of the Brooklyn Center Urban Renewal Area, meaning that that city could reclaim it at any time. Only now — four years after he learned that the city had no plans to acquire the property — is his vision coming to life.
A menagerie of creative entrepreneurs occupies the seven-story building, now known as the Metropolitan Exchange, or MEx, including biotechnologists, ecologically minded architects, organic fashion designers and even miniature-cupcake makers. Most came in search of cheap rent — which runs to around $400 per desk per month — and a place to hatch their start-ups. The open floor plans, communal kitchens and Mr. Attara’s philanthropic nature have made for an unusually symbiotic work environment, tenants say.
“Once we get more people,” said Mr. Attara, “I want to rename it the Brooklyn Arts and Design Arena — or BADA. Since we’re in the BAM District, it’ll be BADA-BAM.” The Brooklyn Academy of Music Cultural District encompasses the blocks around Flatbush Avenue, Fulton Street and Hanson Place. At present, the building, at 33 Flatbush Avenue at Livingston Street, is only 50 percent occupied. But the seventh floor offers a glimpse of the future.
Here a dozen ecological and technology entrepreneurs work in constant collaboration. Amanda Parkes, a co-founder of a biofuel start-up called Bodega Algae, also designs what she calls “parasitic energy costumes” that capture energy generated by the body in motion. So when a Parisian dance company commissioned costumes for a performance this winter, Ms. Parkes solicited the help of James Patten, an interactive designer, and Jessica Banks, a roboticist, who sit 15 feet away.
“I feel like this space contains all the skill sets I would ever need to get anything done,” Ms. Parkes said. “In a competitive work environment like New York City, to find free labor and open advice is incredibly valuable. And comforting, too.”
Mitchell Joachim, an ecological architect and one of three TED fellows (for technology, entertainment and design)on the floor, likens the Metropolitan Exchange to a modern-day version of Bauhaus, the German design school. “People here have enormous credentials and potential to succeed,” Mr. Joachim said. “Plus the rent is ridiculously cheap.”
Mr. Joachim’s nonprofit design collective, Terreform One, promotes green initiatives in cities. Its conceptual projects are on display, including One-Day Tower, a model of a 53-story building built from all the trash produced by New York City in 24 hours.
Mr. Attara, a former ecological designer who also owns three residential buildings on Atlantic Avenue, shares his tenants’ passion for recycling and re-use. “When new people move into the building, I say, ‘Let’s go shopping,’ ” he said. By “shopping” he means rooting through the vast stockpile of reclaimed furniture and semifunctional debris he has collected and stored throughout the building over 32 years.
Much of his collection is eccentric. Visitors entering the first-floor lobby will encounter, for example, a fortune-telling weight scale, props from a Randy Newman musical and a pommel horse. “This is my Rosebud,” he announced on a recent visit, unveiling an ornate horse-drawn sleigh from the 1890s.
But tenants put many of these objects to use. Paul Sladkus, the founder of Good News Broadcast, outfitted his fourth-floor TV studio with curtains from the Biltmore Hotel and a wooden room divider Mr. Attara rescued from the old Engineers Club at Grand Central Station.
MEx’s double life as a castoff furniture warehouse recalls the building’s original incarnation as the B. G. Latimer Sons Furniture Company. Built in 1917, the building, with its fireproof neoclassical design, was described by The Brooklyn Daily Eagle as “one of the finest commercial structures in Brooklyn.”
In 1929, the Corn Exchange Bank took over the first floor, later merging with the Chemical Bank to become the Chemical Corn Exchange Bank. The upper floors held decorating shops and printing presses. Mr. Attara has a photograph of the Brooklyn Dodgers parading past the building after winning the 1955 World Series, rolls of toilet paper flying from the third-story window.
But when the urban renewal plan was approved in 1970, the building emptied. After Mr. Attara took over in 1978, he rented studio space to “poor starving artists,” he said.
A few of those artists have remained. Jason Rogenes, an installation artist who builds hanging sculptures of plastic foam that resemble spacecraft, has kept a drafty studio on the first floor since 2000. On cold nights, instead of walking home, he has occasionally crashed in an insulated air duct, he recalled.
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