Radiical Systems Case Study #2
Community Revitalization

AllInOne: Incubating the Future

Can community centers evolve to bridge

rapidly polarizing economic landscapes?

By Kurt McVey for Radiical Systems

Core Problem: Repurposing vacant real estate for community revitalization poses various challenges in articulating ROI at all stages. Responsible activation in light of concerns regarding gentrification and neighborhood exploitation leads to investment and development stagnation.

Funding problem: Without clear articulation of revenue streams, community centers with a mind for social services (human and infrastructure rehabilitation, self actualization) struggle to launch and survive in a system that demands perpetual commodification and exponential profit.

Ditmas Park, with its grand Tudor, Queen Anne, and Colonial Revival residences backing hundred-foot-tall London Plane companion trees, which cast wide cathedral-like swaths of cinematic shade over their charming grass-hewn driveways, wide streets and enviable wrap-around porches, is not its own neighborhood, despite the common misconception, but rather a historic district in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Newkirk Plaza, the next station in Ditmas Park after Cortelyou Road on the local MTA subway system’s BMT Brighton line, used to be called South Midwood, a reference to another Brooklyn neighborhood located further to the south. In 1908 this same station became Newkirk Avenue after the “Brighton Beach Improvement” project increased ridership on the line. This followed the 1903 legislative elimination of dangerous grade crossings, intersections where highways and major roads cross railroad tracks at the same level or “at-grade,” which led to considerable construction. The station’s name changed again in August 2011 after a $30 million dollar renovation initiative, spurred on by local business owners in or near the corresponding pedestrian-only shopping mall, from which the station borrowed its current name. This is all to say that one single subway stop in Brooklyn is a microcosm for the community-driven evolution of local infrastructure, over a century onward.

Improvements of this nature will continue to involve ongoing, oft-laborious cooperation between agencies like the Metro Transit Authority (MTA), the Department of Transportation (DOT), the Newkirk Plaza Merchants Association (NPMA), NYC Small Business Services (SBS), and other emergent citizen-run organizations like the Flatbush Development Corporation (FDC), which was formed in 1975 by a group of tenants and homeowners who were concerned about growing signs of deterioration in the neighborhood.

Newkirk Plaza, the oldest open-air shopping mall in the country (curb your enthusiasm), still replete with mom and pop shops and some drab corporate entities, remains bound by Foster Avenue to the south. Were one to pop up and walk several blocks east, they would stumble upon a closed, century-old, English Gothic-style church at the northeast corner of East 23rd Street with stale lightbox signage on the attenuated front lawn that reads, in faded blue lettering, FLATBUSH CHURCH OF THE REDEEMER: A LUTHERAN PRESBYTERIAN COMMUNITY. Lower on the same analogue marquee, individual black letter cards still add up to read, JOIN US, SUNDAY SERVICE 11:AM. There is currently no service of any kind planned on Sunday at 11am, but this could change and very well should, and quite dramatically, come Summer 2024.

A 1925 article in Architectural Forum (originally launched in 1892 as The Brickbuilder ) lauded the church, which received a design makeover in 1922 by the architect Hobart B. Upjohn, as a marvel of Gothic architecture. It’s difficult to discern from the digital archive whether or not the author of the article, replete with cross-sectional blueprints of the clerestory and trefoil-style crowned windows, pointed arches, gothic tower with crocket-enhanced spires, and more, is the architect himself, but the writing feels too personal; somehow emotionally implied that it is. He wrote of the church: “Everything about the building is honestly and thoroughly built. There is no sham about it, no painting and ‘sanding’ of wooden trim to make it vaguely resemble stone.” It is real stone, by the way, “of a rich brownish gray, showing considerable iron.”

Read the rest on mirror.