Williamsburg

Williamsburg is the East River front of North Brooklyn — eight blocks of waterfront towers and rebuilt industrial blocks that, in two decades, became one of the most active residential markets in the borough. The 2005 Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront rezoning unlocked roughly 184 blocks for high-density mixed use, and what was a quiet manufacturing edge in the 1990s now reads as a continuous run of glass condos, ground-floor retail, and reclaimed parkland from Grand Ferry to the Williamsburg Bridge.

Inland from the water, the original street grid — low-rise brick rowhouses, prewar tenements, warehouse-to-loft conversions — remains largely intact and gives the neighborhood its texture. The L train surfaces at Bedford Avenue into the busiest non-Manhattan subway station in the borough, and the neighborhood unfolds in three directions from the turnstiles: north toward McCarren Park, west to the water, south through the brick blocks that predate everything around them.

The waterfront has a longer memory than the rezoning suggests. The Havemeyer family built the Domino Sugar Refinery in 1856 — the first of the East River sugar refineries that made Williamsburg the industrial center of the Port of New York. The Filter, Pan, and Finishing House was designated a NYC Landmark in 2007, three years after the plant closed.

What's risen around it is the second life: Northside Piers (Toll Brothers, three glass towers, the first to land after the 2005 rezoning); The Edge at North 5th-7th (roughly 1,000 units across two towers); 184 Kent, Cass Gilbert's 1915 warehouse, converted to around 340 rental lofts; 25 Kent, 500,000 sf, the largest ground-up office building in the neighborhood's history.

Then the defining current project — Two Trees and SHoP's master plan for the Domino site: four towers complete, the rehabilitated Refinery building reopened September 2023 with 460,000 sf of office under a public observatory dome, and a fifth tower under construction at the southern end. Domino Park — six acres along the river, designed by James Corner Field Operations — threads through it all.

A few blocks east of the towers, North 6th Street between Bedford and Wythe has quietly become Brooklyn's highest-rent retail corridor — average asking rents around $400/sf in 2026. Apple opened the first Brooklyn Apple Store at 247 Bedford in 2016, in a 1930 loft building chosen, the architects said, to honor the brick-and-arch language of the neighborhood. Glossier took the corner of N 6th and Wythe in 2022. Le Labo runs the world's only in-store Le Labo café at 120 N 6th.

Hermès is building a two-story, 11,500-square-foot bronze-clad flagship at 111-115 N 6th, scheduled to open this year — its first standalone store in the borough. Rolex signed a fifteen-year lease at 86 N 6th in October 2025 for what will be its first store in Brooklyn and only its second in NYC. Uniqlo opened a full-service Kent Avenue store in March 2026. Chanel, COS, Byredo, Reformation, Warby Parker, and a long list of others fill in between.

South of Grand Street the streetscape predates the rezoning entirely. Brick walk-ups, prewar tenements, the storefronts under the Williamsburg Bridge, bakeries that have been making the same bread for fifty years. Marlow & Daughters runs a whole-animal butcher counter at 95 Broadway. Peter Luger has been serving porterhouse on Broadway since 1887. The Williamsburgh Savings Bank Building — George B. Post's 1875 Italianate banking hall, now the event venue Weylin — anchors one end of the corridor; the Williamsburg Bridge anchors the other.

East of Union Avenue, East Williamsburg shades into industrial blocks and the BQE. Lilia sits in a former auto-body shop on Union. The 47th Regiment Armory on Marcy is Brooklyn's most-filmed location, and Williamsburg is the city's second-most-filmed district after Midtown. Brooklyn Steel — Bowery Presents' 1,800-cap venue on Frost Street — is the neighborhood's largest indoor stage.