Last week, we covered the biggest building coming to Gowanus. This week, we wanted to back up and ask a different question-how did this neighborhood end up with seven breweries, ten shuffleboard courts, and two climbing gyms in the first place? Turns out the buildings made the call.

Now Open / Coming Soon —  Prince Street Pizza crosses the bridge, Powerhouse Arts has a new café, and Bombolona brings focaccia sandwiches to 3rd Avenue

The Big Story — Why seven breweries, ten shuffleboard courts, and two climbing gyms all ended up here

Things to Do — A hip-hop tribute at Littlefield, Dirty Projectors for two nights at Public Records, and a four-day art fair at Powerhouse

The Local — 78 years on Court Street, three generations, and one perfectly consistent cup. D'Amico Coffee.

Development Watch — Excavation starts at 444 Carroll, and 213 3rd Avenue is about to break ground

Quick Hits — A plant pop-up Saturday, Dinosaur Bar-B-Que calls it after 15 years, Long Play Festival keeps going, and Loofa and Pebbles visit Gowanus

Prince Street Pizza Opens on Smith Street
271 Smith Street, Carroll Gardens
Now Open
Prince Street Pizza, the Nolita slice shop known for square Sicilians, spicy pepperoni cups, and lines that run down the block, finally crossed the bridge. The Carroll Gardens shop is the brand's first NYC expansion since the Mott Street original opened in 2012. The menu is the menu you already know: the Spicy Spring square, the Prince Perfection, a handful of Neapolitan options. Opening day was Thursday, April 23. Expect a wait for at least the first month.

Turbine Café Opens at Powerhouse Arts
322 3rd Avenue, Gowanus
Now Open
Powerhouse Arts, the destination art and event venue, now has a café on the ground floor. Turbine Café sits just inside the main entrance off 3rd Avenue, named after the Turbine Hall that anchors the building. It is one of the more striking rooms to drink a coffee in anywhere in the neighborhood: soaring ceilings, brick and steel, and the original industrial bones still visible overhead. The menu is coffee and pastries for now. 

Bombolona Bakehouse Is the 3rd Avenue Focaccia Stop You'll Want to Know
520 3rd Avenue, between 12th and 13th Streets, South Slope
Now Open
Bombolona Bakehouse is known for its signature focaccia sandwich, La Bombolona, stacked high with prosciutto cotto. In addition to their sandwiches, they make fresh pasta, pizza by the slice, and the cream-filled bomboloni for which the place is named. The menu name-checks the neighborhoods around it: there is a sandwich called Gowanus, another called 19th Street. Open every day, 9am to 5pm.

The Warehouse Inheritance

Seven breweries. Ten regulation shuffleboard courts. Multiple music venues. Climbing gyms. The concentration isn't random. It's the payout from a century of heavy industry.

Gowanus inherited something most New York City neighborhoods don't have-warehouse bones. The same spaces that once housed cement works, machine shops, chemical plants, and shipping operations now hold destination businesses that need what the old industry left behind. High ceilings, thick floors, loading-dock access, and zoning flexibility that still allows production and retail under the same roof.

What Was Here Before

The Bell House sits in what was once a 1920s warehouse used as a printing press. Royal Palms occupies a former die-cutting factory, where industrial sized cookie-cutter presses once punched leather, metal, and rubber into shapes for manufacturing. Brooklyn Bouldering Project operates in the former Daily News garage, where newspaper printing presses once ran. A few blocks over on Butler Street, Movement Gowanus, now the largest climbing gym in New York City, took over a 36,000-square-foot industrial space and filled it with three floors of walls. The building at 543 Union Street once housed James H. Dykeman's National Packing Box Factory, which made wooden shipping boxes and used the canal to receive lumber and ship finished crates. You can still see the faded painted sign for "National Packing Box Co." on the outer wall.

By the early 1900s, the Gowanus Canal was the busiest industrial and commercial canal in the United States, handling more than 6 million tons of cargo annually. It was a hub for cement works, machine shops, chemical plants, shipbuilders, paint factories, ink makers, soap manufacturers, warehouses, tanneries, coal yards, and flour mills. By the middle of the 20th century, most of the manufacturing had left, and the areas around the canal began their slow transition to commercial and residential use.

The Perfect Infrastructure Match

What the old factories built is exactly what today's destination businesses need. Breweries require high ceilings for fermentation tanks, loading docks for grain deliveries, and heavy floors that can support industrial equipment. Music venues need wide-open warehouse-floor space for crowds and gear. Climbing gyms want the vertical space that newspaper presses once required. Gymnastics gyms, swim schools, archery ranges, and tennis facilities all need the same thing-big, open, flexible spaces.

Tyler March of Wild East Brewing picked Gowanus because the zoning allows a production brewery and a taproom to share the same roof, and because the neighborhood sits at the crossroads of Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Boerum Hill, and Cobble Hill. These businesses serve customers from surrounding neighborhoods but operate in spaces and at rent costs that only an ex-industrial area can offer.

The New Economy of Old Spaces

The brewery count tells the story. Wild East, Threes, Finback, Forever Brewing, and Other Half have clustered here not by accident but by design. Each found what it needed in these industrial bones. There’s space to brew, zoning that works, and access to many customers.

This isn't gentrification displacing industry. It's evolution. The same spaces, serving the same function, just different businesses using the infrastructure left behind by the 20th century. Gowanus is still a working neighborhood; it's just that the work now includes turning Brooklyn's old industrial bones into its newest playground. The work just looks different now.

Dead Gowns at the Sound Room at Public Records
233 Butler Street, Gowanus
Sat Apr 25 · Sound Room
Maine indie-folk project Dead Gowns brings moody country songwriting to the Sound Room. It's the quiet, close-listening end of what Public Records does, and a good warmup for the Long Play run that takes over the venue later in the week.

The Craft Presents Beanie Sigel, Grafh & More at Littlefield
635 Sackett Street, Gowanus
Sat Apr 25 · Doors 6pm, show 7pm · 21+
A tribute night to Mr. Complex, the underground hip-hop cornerstone and Polyrhythm Addicts co-founder who passed in 2023. Beanie Sigel headlines, Grafh on the bill, and more to be announced. The Craft is Littlefield's recurring hip-hop series: crafted cocktails, open bar, and lineups that lean underground rather than mainstream. If you care about bars, this is the room.

Paul F. Tompkins' Varietopia at Bell House
149 7th Street, Gowanus
Sun Apr 26 · 7:30pm
Tompkins' long-running variety show, built around rotating comics, musicians, and whatever bit he's developed that week. Saturday night is already sold out. Sunday still has tickets as of press time. If you've only seen him on podcasts, this is a different register-live and looser, and the Bell House room suits him.

Long Play Festival: Dirty Projectors at Public Records
233 Butler Street, Gowanus
Wed Apr 29 + Thu Apr 30 · early and late shows both nights
Bang on a Can's Long Play Festival takes over Public Records (and a few other venues around the neighborhood) from Wednesday through Sunday. Dirty Projectors are the biggest draw. Two nights in trio format, early and late shows each evening, which tells you what demand looks like. The Sound Room holds a couple hundred people. Both nights are expected to sell out. If you want tickets, buy them now. More on the rest of the festival below.

CONDUCTOR Art Fair of the Global Majority at Powerhouse Arts
322 3rd Avenue, Gowanus
Thu Apr 30 – Sun May 3
Inaugural edition of a boutique art fair focused on artists and galleries from Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Oceania, and Indigenous nations. It takes over the Grand Hall at Powerhouse for four days. After the Brooklyn Fine Art Print Fair earlier this month, this is the second major fair Powerhouse has hosted this spring. The building is increasingly becoming a real destination for the international art calendar.

Drunk Bollywood Live at Bell House
149 7th Street, Gowanus
Fri May 1 · 7:30pm
Bollywood blockbusters turned into unhinged stage parodies, with drinks. The show started in 2023, got written up in Time Out and Pop Culture Happy Hour, and has become a reliable Bell House night. This one is a brand new parody, title TBA. Produced by Proma Khosla and Raashi Desai. A good Friday if your week needs fewer rules and more musical numbers.

D'Amico Coffee Roasters
309 Court Street, Carroll Gardens
Mon–Sun 7am–5pm

Emanuel D'Amico, had lost everything in a failed pasta company before he emigrated to Brooklyn from Palermo. After years of odd jobs and side ventures that didn't quite work, he and his wife opened a grocery and coffee roastery on Court Street. He bought an AJ Deer Royal Roaster with a ten-pound capacity, which meant every batch was small and fresh, which in 1948 made him a revolutionary. Most coffee sold in America at the time was mass-produced and undrinkable. Emanuel was one of the first small-batch roasters in Brooklyn.

That tiny roaster is the origin story of the whole operation. Three generations later, the shop still roasts on-site. The aroma that hits you when you open the door isn't a signature. It's just what happens when you roast coffee in the same room you sell it in for seventy-eight years.

Francis D'Amico, Emanuel's grandson, ran the shop with his wife Joan for decades. The New York Times once described D'Amico as offering "a rare equilibrium of old and new Brooklyn," drawing both older Italian regulars and younger customers who came for the espresso. Francis died in August 2023, after a brief illness. Joan has kept the shop open since. Neighbors still stop in to say hello. The coffee is still roasted in the back.

What has always made D'Amico work is the thing that's hardest to manufacture. Over a hundred blends. Silver canisters of beans along the wall. Italian groceries in the back: olive oils, tinned fish, pasta, cookies you can't find anywhere else on the block. The kind of place where the person behind the counter remembers your order and sometimes just starts making it before you ask.

Court Street has changed around them. Staubitz Market, which we covered in Issue #3, is the last butcher left from the Italian Carroll Gardens era. D'Amico is the last of the neighborhood's original coffee roasters. Both operate the same way they always have, and both continue to sell what they've always sold to people who have been buying it for a long time. There are new cafes up and down Court Street now, some of them very good. None of them smells like this.

444 Carroll Street: Excavation Underway
Excavators are working at 444 Carroll Street, a six-story rental building going up on a canal-adjacent lot between 3rd Avenue and the water, right next to the two-tower 420 Carroll development. The project, designed by Kao Hwa Lee Architects for GW Infinity LLC, will bring 99 rental units across 68,526 square feet and is targeted for completion in April 2027. Foundations are expected to start mid-year.

213 3rd Avenue Is About to Break Ground
A piling machine is on site at 213 3rd Avenue, at the corner of Degraw, where construction is about to begin on a 14-story, 80-unit residential building designed by Kushner Studios for 590 Degraw LLC. At 145 feet and roughly 83,000 square feet, it will include about 5,900 square feet of commercial space on the ground floor, a rear yard, and a ten-car parking garage. Twenty-five percent of the units are planned as mixed-income. The architects have described the building as a “Mother Tree,” with 3D-printed palm-leaf storefront details at the base, reportedly the first 3D-printed parts integrated into a US high-rise. Completion is targeted for summer 2027.

Gowanus Nursery pops up Saturday. Second pop-up of the season! Gowanus Nursery sets up at 410 President Street this Saturday, April 25, from 11am to 4pm. Expect vegetable starts, herbs, and planting-weather material: tomatoes, peppers, parsley, chives. Regulars from the last one know to show up early.

Canal-inspired inflatables arrive this week. Friends from the Canal, a new public art installation by Gowanus-based artist duo Mookntaka, goes up Wednesday at three spots around the neighborhood: Cafe Mars, Union Channel, and Wyckoff Gardens. The sculptures (Shelby, Loofa, and Pebbles) are inspired by the canal's aquatic fauna and light up after sundown. Produced by Van Alen Institute through a $100,000 NYC Public Realm Grant.

Dinosaur Bar-B-Que calls it after 15 years. Dinosaur's Gowanus location at 604 Union Street announced this week it will close later this spring when the lease ends. The building, a former tool-and-die shop that Dinosaur turned into a barbecue destination when they moved in around 2011, is set to be demolished for a new residential project. No final date of service yet. If you have been meaning to get the brisket one more time, go. The Harlem and upstate locations remain open.

Long Play keeps going past Dirty Projectors. Bang on a Can's festival runs Wed Apr 29 through Sun May 3, with events at Public Records and a few other Gowanus-adjacent venues. Weekend highlights include Colleen, Felicia Atkinson, Christina Vantzou, Whitney Johnson, and a Macie Stewart trio on Saturday, plus Sam Prekop, Elori Saxl, and GEORGE on Sunday. Full schedule at longplayfestival.org.

Go sit in an old warehouse this week. Drink something that was made right there. The neighborhood's whole weird trick is that it keeps finding new uses for the same buildings, and that's worth celebrating.
See you next Saturday.
The Gowanaut
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