Walking across the 3rd Street Bridge this week, we paused at the canal to take a look at the progress on both sides from a good vantage point. Standing there, it was hard to remember what used to be. You can almost see the waterfront parks that are coming, that will eventually let you walk from 3rd Street all the way to Baltic on one side and back on the other.
That future is what this issue is about. There’s a lot to cover.

Now Open / Coming Soon — A new brewer takes the keys on President Street, a Greenpoint taco legend is coming to Smith Street, and Lou & Bev's is almost ready next door to Confidant

The Big Story — The Westmark is open: 603 apartments, 51,000 square feet of empty ground-floor retail, and no announced tenants. What fills those shop windows?

Things to Do — Baths plays CERULEAN tonight at Littlefield, ambient music and plants at Public Records Wednesday, Reggie Watts takes the Bell House for two nights, and more ahead

The Local — The Smith Street bakery with five James Beard nominations and baked goods food writers can't stop writing about

Development Watch — A parking lot at Baltic and Nevins is about to become 79 apartments, and the vacant lot next to Dinosaur BBQ finally has a building plan

Quick Hits — Prince Street Pizza is coming to Smith Street

Gowanus gets a new brewer at an old address
Forever Homebrewing
574A President Street, Gowanus
Now Open
Strong Rope Brewery held this space for ten years before closing its Gowanus taproom on March 28 and consolidating at its Red Hook waterfront location. Matt Land and Rob Jenkins, who run Forever Homebrewing (Brooklyn's only homebrew supply shop, currently on Dean Street in Crown Heights), have taken over the space and rebranded as Forever Brewing, with plans to brew and sell their own beer on-site. A pair of homebrewers inheriting one of Gowanus's original craft beer addresses is a genuinely good sequel. (Strong Rope fans: the Red Hook taproom, with waterfront views and a full tap lineup, is still very much open and worth the trip. Get there this spring!)

Bakery by day, natural wine and pizza bar by night
Lou & Bev's
129 Atlantic Avenue, Cobble Hill
Coming Soon · Opening date TBA
The team behind Confidant, now open next door at 127 Atlantic, is opening a second concept in the adjacent space. Lou & Bev's will operate as a bakery and café during the day before transitioning into a natural wine and pizza bar at night. No opening date yet, but the whole corridor keeps getting more interesting.

NYC's most-talked-about taco spot heads to Smith Street
Taqueria Ramírez
267 Smith Street, Carroll Gardens
Coming Soon · Opening date TBA
One of the city's most talked-about taco spots is coming to the neighborhood. Co-owners Tania Apolinar and Giovanni Cervantes are renovating the former Oculus 20/20 space at Smith and Degraw. The Greenpoint original opened in 2021 and earned a spot on Pete Wells' inaugural list of NYC's 100 best restaurants in 2023, after the Times named their campechano taco one of the top seven NYC dishes of 2022. Mexico City-style: suadero, longaniza, tripa, al pastor, nopales. Dine-in only. No opening date has been announced, but the work is underway. This one's worth watching.

The Westmark
395 Carroll Street and 325 Bond Street

The two towers have been hard to miss if you've walked near the canal lately. Designed by Hamish Whitefield Architects for the Rabsky Group, the complex is the largest development to come online in this rezoning cycle: 603 rental apartments across a 23-story tower on Carroll Street and a 9-story companion building on Bond. Residential leasing is underway, with studios starting around $4,010 a month and two-bedrooms approaching $7,000. A landscaped public walkway between the towers and the canal is being finished now.

(A quick geography note: Maison Bond, at 335 Bond Street on the corner of Carroll, is a separate building from a different developer. It's a 9-story, 73-unit project from E&M Realty that has its own affordable housing lottery. The Westmark's Bond Street tower is at 325 Bond, one address up.)

So roughly 600 households are moving in. Which means 600 households are starting to ask: where's the coffee? Where's the neighborhood restaurant? Where do I actually go?

Right now, nowhere in the building. The Westmark carries 51,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space across both towers, and as of this writing, none of it has a confirmed tenant. The three retail units at 395 Carroll range from about 1,300 to just under 5,000 square feet, with canal-facing frontage and floor-to-ceiling windows. The leasing materials describe the space as suited for "retail, wellness, or creative office uses." What they don't say is what's actually coming.

This matters because 51,000 square feet of waterfront ground floor is a meaningful amount of space. Enough for several restaurants, a proper coffee shop, a bar, maybe a market. Enough to set a tone for what this stretch of the neighborhood actually feels like on foot. The Gowanus rezoning has always been two stories running at the same time: the towers going up, and the street life that's supposed to follow. The towers are here.

Whoever signs those leases will have a hand in writing what daily life looks like on this stretch of the canal. No pressure.

Baths: CERULEAN 15th Anniversary at Littlefield
635 Sackett Street, Gowanus
Sat Apr 4 · Doors 6:30pm, show 7:30pm · 21+
Fifteen years ago, Will Wiesenfeld made an album in his bedroom that somehow became a genre. He plays it in full tonight in a show presented by LPR. If you've been meaning to revisit CERULEAN, this is a better reason than just queuing it up on your phone.

Green-House + More Eaze at Public Records
233 Butler Street, Gowanus
Wed Apr 8 · 7pm · $31.93
Olive Ardizoni makes ambient music about plants. Public Records has a greenhouse. This is not a coincidence, and it's exactly the kind of pairing that makes this venue worth paying attention to. More Eaze opens. 

Melissa Villasenor at Bell House
149 7th Street, Gowanus
Fri Apr 10 · 7:30pm · from $51
SNL alumna, stand-up show. Her impressions and characters tend to land harder in a room than they do on screen, and Bell House is the right size for it. A good Friday night option if you can’t get tickets to Reggie Watts.

Reggie Watts at Bell House
149 7th Street, Gowanus
Sat Apr 11 + Sun Apr 12 · 7:30pm · from $63
Former Late Late Show bandleader, beatboxer, comedy philosopher, and genuinely one of the most singular performers working. We’ll be there. If you know you know, and if you don't, trust us and buy them now before both nights are gone.

Brooklyn Fine Art Print Fair at Powerhouse Arts
37 6th Avenue, Gowanus
Thu Apr 9 – Sun Apr 12 · from $15
Second annual. The inaugural edition drew 7,500 visitors and brought together galleries, publishers, and academic printmaking departments from across the country. Daily talks, live demos, and printshop tours round out the programming.

Long Play Festival: Dirty Projectors at Public Records
233 Butler Street, Gowanus
Wed Apr 29 + Thu Apr 30 · from $36
Dirty Projectors headline two nights in the Sound Room as part of the Long Play Festival. If you haven't seen them in a room this size, it's worth planning ahead for. Tickets move fast.

Bien Cuit
120 Smith Street, Cobble Hill/Boerum Hill
Mon–Sun 7am–7pm

In July 2011, Zachary Golper opened a bakery on Smith Street and named it Bien Cuit, which is French for "well baked." He meant it literally. His signature is a dark, almost mahogany crust, the product of long low-temperature fermentation that sometimes runs 68 hours. To an unfamiliar eye, the loaves look like they spent too long in the oven. They did not. The crust is the point.

Golper came up through a particular kind of culinary wandering. He started baking at 18 on an Oregon farm (by candlelight at 1am, which is either romantic or alarming depending on your disposition), trained across the US and France, worked at Seattle's Bakery Nouveau under a Coupe de Monde de Boulangerie winner, and eventually ran the bread program at Georges Perrier's Le Bec-Fin in Philadelphia. By the time he opened on Smith Street, he had been thinking about fermentation for most of his adult life.

The neighborhood noticed. The Village Voice named Bien Cuit Best New Bakery in 2011. The Times and New York Magazine put it on their Best of lists the same year. Bon Appetit selected the baguette as one of the ten best in America. The James Beard Foundation nominated Golper for Best Baker five times. In 2015 he published a cookbook under the same name, which became a James Beard Award finalist in 2020.

There are now three locations: the original on Smith Street, a second at 721 Franklin Avenue in Crown Heights, and a counter at Grand Central. The Smith Street bakery runs seven days a week, 7am to 7pm. The Miche, a blend of rye and wheat on a whole grain sourdough starter fermented for up to 68 hours, has been on the menu since the beginning.

Fourteen years is a long time on this stretch of Smith Street. Restaurants that opened the same year have closed, pivoted, reopened, and closed again. Bien Cuit has not pivoted. The thing that made it worth writing about in 2011 is still the thing it's doing in 2026. There's an argument that staying stubbornly yourself is its own kind of neighborhood service.

491 Baltic Street Is About to Break Ground
Excavation is imminent at 491 Baltic Street, at the corner of Baltic and Nevins in the northern stretch of the rezoning zone. The project: 14 stories, 79 rental units, 25 percent affordable, designed by Isaac & Stern Architects for Two Kings Real Estate on a former surface parking lot. Completion targeted for summer 2028.

590 Union Street: The Lot Next to Dinosaur BBQ Has a Plan
A permit was filed last April for an 8-story, 24-unit building at 590 Union Street, on the south side of Union between 3rd and 4th avenues, directly adjacent to Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. Plans call for just over 12,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space alongside the residential units. No construction timeline has been announced yet, but permits are filed and the rezoning cleared the way.

Prince Street Pizza is coming to Smith Street. The SoHo Sicilian squares institution known for the spicy pepperoni square has confirmed a new location on Smith Street. Address not yet pinned, but a flyer with the logo has been spotted in the neighborhood.

See you next Saturday. If you know someone in Gowanus, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, or Boerum Hill who'd want this in their inbox, send it their way.
And if you spot something worth covering, a sign in a window, a new door going in, a rumor about that empty storefront, send us an email. We read everything.
The Gowanaut
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