With Sheraton, Downtown Brooklyn’s Makeover Continues

With a Barney’s Co-Op coming to Atlantic Avenue and new rental buildings bringing a steady stream of young professionals to downtown Brooklyn, the opening of a 321-room Sheraton on Duffield Street gave hotel executives and city officials yet another reason to proclaim it a great day for the borough.

“I know you’ll be opening Sheraton TriBeCa later this year in the outer borough of Manhattan,” the Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz, said at a midday celebration in the hotel lobby. “Once you’ve made it on the big stage which is Brooklyn, you can make it anywhere, so don’t you worry about it.”

The 25-story hotel, which already had about 225 rooms booked for Saturday night, will bring a restaurant, lobby bar and roof terrace lounge to 228 Duffield Street between Willoughby and Fulton Streets. The restaurant, Grubstake, is to open in about two weeks, with the roof lounge, offering sweeping views of Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, to follow in the fall. 

The block, with an Aloft hotel under construction next to the Sheraton and a boutique hotel planned across the street, is becoming something of a hospitality hub, which will help the area continue becoming a vibrant, full-service community, said Joe Chan, president of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership. (The first big hotel to be built downtown in the modern era, a Marriott that opened in 1998, is five blocks away.)

Not everyone was pleased with the transformation, though; as officials and hotel executives cut the ceremonial red ribbon and hoisted the blue-and-white Sheraton flag above the entrance, about a dozen protesters chanted, “Houses, not hotels –- the people are not for sale,” and, “Up with the people, down with developers.”

Valery Jean, director of Families United for Racial and Economic Equality, which organized the protest, said that they were not so much against the Sheraton as concerned that the need for low-cost housing and for preserving the cultural history of the area were being overshadowed. Development plans for the block threaten the remains of a stop on the Underground Railroad and would displace roughly 40 families, she said.

“What we’re saying is, in the middle of an affordable housing crisis, stop bailing out hotels and major development and start focusing on low-income and working-class families in this country,” she said.