Fulton Street, Downtown Brooklyn’s clamorous bazaar, is transforming, leading the borough’s political and business minds to ask: Can the street — New York City’s third busiest shopping district after Herald Square and a stretch of Madison Avenue — accommodate such sleek emporiums without killing off the more ragtag independent shops that sell hip-hop fashion, cellphones, sneakers and gold jewelry?
Their disappearance, some worry, would alter the distinctive street flavor that draws African-American and Caribbean-American customers.
Rondell Antoine, who is from Granada, is a regular shopper at the Fulton Mall, as an eight-block stretch of the street is known. For shape-hugging, flamboyant dresses she shops at the street’s smaller, less tidy, unique stores like Stellar European Design.
“Some of these styles are unique to Caribbean women — bright colors and styles that let them show off their physique,” said Ms. Antoine, 34, as she scanned the dresses crowding the store’s walls up to the ceiling. But she is also delighted with the chain stores that have moved into the area.
The owner of Stellar European Design, however, Sam-Yung Kim, an immigrant from South Korea, looks upon the new stores as a menace. They are, he said, driving up rents beyond $ 200 a square foot that may make it impossible for him to remain when his lease comes up for renewal in a year. “Next door closed,” he said. “Store next to that closed.”
Some worry that the loss of smaller stores may drive out the current clientele, which is largely black.
“What’s being engineered now is the replacement of one population by another to capitalize on the luxury housing boom that rezoning made possible,” said Lucas Shapiro, a senior organizer for Families United for Racial and Economic Equality, which has opposed much of the development set off by a 2004 zoning change that permitted taller office and residential buildings.
The Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, which manages the neighborhood’s three business improvement districts, said that the demographics of the block had essentially not shifted and that the new stores are just as popular with the street’s traditional customers.
“Retailers are going where the shoppers are,” Tucker Reed, the partnership’s president, said. “They’re not making decisions based on the color of the shoppers’ skin, but by where there’s demand for a product.”
Marty Markowitz, the departing borough president, said the new chains were returning the street to its peak mid-20th century years, when it had half a dozen department stores like Abraham & Straus and Mays that catered to both Brooklyn’s more affluent residents and those looking to stretch a dollar.
“H&M is the first wave of the diverse shopping experience of Fulton Street,” he said. “When I was a boy, there were opportunities at every income level. My mom used to drag me to Mays at the lower end and A&S at the upper end.”
Mr. Shapiro said that recent development had already pushed out more than 100 smaller businesses that provided a solid livelihood for merchants, an option for lower-income shoppers and hundreds of jobs to young strivers.
“For people of color, it’s been such a successful economic model,” he said.
Fulton Street has been Brooklyn’s marketplace since the early 19th century. At its peak it had half a dozen department stores, but in the 1970s and 1980s, it became somewhat raffish, the scene of news-making robberies and shootings. Still, it drew working-class families shopping for shoes, televisions and clothing.
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