Walk down Montague Street this week and you'll pass new curb extensions, a stretch of raw concrete waiting on benches that haven't arrived yet, and construction fencing that's been part of the scenery for more than a year. The city is rebuilding the neighborhood's historic commercial spine into a place designed for lingering: wider sidewalks, bike corrals, planters, seating for the outdoor dining that never quite took hold there the way planners hoped.
Meanwhile, the restaurants people are actually lingering at this year aren't on Montague at all. They're three blocks south, on Atlantic Avenue, packed into a stretch you could walk in under two minutes.
Four Storefronts, One Block, Same Season
In February, chefs Brendan Kelley and Dan Grossman opened Confidant at 127 Atlantic Avenue, just east of Henry Street, after their first restaurant at Industry City closed eight months into its run. The signature dish, a prawn pot pie Grossman has called an ode to his time working at Gage and Tollner, anchors a menu that a review in Brooklyn Magazine described as filled with family heirlooms from both chefs' grandparents rather than the polish of a restaurant group's next unit. It's open Wednesday through Sunday, five to ten, with brunch still to come.
Right next door, the same team is opening Lou and Bev's, a bakery by day and pizza spot by night, with pastry chef Mariah Neston running the ovens. A few doors down at 129 Atlantic, Frenzie is bringing pizza and wine to a space that's been building out for weeks. And around the corner at 107 Atlantic, an empanada counter called Empanada City is aiming to open its doors before Labor Day.
That's four kitchens on one short block, all opening within a single year, on a stretch of Atlantic where Colonie and Pips once anchored the corner. It's worth sitting with how unusual that density is. Brooklyn Heights doesn't typically turn over storefronts in clusters. It replaces one restaurant at a time, quietly, on a timeline measured in years rather than months.
There's a second thread worth pulling here. A few blocks away in Boerum Hill, Ingas Bar, a longtime Brooklyn Heights favorite, is opening a sister restaurant in the former Café Kitsuné space, with a bar on Bond Street to follow. Heights operators aren't losing their staff to other neighborhoods this year so much as sending their own concepts outward. That's a small but real shift from five years ago, when the traffic mostly ran the other direction.
The Street Built for a Boom That Already Happened Elsewhere
The Montague Street project itself isn't new. The Department of Transportation, working with the Brooklyn Heights Association, the Montague Street Business Improvement District, and City Council Member Lincoln Restler's office, laid out a plan for new corner curb extensions at Hicks, Henry, and Clinton Streets, mid-block extensions between Hicks and Clinton, updated loading zones to cut down on double parking, and new public seating, bike corrals, and planters along the corridor.
What's visible on the ground right now is a project caught mid-transition. A News 12 segment captured the current state well: the widening work has largely wrapped, but the seating and greenery the DOT promised haven't shown up yet, leaving stretches of the sidewalk as bare concrete. Reactions along the block are mixed. One nearby business owner has welcomed the extra breathing room for outdoor tables. Others worry a narrow commercial street built for delivery trucks and small storefronts isn't the right candidate for the kind of widening that works on broader avenues.
Historic Bishop's Crook streetlamps are also in the pipeline for the neighborhood, with more than a hundred poles planned for streets including Joralemon, Remsen, Pierrepont, Hicks, Henry, and Clinton. It's the kind of infrastructure investment that signals long-term commitment to how the neighborhood looks and feels, and it's arriving on the same timeline as the sidewalk work, both projects built for a version of street life that, on Montague specifically, hasn't fully caught up to the design yet.
Put the two threads side by side and the timing gets interesting. The city spent more than a year rebuilding Montague Street for a restaurant and dining boom that, when it actually arrived this year, chose Atlantic Avenue instead. That's not a criticism of the DOT's plan. It's a reminder that street design and street life don't always move on the same clock, and that the neighborhood's actual center of gravity this year sits a few blocks from where the infrastructure investment landed.
Where the Rest of the Summer Is Actually Happening
If Atlantic Avenue is absorbing the restaurant energy and Montague is still finishing its facelift, the third place doing a lot of the neighborhood's daily work is Brooklyn Bridge Park, which is in the middle of its biggest season yet. Park president Eric Landau called it a season built to offer "something for everyone" across more than fifty free or low-cost events running from May through October.
A few things worth putting on the calendar this week and next:
- Thursday, August 6 — Movies With a View, now in its 26th season, screens Jurassic Park at Pier 1 Harbor View Lawn. The lawn opens at 6 p.m., the film starts at sunset, and it's free and first-come, first-served.
- Thursday, August 13 — the same series follows with Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, shot a few neighborhoods away in Bed-Stuy.
- Friday, September 18 — the season adds a family movie night to close things out.
- Weekends through December — Brooklyn Flea has returned to its spot under the Manhattan Bridge arch at 80 Pearl Street in DUMBO, running every weekend for the rest of the year. Full schedule is at brooklynflea.com.
Earlier in the season, DUMBO's annual toy elephant fundraiser and the 15th year of the Photoville photography festival both came and went at their usual spots along the waterfront, part of a calendar that's grown thick enough that a resident could fill most of a week without leaving the park's footprint.
Three Blocks, Three Different Speeds
None of this is unusual on its own. Cities always have a street getting torn up, a park having a good year, a corner reinventing itself faster than the block around it. What's unusual is how compressed it all is here right now. Within about a half mile, Brooklyn Heights has a historic commercial corridor still finishing renovations meant to catch a wave that already broke somewhere else, a two-block stretch of Atlantic Avenue absorbing four new kitchens in a single year, and a waterfront park pulling more foot traffic than it has in its sixteen seasons.
If you've lived here long enough to remember when Montague Street was the obvious answer to "where should we eat tonight," this is the year that answer quietly changed, even as the city keeps building Montague to be ready for whatever comes next.
I spend a fair amount of my own time walking these blocks, both for work and for the Rediscovering New York tours and podcast conversations I've been doing for years, and this particular stretch of the Heights and DUMBO has been one of the more interesting ones to watch reshape itself in real time. If you're curious about what any of this means for a specific block, building, or corner of the neighborhood, I'm always glad to talk it through.
Jeffrey Goodman — Let's Connect.
