An Apple Store for Brooklyn?
New Yorkers know better, especially these days, than to expect any sympathy from the rest of the country — even though the city, with three Apple Stores for a population of more than 8 million, is conspicuously underserved by the company's retail outlets. (San Francisco's three stores, by contrast, serve a population of fewer than 800,000.)
But what about Brooklyn? The most populous of the five boroughs (pop. 2.5 million) would be, as any cabbie can tell you, the fourth largest city in the United States if it weren't yoked to Manhattan, Queens and the rest. It is home to tens of thousands of Mac users of every stripe — teachers, students, writers, artists, designers, musicians, mobsters — yet it has zero Apple Stores.
Which is why Brooklynites get so excited when there is any news, as there was this week, about Apple putting an outlet in their borough.
At a real estate roundtable on Tuesday, the developer of a huge condominium project on the Brooklyn side of the East River announced that an Apple Store was a "real possibility" for one of its prime ground floor retail spaces.
"There's no deal," developer Jeff Levine told the audience, according to the website Brownstoner. "But we are talking and they are interested."
The site in question is the Williamsburg Edge, a 575-apartment complex still under construction with two blue-glass towers and million-dollar views of the Manhattan skyline.
Sounds cool, huh? The problem for the rest of Brooklyn is that the Edge is on the edge of nowhere, with water on one side and Williamsburg on the other — a crazy quilt of ethnic enclaves teeming with Germans, Hasidic Jews, Italians, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and, most recently, artists and indie musicians fleeing Manhattan's exorbitant rents. There is only one subway — the crowded L line — and it connects Williamsburg to Manhattan, not to the main thoroughfares of Brooklyn.
Levine's claim — true or not — reignited the fierce internecine rivalry among Brooklyn neighborhoods that broke out a year and a half ago when word first spread, via ifoAppleStore, that Apple was shopping for a Kings County location. The pros and cons of some of the contending sites were summarized at the time by a local website called Racked.
For the benefit of my neighbors and any scouts from Apple's (AAPL) retail division who might be reading this, I've excerpted Racked's handicapping and a few of the comments. But because none of this will mean anything to the rest of the world, I've put it below the fold.
