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John Chubet
On September 16, the Brooklyn Heights Blog ran a short item under the headline "Bossert to Become 'Ritz-Carlton Residences, Brooklyn Heights.'" A few paragraphs. A couple of tags: Development, Real Estate, New Businesses. The next day, the same blog ran an item of almost identical length announcing that this Sunday's street fair had been rained out. Two stories, same format, same restraint, even though one of them was a hotel converting into Brooklyn's first branded luxury residence and the other was a canceled sidewalk sale.
That is not an accident of blogging style. It is how this neighborhood actually processes news, and if you live here, it is worth understanding why a global real estate headline and a rained-out market got exactly the same column inches this month.
Between September 10 and September 20, four unrelated things landed on or near Montague Street: a community theater revival, a recurring open streets series, a public art procession involving forty life-size buffalo puppets, and the announcement that the long-vacant Hotel Bossert would become a Ritz-Carlton. None of these were coordinated. None of them referenced each other. Here is roughly how the ten days broke down:
Read individually, each of these is a small, forgettable local item. Read together, they say something about how a neighborhood this old absorbs change: it just keeps running its normal calendar and lets the big news slot in wherever it fits.
The procession itself deserves more attention than a single line in a listings roundup. Return of the Buffalo: Tatanka Owe Akupi was created by Amir Nizar Zuabi, the same artist behind The Walk, the international project that brought the twelve-foot puppet Little Amal through New York in 2022. The buffalo were built by Ukwanda Puppets of South Africa and produced by St. Ann's Warehouse, KBH Arts and The Walk Productions, in partnership with Lenape and Lakota elders.
The Brooklyn route on September 19 started at Abolitionist Place in Downtown Brooklyn, moved to Borough Hall where Rhiannon Giddens and the Resistance Revival Chorus performed, then crossed Brooklyn Heights by way of Montague Street, where Heather Christian and a chorus serenaded the herd from a stoop. From there it continued past the Promenade and Columbia Heights toward Fulton Ferry Landing before ending at Brooklyn Bridge Park, where Sam Waterston read Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and Laurie Anderson closed out the afternoon. It is the kind of event a neighborhood normally builds a season around. Here, it shared a week with a theater revival and a hotel announcement and got roughly the same treatment as both.
A few blocks away, none of that mattered to the Heights Players. The all-volunteer company staged its revival of Damn Yankees, directed by Marie Ingrisano Isner, at the John Bourne Theater on Willow Place, with an accessible entrance around the corner on Columbia Place. Two weekends, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday matinees at 2. It ran exactly on schedule, overlapping the buffalo weekend without adjustment, because community theater in Brooklyn Heights does not reschedule around parades. It has its own calendar, and that calendar has clearly outlasted a great deal.
The Montague Street BID's Open Streets series works the same way. The Back to School party on September 13 went off as planned. The FAD Market the following Sunday did not, canceled for rain the way any outdoor market gets canceled for rain, with no acknowledgment that it was sharing a weekend with a citywide art spectacle and international press coverage of a hotel conversion.
The Hotel Bossert opened in 1909 at 98 Montague Street, designed by Helmle & Huberty in the Renaissance Revival style, and quickly earned the nickname "the Waldorf-Astoria of Brooklyn." It hosted the Brooklyn Dodgers' celebration after their only World Series win, in 1955. The Jehovah's Witnesses used the building as a dormitory for decades before selling it in 2012. It passed through the Chetrit Group, then went into foreclosure to Beach Point Capital, before SomeraRoad, a firm founded by Brooklyn Heights local Ian Ross, bought it in May 2025 for $100 million.
This month, SomeraRoad and Marriott International announced that the building will become The Ritz-Carlton Residences, Brooklyn Heights, with about 62 condominium units and a ground-floor restaurant from Danny Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group, its first full-service location in Brooklyn. The Landmarks Preservation Commission has already approved changes to the historic exterior, including a new fifteenth floor set back from the original roofline. Construction is expected to start later this year, with completion targeted for 2029. It will be the fiftieth standalone residence in the Ritz-Carlton's global portfolio and the first to cross the East River into Brooklyn.
Marriott's chief development officer for luxury brands, Dana Jacobsohn, put it plainly:
"Brooklyn Heights is defined by its unique blend of historic charm and contemporary culture."
That is a fair description, and it is also, in its way, the same observation this piece is making. A hotel that once hosted Dodgers celebrations and later housed religious volunteers is becoming a Ritz-Carlton, and the neighborhood's response, at least in its own local coverage, was one short blog post filed next to news about a canceled market.
The Bossert is the headline, but it is not the only thing being built inside Brooklyn Heights right now. YIMBY's September 14 survey tracked four separate projects clustered in the blocks between Joralemon Street and Atlantic Avenue. The largest is 120 Court Street, a fourteen-story mixed-use tower replacing a two-story building that most recently held a Walgreens, whose lease ran out at the end of August after paying roughly $55,000 a month in rent. The site sits directly across the street from a Trader Joe's and sold for $30 million before city filings called for 75 residential units above ground-floor retail. Nearby, 33 Joralemon Street is being rebuilt as a four-story single-family home, 38-44 State Street is converting a former parking garage into five stories of residential units while preserving its landmarked street-level facade, and 1 Willow Place is turning a four-story multifamily building into a single mansion with five bedrooms and a roof deck.
None of these four projects made national news. Together with the Bossert conversion, they represent a neighborhood absorbing a genuinely unusual amount of new construction for an area constrained by a historic district, and doing it in the same understated tone the blog gave the buffalo parade.
The lesson here is not that Brooklyn Heights is changing fast, though it is. It is that the neighborhood's daily rhythm, run by the Heights Players, the Montague Street BID and the volunteers who staff both, does not bend for headlines. A parade with A-list performers, a landmark hotel becoming a global luxury brand, four residential conversions inside six blocks, and a rained-out sidewalk sale all happened within ten days, and the neighborhood absorbed every one of them with the same unhurried attention. If you live here, that consistency is worth noticing. It is also, in its own way, the most accurate description of what makes this particular stretch of Brooklyn feel the way it does.
If you're curious what any of this means for your own building, your block, or a property you've been watching, the team at JTC Team knows these streets from the inside. Let's Connect — Request a Home Valuation.
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John Chubet