Fulton Mall: New Strategies for Preservation and Planning

A report on the future of Brooklyn's central shopping district

Amid the city's broad redevelopment plan for downtown Brooklyn, Fulton Mall: New Strategies for Preservation and Planning offers ideas for securing the future of Fulton Mall as a vital public place in the wake of the area's 2004 rezoning to promote new office, retail and residential space. The Pratt Center brought historic preservation, urban planning, ethnography, community cultural development, and economic development strategies together, in order to identify economic opportunities, preserve the district's most important historical resources, and provide unique and useful retail for surrounding communities.

The Fulton Street Mall's old department store buildings, dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, are still occupied by retail establishments on their ground floors and retain rich architectural details, but many upstairs floors are now vacant and boarded up. The Pratt Center developed "preservation-oriented development" plans for several sites—financial models for the buildings' productive reuse, and designs for commercial and residential spaces that build on the mall's existing strengths.

The Pratt Center's planning and design work is helping ensure that longtime Fulton Street shoppers get an improved commercial strip that serves their needs and preserves Fulton Street Mall's role as a crossroads for Brooklynites from all over the borough. This project was launched with the generous support of the J.M. Kaplan Fund and the New York Community Trust and is a collaboration with Minerva Partners, a non-profit organization that works to forge links between heritage conservation and social development.