Williamsburg, we hardly knew ye: Lest anyone doubt that the Brooklyn neighborhood has jumped the shark — at least as an unpretentious, un-yuppified (read affordable) place to live — today there’s word that an apartment at the Aurora, the 51-unit glass-and-brick condo overlooking McCarren Park marketed by the Developers Group, has sold for $3.8 million. That’s supposedly a record in these parts. The previous high price in the area — slightly under $3 million — is said to have been set at the Gretsch, the first high-design project in the area and, some would say, the match that lit the condo explosion in the neighborhood. (Coincidentally, both the Aurora and the Gretsch bear the ultraluxe mark of starchitect Karl Fischer and Andres Escobar.)
Über-condo marketer Michael Shvo
predicted last spring that certain swaths of Williamsburg would “look like the Miami skyline in five years.” It seems we’re now that much closer. —
S. Jhoanna Robledo