Stylish plans for sleepy, industrial Red Hook

New York

UNTIL recently, the development march of office and apartment towers that displaced warehouses and refineries along the Brooklyn waterfront largely spared Red Hook.

Even the addition in recent years of a Fairway market and an Ikea store that attracted shoppers didn't lessen much of the activity in Red Hook, a square-mile nub. It still revolves around the loading of freight onto trucks.

But this neighbourhood may not be an outlier much longer. An ambitious plan for a 12-acre, 1.2 million-square-foot mixed-use project called the Red Hook Innovation District would include offices, shops, performance spaces and a promenade.

"The character of Red Hook was always that it was sleepy," said Jeffrey Unger, a commercial real estate broker with Kalmon Dolgin Affiliates who has worked in the area for more than a…