Jonathan Butler:
Even though Brooklyn population-wise, it's so big, I was struck early on by how it felt like it was a place that actually has an impact on whether it was creating something, you know, entrepreneurial you come to Brooklyn. I was like, oh my God. People are like, really woven tight here.
Ofer Cohen:
In this episode of, Hey BK, I speak to Jonathan Butler, the blogger, and entrepreneur behind some of Brooklyn's coolest projects. Brooklyn Flea, Smorgasburg and 1000 Dean. Johnathan and I shared an Uber to the interview. We both live in Clinton Hill. We both moved to Brooklyn around the same time in the early two thousands. We were 30 somethings with young families and had discovered the magic. So you've been at it a very long time starting with Brownstoner.
Speaker 1:
Indeed, I was a little bit bored at my, Wall Street job at the time. So I just went on a lunch break one day and started a blog about my house and about what was going on in Clinton Hill, Fort Greene and beyond.
Ofer Cohen:
When you started writing Brownstoner, it was just, you just kinda did it on a whim almost.
Jonathan Butler:
Oh yeah
Ofer Cohen:
You didn't think it would be a business?
Jonathan Butler:
I didn't even know, I started it on blogger.com or it was Brownstoner.blogspot.com. I did, you know, have the foresight to buy the domain name Brownstoner.com before I started the blog there and thought, you know if this goes somewhere I want to at least be able to have the name. And so after three months, it was going well enough that I then created it in January 2005, I created the first sort of standalone website version of Brownstoner and it just just kept kind of catching on. It was early days of blogging and, you know, a lot of success in life is timing and clearly you know started capturing a moment and the thing that was happening in Brooklyn and you know, probably captured and also helped in some ways propel certain things that were underway in Brooklyn.
Ofer Cohen:
Yeah. Remember, I mean, back then I mean there was the real kind of, almost like a DIY feeling, you know, of buying a brownstone, having a piece of Brooklyn, having a piece of the neighborhood, a piece of real estate.
Jonathan Butler:
Yeah, there was a sense, you know, and, and it's, it's hard, hard to use a word like, you know, pioneering because clearly, people had, people were living in Brooklyn forever but certainly for at least for a certain segment of the population that might have lived in Manhattan by default before we're waking up to and realizing that this incredible, beautiful culturally diverse place existed across the river certainly it was. It was really. There was a sense of sort of fun and discovery and adventure. For me, having been a lifelong Manhattanite. And I found myself in this really interesting, huge, incredibly diverse place that I just wanted to keep exploring. And really the, I think part of the charm of the blog, in the beginning, was that I was not holding myself out as an expert at all. I was more saying, woah, here's this thing I'm, I'm really into. And I'm discovering and come along for the ride and a lot of the early days of the blog posts especially were more interactive or I'd say, I don't know, you know, what, what parks should I go explore this weekend or you know, ask people questions and you know, sometimes people would call me stupid and an idiot and that kind of stuff or not, you know, not knowing everything I was supposed to know about Brooklyn. But I think to me, part of the fun and part of the charm was that I was just bringing people along on this, ride as I discovered it and as I literally rode my bike around and took pictures of empty lots or beautiful buildings, whatever it is and some reason and under-tapped into something that people related to.
Ofer Cohen:
Feels very romantic now, that you talk about it, those days specifically but also that sort of period.
Jonathan Butler:
Yeah, believe me, we were talking about being middle-aged on the way over here and it's sometimes hard to not feel wistful for those days. Yeah, that was 13 years ago, so I was 35 instead of 48. One year old and a three-year-old. Yeah, there was, you know, jumping on my bike and take pictures of things and feeling like I was at the beginning of trying to build something that was mine and creative. And you know, I don't think you'd get those moments very often in life
Ofer Cohen:
After years of looking to leave Wall Street, Jonathan finally took the risk. He got his bonus and moved onto Brownstoner full time.
Jonathan Butler:
Oh yeah. January 2007 was kind of like, I was also hated my job so much that I was like, this point I'm going to go for it and if it doesn't work, I'd rather like move to a farm in Vermont and start over then being stuck to this horrible job, Wall Street on the hamster wheel of New York City for the rest of my life.
Ofer Cohen:
Jonathan sold Brownstoner in 2015, but it was his role as a blogger that helped him launch his first big entrepreneurial project: The Brooklyn Flea.
Jonathan Butler:
It wasn't much. It was that fall 2007 when they had the idea to start a flea market. That's really what enabled me to live a more comfortable life. That kind of launched a whole other part of my life business life and also it was a whole other role and sort of this, ambassadorial role in spreading around the gospel of Brooklyn in both, you know, both the sort of Manhattanites who were coming out of the C train in Fort Greene, and look around and be like, holy crap, this is the most beautiful place I've ever seen. I didn't even know this was here. To, you know, tourists from Europe and Asia or wherever. There was a lot of this energy and momentum that was happening. And obviously, that was already apparent, on Brownstoner online. But this really was, ended up being a more physical manifestation, and meeting place. It was kind of like the town square effect, where all of a sudden, there was like a meeting place and there was something to do even if you weren't in the market to buy an old piece of furniture, still wanted to push your baby's stroller over the Brooklyn Flea and buy a pupusa and you know, maybe a t-shirt for the birthday party you're going to later or whatever. But it became a place where you go, you probably bump into people and it's really it had that community building fact. I think that really brought a lot of connections and made people feel really connected and created a real sense of place. Not only Fort Greene but kind of are all around brownstone North Brooklyn.
Ofer Cohen:
He turned to then-city councilwoman Tish James with the idea, which as it turns out is a relatively safe business model.
Jonathan Butler:
So I love flea markets and I just thought it was as simple as here's this huge dynamic place where full of creative people who don't have quite as much money as Manhattan and we don't really have a big flea market. So let's try one.
Ofer Cohen:
Sounds like no-brainer right now.
Jonathan Butler:
I mean the other nice thing about it, just like blogs, starting to flea market doesn't take a whole lot of capital. So I went to Tish and said, I have this idea for a flea market. There's this schoolyard or a Catholic high school or I think it'd be a great place to do it. On Vanderbilt and Lafayette. And she put me in touch with Brother Dennis at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School. The first year, I can't remember if we did it on a handshake or a one paragraph deal that first year. But anyway I announced it on my blog in October 2007 I'd known Eric Demby for about probably about a year because he had been the communications director for Marty Markowitz. Who was the borough president at the time. And he saw the announcement and reached back out to me and said, this is a great idea. I love to be a part of this. And it's sort of jives with a lot of things I've been thinking about. So we got together and decided to work together on it and it launched in April 2008 and you know, we had, it was crazy. We had like 20,000 people show up that first day.
Ofer Cohen:
What about the vendors? How did the vendors show up?
Jonathan Butler:
Well, the vendor that, that was sort of the idea of leveraging the existing media platform I had, right? Because the challenge of any kind of marketplaces, how do you get buyers and sellers there at the same time and in the old days you would have been like, you know, putting up flyers on telephone poles and hoping people showed up. Um, you know, this, uh, when, when I announced it on the blog in the fall, I think we had close to 100 vendors signed up in the first 48 hours. So we knew we were onto something and that was also through the perfect timing with the blogs and the newspapers that were around, there was this great echo chamber that would happen. So I announced it and then curved wrote about it and then Brooklyn paper wrote about. And so it sort of and then sort of culminated on the second day of the flea market when New York Times showed up and did a big photo shoot for the cover style section that really put it on the map. A lot of stuff too. We decided to have some food at the flea market too, which was sort of a novel idea, believe it or not back then, but we thought, oh, people are gonna be coming out fort Greene and the vendors will need some coffee and donuts in the morning. And at that point 10 years ago in Fort Greene and there weren't that many places to get food. And so that ended up being a fortuitous decision because it ended up becoming sort of ground zero for like street food, entrepreneurial who seen Brooklyn, which then led to the creation Smorgasburg.
Ofer Cohen:
So, Smorgasburg sort of got incubated in Brooklyn Flea and now it's own.
Jonathan Butler:
Yeah, we realized we had this great food scene going in Brooklyn Flea and a lot of people coming to Brooklyn Flea for the food. But it got to the point where we were having to turn away really interesting food vendors because, you know, we wanted to not have more than, let's say 25 percent of the market be food, otherwise it would still stop feeling like a flea market that we realized we were saying no to a lot of people. Eric and I sat around for a couple of weeks scratching our heads, trying to think we didn't want to just create a flea market that would compete with our flea market, you know, it was three miles away in Fort Greene. So it seems so obvious in retrospect, but we, you know, are like, oh, should we have an art market, craft market? And I'll feel like no, food would make a lot of sense. We have a lot of food vendors. Um, and I just kind of, I remember I was sitting in front of the TV, I just thought of the name Smorgasburg texted it to Eric and he's like, that's a little silly but might work. And then kind of stuck. So that launched in May of 2011.
Ofer Cohen:
Smorgasburg has moved around a lot from Brooklyn Bridge Park to Williamsburg. What helped activate the waterfront Most recently it has expanded to Los Angeles.
Jonathan Butler:
It is sort of arbitraging short-term real estate opportunities because we need to get the space for cheap. And one of the nice things about the business model is we only pay for our retail space on the best retail days of the week. We were three or four different locations in Brooklyn Bridge Park because Brooklyn Bridge Park was getting built out, so we sort of always, you know, one, one step ahead of the bulldozer. And uh, ultimately two years ago there's no room left in Brooklyn Bridge Park and we moved the Sunday market to Prospect Park.
Ofer Cohen:
It has created a business model that has been copied all over the country.
Jonathan Butler:
They don't require much capital. So even if you fail, you know, haven't wiped yourself out, at least. I didn't know how to run a flea market. But I was like, how hard could it be to figure that out? You know, I never had. There was something, even though Brooklyn population-wise, it's so big, I was struck early on by how it felt like it was a place to actually have an impact on whether it was creating something entrepreneurial or just even. It never occurred to me in Manhattan that I could like call up a politician and ask them for help or providing an opinion or complain about something like I came to Brooklyn I was like, oh my God, people are like really woven tight here and there's not a lot of artificial barriers, you know, everyone can talk to each other. For me, it was really eyeopening. The ways people worked on a community level that I'd never really seen in Manhattan before.
Ofer Cohen:
Jonathan has embarked on his own real estate project at 1000 Dean in Crown Heights. In 2011, he pitched a conversion of the abandoned studebaker service station to Goldman Sachs, the commercial workspace for Brooklyn's creative classes. An extension of all of his other projects.
Jonathan Butler:
Really my sales pitch to Goldman was, it's like a map and drew two concentric circles. One was half a mile, one was a mile and showed all the residential neighborhoods that had been booming for the last seven years, that touched there and said, look, there's no place for all these creative, successful people who are moving into neighborhoods to work.
Ofer Cohen:
Right. It would be cool if there's going to be a place for them to hang out.
Jonathan Butler:
Kind of a hub, you know, and people who are running small businesses still want to feel like they have people around them and they're seeing people in the hallway and, in our case, we built a beer hall and a food court on the ground floor. That's pretty crucial to the success of the building probably. They still want to have that sense of community. No one wants to sit in the kitchen by themselves all day long if they don't have to. And I think, you know, in the car over, we were talking a little bit, I think about, how it feels like we're in a different era now than the era in which I started. I mean, it's hard to know it's being filtered through my own eyes. It certainly feels less exciting and that sort of, as I was saying, before there was personally for me, there was a sense of discovery and that there was a lot of stuff, you know, whether it's a grocery store or a bar or whatever, you know, that a lot of neighborhoods still needed. Um, and there was the ability to have an idea that someone else hadn't had and make it happen and feel like it was impactful. And I certainly look, I still think people are moving to Brooklyn, not for many of the same reasons, you know, of community and scale, all that kind of stuff, quality of life, the kids, all that sort of thing. But it's just, you know, it's less a, it's already picked over and it's, it's hardly a new idea. Yeah I bumped into a guy now if I hadn't seen it a couple of years, I bumped into him at Smorgasburg in Prospect Park Sunday and he's like, I was like stressed out. I saw some garbage can overflowing and something. He was like, it must feel great to stand here and look at this and think you created it. It's like, I guess you're right. I don't usually think about it, but yeah, you know, Eric and I created this thing that however many thousands of people are coming to and even more, you know, the one thing we haven't talked about that is that the most satisfying and some ways impactful piece of what we've done is we actually created a platform for small businesses. So between Brooklyn Flea and Smorgasburg, I think, I can't think of anything else. Let me know if you can think of anything else. I can't think of anything else that basically incubates and supports more small businesses in New York City. I really think we're the biggest small business incubator in New York City, sort of unintentionally, but it's really about a platform and created that change. The economics of the food business.
Ofer Cohen:
Johnathan and his partner Eric Demby have a keen eye for identifying the vibe of the neighborhood and the sensibility to create a business around it. But they aren't ready to take the credit for expanding the so-called Brooklyn brand, even as food markets expand throughout the country.
Jonathan Butler:
I would probably steer away from calling it, bringing the Brooklyn experience. Um, I think that they sent you on a use Brooklyn as a verb or an adjective, you know, there's probably 30 or 40 cities already in the country that you could say have been, have there Brooklyn or have, you know, have been Brooklyn eyes in some ways. And basically just means there's a creative community and food is important there. And you know...
Ofer Cohen:
In the real estate business, they call it millennial clusters.
Jonathan Butler:
Certainly has to be some. Impacted. You can trace back to Brooklyn. But no, I think, I think if you go to another city, it's more about how do we take what we know about creating a platform to celebrate these local businesses. Um, you know, it'd be interesting if a couple of our Brooklyn vendors or a couple of our LA vendors want to use that as a way to expand their businesses to come to a new city. But the primary focus is going to be about going in celebrating what's happening locally and hopefully, what's interesting is when people start creating new ideas to be in Smorgasburg, not just like a restaurant, you know, we don't really want us to go into a new town and just like have all the good restaurants create one, you know, the one thing that's popular on their menu and reproduce it in one place. It's much more about people creating new ideas for this new experience. That's what makes it special.
Ofer Cohen:
Johnathan Butler, thank you so much for joining me at Hey BK, you're listening to Hey BK the podcast about the people behind Brooklyn's transformation, you could find us at, heybk.nyc or wherever you get your podcasts, please download and subscribe to our episodes. I'm Ofer Cohen, thanks for listening.