Coda: ShakeShack Comes to Downtown Brooklyn Today

The new Shake Shack, a luxe fast food restaurant by Danny Meyers, opens its first Brooklyn outpost today at 11 AM at a ribbon cutting ceremony at its gleaming new store front at 409 Fulton Street (between Willoughby and Adams), just steps from Brooklyn borough hall. Mayor Bloomberg, Borough President Marty Markowitz, and other business and civic luminaries will be present to cut the ribbon and chow down on burgers, hot dogs, shakes
and frozen treats.

It's as much about quality, upscale fast food as it is another marker of the continuing development and recognition that the Borough of Brooklyn is a complex, highly developed and unique community in its own right. When the City of Brooklyn merged with Manhattan in 1898, it seems as though the City of Brooklyn lost some panache, overshadowed by its more dominant partner across the river. We were the borough of the Honeymooners, at best a bedroom community to where the action really happened.

Now, especially in the past decade, the development of new hotels, the appearance of major corporate and financial operations at Metrotech,  the expansion of the Brooklyn Academy of Music into an artistic center,  the complete recreation of the mall at Albee Square into the new City Point Mall and  the new, already -opened Urban Space at the DeKalb City Market, are all harbingers of the continuing commercial development and cultural significance of the borough, both as part of New York City and as a  distinct and unique American destination.  The borough of Brooklyn, like the City and State of New York, and the entire US, require expanded employment opportunities, a more realistic social safety net within the context of a free economy, that addresses the needs of families, children, the elderly and the under- and unemployed.

At the same time, remarkably,  it is a wonderful message of the continuing economic vibrancy and potential of Brooklyn, when a simple thing like a New Burger Comes to Town.  Go figure.
--Deep in the Heart of Brooklyn