Greenpoint is Getting a Giant Convention Center
Finally really earning its nickname as “Brooklyn’s West Side Highway,” Greenpoint is on pace to get its own convention center, Bedford + Bowery reports, known as the Brooklyn Expo Center. The project will be going in at 79 Franklin in the Greenpoint Terminal, a massive complex that was destroyed by a major fire back in 2006. The logic here is pretty straightforward; one of the project’s developers told the site, “from Manhattan out to Brooklyn there is not a big open space on the ground floor that you can conduct expos at the moment.” Well, true enough.
Per their website, the 40,000 square foot space is set to include 28,000 square feet of exhibition space, office and meeting rooms, a cafeteria, “banquet capacity of 2,200” and lots of “natural lighting. (By comparison, the Javits Center has 760,000 square feet for exhibitions.) Developers call it “a new concept for a historical neighborhood that is now emerging as a frontier of culture in the Brooklyn scene.”
Seems a little surprising that this would be happening in Greenpoint instead of, say, the Williamsburg waterfront or somewhere in Downtown Brooklyn, but then, it also makes sense that developers would gravitate toward a cavernous, unused space. In any case, we look forward to watching out-of-town convention-goers attempting to navigate the G.
Follow Virginia K. Smith on Twitter @vksmith.