By Jack Delaney | jdelaney@queensledger.com
“Brooklyn is a magical place. World famous. A muse. A wellspring. Even the water is famous!”
Some might take the opening words of Joel Holland’s introduction to his third book, Brooklyn Storefronts, released in September, as pure flattery, but he brings the goods: upwards of 230 minimalistic yet painstakingly drawn renderings of the borough’s most iconic spots. From oldies like Staubitz Market in Cobble Hill (est. 1917) to new entrants such as Frankel’s Delicatessen & Appetizing in Greenpoint (since 2016) and beyond, Holland and collaborator David Dodge — who contributed lovingly researched copy to contextualize each drawing — have tried to make sure there’s something for every Brooklynite in these pages.
The project wasn’t without its challenges. Holland and Dodge had worked together on the former’s first title, a paean to his Manhattan haunts called NYC Storefronts, which hit shelves in 2022. But they acknowledged that doing Brooklyn justice called for a different approach. For one, the older book drew from a personal stash of illustrations Holland had made over the course of years, so they knew which stores would be included from the outset. In tackling a new borough, the scale was daunting: “I was pretty confident that I would know 75% of the stores that came our way,” Dodge said. “It was more like a quarter.”
The economic crisis that has rocked the restaurant business also posed an issue, both for Brooklyn Storefronts and a soon-to-be second edition of the first book.
“It’s been a little depressing, actually,” said Dodge. “We’ve had to go through and list all the different storefronts that have closed, and a lot of them — at the time, we were proud of them for making it through Covid, and there were all these great mutual aid efforts. But the toll of [the pandemic] is still kind of rippling throughout the city. It’s been interesting to go back and dip into the first book and see what’s changed.”
As for Brooklyn? “Having lived out there, I was jazzed,” said Holland, an expat of Greenpoint and Park Slope, who was lettering his next project as we spoke. “Like, ‘Oh, this is gonna be easy!’ And then I started to get really bummed, because I lived out there 10 or 15 years ago, and all the places that I thought of as being so awesome were gone.”
Both Holland and Dodge had been Brooklynites before (Dodge is “constantly in Brooklyn” to this day, he maintained), but as they assembled a preliminary list of storefronts — taking excursions from tip to tail, and taking stock of closures — they decided to recruit more help in order to cast a wider net.
“The way that we solved it was by combining forces between David, [editor] Ali, and myself, as well as all of our contacts with friends and some anonymous crowdsourcing [through social media],” said Holland. “That got me excited, thinking — this is not just for me or for us. We’re doing this for the community.”
And after documenting so many striking facades and improbable backstories, it’s hard not to have favorites.
“[It’s] probably the San Toy Laundry on 7th St,” said Holland. “I just love the look of it. I love the little packages in the window. I know it sounds weird to talk about my own drawing this way — sorry! But I like the texture that I was able to do for the exterior, mimicking a brown stone grit. That’s my favorite spot.”
Dodge was torn, but leaned towards the New York City Transit Museum on Schermerhorn St. in Downtown Brooklyn. The museum only exists, he explained, because a Transit Authority employee named Don Harold, who died in 2023, became obsessed with saving decommissioned trains from the scrapyard by switching their numbers so they wouldn’t be identified. Many of these same trains eventually found a home in today’s museum, which is sited in a subway station that was retired in 1946.
Another quirky discovery for Dodge was Broadway Pigeons & Pet Supplies in Bushwick, run by brothers Joey and Michael Scott. They inherited a flock of the speckle-necked birds when their grandfather passed away, and decided to create a hub for fellow enthusiasts. Though their hearts are with the rock doves, in recent years the Scotts have been forced to turn to traditional pet supplies to survive. People still buy pigeons, Dodge says, but nowadays the store is more likely to sell them for oddball purposes, such as to help train a dog to hunt, than for racing or long-distance messages.
Ultimately, the book strives to be more than eye candy. “Over the past decade,” curator Kimberly Drew writes in the foreword, “I’ve watched so many storefronts come and go. I’ve seen my neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant, be invaded. I’ve felt the brunt of rising rents. I’ve watched the horizons change. Witnessing this all firsthand is why I know it is urgent that we seek out these storefronts and support them.” In that sense, Brooklyn Storefronts is much like a pattern book, full of eateries, bars, bookstores, museums, and laundromats whose storied warps and wefts — luring you out of the house — amount to something more than the sum of its (very elegant) parts.
The duo’s next project will be a citywide survey of street vendors, tentatively scheduled for 2026. You can contact David Dodge via his Instagram, @bydaviddodge, with any suggestions or tips about vendors he should profile. Holland’s fourth book, Paris Shopfronts, is due out next spring.
