Soon you’ll tell people that you used to hang out on Bedford Avenue and they’ll look at you as if you said you used to regularly get trashed up and down the stretch of Broadway in Soho. We’ve seen a lot of change on the once-iconic Williamsburg street, from the mundane (a Dunkin Donuts opening) to the gross (an Equinox replacing Spike Hill) to the environmentally minded. So change is inevitable blah blah but one of the key pieces of Bedford Avenue’s chainification is finally ready: The Whole Foods on Bedford and North 4th will open in a month. Commence the jokes about spending your “whole (parents’) paycheck!”
Gothamist reports the long-awaited store, the first major grocery chain to open in Williamsburg (if you don’t consider relatively quaint Foodtown and Ctown as major chains), will open July 26 in a 51,000-square foot space at 238 Bedford Ave., complete with a coffee bar and cafe, with pastries provided by Roberta’s, and a Luke’s Lobster tail cart. It’ll be the second Whole Foods in Brooklyn (the Gowanus one is larger, at 56,000 square feet), but not the last new grocery story for Williamsburg: a Trader Joe’s is still in the works on Kent Avenue.
It seems like so long ago when Brooklyn’s first Whole Foods opened in Gowanus in 2014, serving all these perfectly ridiculous products; and even longer ago that Urban Outfitters opening in the nabe seemed like a big deal. Is this store opening a tipping point? Probably not, there are worse things to happen to the area in recent years than a place to get expensive vinegar powder and impulse buy Swell water bottles at the register. But it does cater to a certain clientele who generally have more money to spend, which is the trend of the neighborhood on whole for the past several years.
Remember: Whole Foods is 15 percent more expensive than Fairway, and Fairway is still going bankrupt.
Below is the rendering of the building when it was proposed; here is what it actually looks like.