Polonaise Terrace in Greenpoint could be converted into office and retail space

By Brooklyn Magazine Staff

It appears the Polonaise Terrace, a distinctive building that most recently housed the Brooklyn Bazaar, is about to be no more — in its current iteration, anyway.

Developers have filed paperwork to gut it and transform the Greenpoint building into a four-story office and retail space, ending the latest chapter in its nearly 125-year-old existence. Gone will be its iconic gaudy-chic facade, installed in the 1960s, and with the proposed build-out would come new exterior that hearkens back to when it was first built over a century ago.

Polonaise Terrace has been a fixture in the neighborhood for being an event space to the Polish community until it closed in 2013. Three years later, Brooklyn Bazaar moved in and had several bars, an arcade and a music venue. That closed in 2019 when lease negotiations broke down and it has remained empty (and defiled) through the pandemic.

The developers bought it in 2021 and have been working with the neighborhood to redesign the decaying building, according to Brownstoner. However, they have to receive permission from the Landmarks Preservation Commission before they can fully renovate it. That meeting will happen on November 15.

The building’s layout is notoriously chaotic in its current form, due to repeated modifications (see: event space, music venue, separate stores), which has prompted the developers to say at a meeting that “it’s very hard to make any sense of it.” Which, perhaps, made it quintessentially Greenpoint.

“We are doing our best to reuse all of the existing structure and then we will use it to convert for the new components,” architect Ray Dovell recently said.

It would be the second iconic event space in the past year that the borough would lose. Grand Prospect Hall in Park Slope was recently completely demolished to make way for apartments.