The Neighborhood
DUMBO | Vinegar Hill
The space, located in the heart of DUMBO, was curated to create an aesthetic that attempts to capture the warmth of a Brooklyn brownstone living room, with the lighting of a Chelsea gallery, but the feel of a Greenpoint loft. The building itself lies on the border of DUMBO and Vinegar Hill, two historic Brooklyn neighborhoods with their own distinct history.
DUMBO — short for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass — is the small triangular waterfront neighborhood between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges in northwest Brooklyn. Originally a 19th-century manufacturing and shipping district, DUMBO is where the cardboard box was invented (in the Robert Gair building, now home to Etsy), where the Arbuckle brothers pioneered packaged ground coffee, and where the Brooklyn waterfront earned the nickname "the Walled City" for its uninterrupted line of brick warehouses. The neighborhood was reinvented in the 1980s and 1990s by artists who took over the abandoned industrial lofts, then transformed again in the 2000s into one of New York's densest concentrations of design and tech firms. The DUMBO Historic District, designated in 2007, protects more than 90 industrial buildings, ensuring the texture of the original waterfront remains visible beneath the glass-tower additions of the past decade. Today, DUMBO is cobblestone streets, warehouse loft buildings, the East River waterfront, Brooklyn Bridge Park, the iconic view of the Manhattan Bridge framing the Empire State Building, and a creative culture that runs continuously from the 1980s artist arrival to the present.
Vinegar Hill is the small, quiet neighborhood directly east of DUMBO — six or seven blocks bounded by the East River, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and Bridge Street. Named after the 1798 Battle of Vinegar Hill in the Irish Rebellion, the neighborhood was settled in the 19th century by Irish immigrants who worked in the Navy Yard, and was known for decades as Brooklyn's "Irishtown." Where DUMBO was reinvented as a tech and design hub, Vinegar Hill was largely left alone. Its narrow Belgian-block streets are lined with pre-Civil War Federal-style and Greek Revival rowhouses — some of the oldest residential architecture in Brooklyn. The Vinegar Hill Historic District, designated in 1997, protects roughly 50 structures along Front, Water, and Hudson Streets, preserving a streetscape that feels closer to early 19th-century Brooklyn than to anything else in the modern city. Vinegar Hill is what DUMBO would have been if the development had stopped in 1985. It's quieter, smaller, less visited, and a different physical experience entirely. The two neighborhoods meet at Bridge Street, and Water Street runs continuously between them — Seyff sits at that meeting point.