News banners to line Grand Street--Sponsorship available

The BID is now seeking sponsorship for new streetlight banners

Logos will be placed at the three dots.

Our street lights are receiving a makeover. After 2 years of our previous blue-green street banners, we’ve worked with Brooklyn artist Morgan Winter to shake things up.

Drawing inspiration from the Brooklyn-native perennials the BID planted through the Hort this past spring, Morgan applied her vibrant technique of stencil drawing over water color to bring life to our banners.

While we cannot wait to install our newest art piece following a busy summer of 10 new murals, we first need sponsorship from local businesses that make our work possible. Whether your business is ground floor retail or out of your apartment, displaying your logo on these eye catching canvasses shows everyone your contribution to the community and bring more attention to your brand.

As a 501(c)(3) non profit, the majority of your contribution will be tax deductible and your sponsorship will go directly towards improving our shopping corridor with our 2,800 hours of cleaning in fiscal year 19.

The implementation of new colorful street banners is central to our Grand Street Arts Initiative to invest in Brooklyn artists and to cultivate an art collection that better represents the community of creatives that make Williamsburg unique.

If interested in sponsoring, please reach out to john@grandstreetbk.org. Look out for the streetscape changes in the coming months.

Cleaning up Grand Street--By the numbers

Our 7 day a week clean team collects 5,700+ buckets of trash in a year

One of the Grand Street BID’s most vital functions in keeping the neighborhood thriving for shoppers and businesses is our robust cleaning + sanitation program. You may recognize our star sweeper Mamat in the picture above, and while he stopped to pose for this picture, Mamat is busy each day collecting an average of nearly 16 buckets of trash on Grand Street.

Those daily totals add up to an average of 5,700+ buckets of trash over the course of a year. That is in addition to the BID’s efforts removing stickers + stains and making 50+ quality of life calls to 311 + DSNY that total to 2,800+ hours spent cleaning up Grand Street. With help from Ridgewood Restoration Corp, the BID removed 159 incidents of graffiti on Grand Street in fiscal year 2019. That’s our version of talking trash.

But, the BID also performs a variety of other neighborhood essentials such as our greening efforts which maintained 33 tree beds and installing 22 new tree guards in FY19. With the Hort, the BID also plants + maintains native Brooklyn perennials in our tree beds throughout the district.

Next time you see Mamat on the street, give him a ‘thank you’ for working hard every day to keep Grand Street gorgeous.

Introducing the Grand Street Neighborhood Initiative

A new campaign to bring our work closer to the community

A new logo + materials to help identify our work to the community

The Grand Street Business Improvement District (BID) is proud of our work keeping the East Williamsburg neighborhood clean and vibrant since 1985, but we still have a lot of work left in connecting to the residents whose everyday lives are affected by our numerous programs and services. We recognize that we’re in a changing neighborhood, and we want the BID to play a visible role in connecting all our local communities.

Our neighborhood is experiencing a dilemma common to many NYC communities. How do we create a commercial corridor that serves all residents, new and old? As a community-based organization, we also have the additional factor of determining how the BID fits into this question as a long-serving institution in the community.

We were awarded a grant from the NYC Department of Small Business Services to participate in the “Neighborhood Design Lab” program to reconcile this challenge and met with some stakeholders in the community to listen to feedback. The results of these meetings led us to determine that we needed to be more clear in our messaging, and do more to create the Grand Street BID as a space where all shoppers are welcome and invited to all businesses.

This leads to our new campaign, the Grand Street Neighborhood Initiative, our effort to better demonstrate and articulate the BID’s role as a positive force in the neighborhood and to show how the BID creates a vibrant place for everyone to live, work, and play. We’ve updated our visual identity and messaging to be more clear about our role as an organization working to care for the Grand Street community, and developed postcards + other materials designed to clearly identify what we do.

The goal of this initiative is to create a more defined neighborhood where residents and stakeholders all belong to one larger community, and we are excited to do this work. Let us know who you are and what you think about us and our neighborhood, we have unique surveys open for residents, businesses, and property owners. You are an important part of this process, and we want to hear from you.

Unique postcards available for residents, businesses, and property owners.