For two decades, if you wanted to explain Boerum Hill to someone, you pointed at Smith Street. The restaurant row, the bike shop, the general store, the Saturday Open Streets promenade between Wyckoff and Union. That was the shorthand. It still works, but it is no longer the whole picture. The most consequential openings of the last twelve months have landed a few blocks north, on Atlantic Avenue and the short spine of Bond Street between Pacific and State. If you live here, you can feel the pull of the neighborhood shifting toward its top edge.
This is not a lament for Smith Street. It is an observation about where energy, capital, and programming are collecting right now, and what that means for a Saturday afternoon in July.
The Bond Street corner nobody was watching
Bond Street between Pacific and State ran quiet for most of the last decade. The 2,900-square-foot corner at 100 Bond had been Café Kitsuné, which closed toward the end of summer 2025. Then, in May, the block got a proper anchor. Lonnies opened on May 20 at 112 Bond Street, right at the Pacific Street corner, from the married duo Sean Rembold and Caron Callahan, the team behind Ingas Bar in Brooklyn Heights.
Two details matter here beyond the pedigree. First, the kitchen runs entirely on induction with no gas, and the menu leans on a few things done carefully: chicken under a brick, a daily prime rib special, burgers, and a Basque cheesecake for dessert. That is not a coincidence in a converted ground floor with modern electrical service. Second, Rembold described the project as Ingas's older sister, with a future bar concept reportedly to follow. A separate bar on Bond would give this block a full evening arc for the first time in years.
If you have been walking past that corner on the way to the Bergen F/G and wondering when the scaffolding would come down, that is the answer.
Why 540 Atlantic is not just another wellness opening
The bigger structural change is a block south of Atlantic, at Third Avenue. Bathhouse opened the Atlantic Avenue location to the public on May 16, 2026, with about 32,000 square feet of space in total, including roughly 27,000 square feet indoors and 5,000 square feet outdoors.
The scale is the story. This is not a small studio. The Atlantic Avenue thermal circuit includes a hot pool at 104°F, a cold plunge at 50°F, a neutral pool at 98°F, an event sauna that reaches up to 175°F, a banya, an infrared sauna and a steam room. The event sauna is what makes this a neighborhood variable rather than a spa footnote. It served as a centerpiece for the Aufguss USA Nationals 2026, with the venue's 100-plus seats making it possible to present theatrical, costume-driven performances alongside more traditional ritual formats.
For residents, the practical read is this: day passes start at $29, which sets a floor for a weekday afternoon that used to require a train ride to Williamsburg or Flatiron. That changes the calculus for how you spend a rainy Sunday within a ten-minute walk of Nevins Street.
The openings, mapped
A quick reference for what has actually landed on the north edge of the neighborhood in the last year:
| Address | What | When |
|---|---|---|
| 112 Bond St | Lonnies (Ingas Bar team) | Opened May 20, 2026 |
| 540 Atlantic Ave | Bathhouse Brooklyn | Opened May 16, 2026 |
| 222 Smith St | Bar Rêve, Belle Époque cocktail bar | Opened earlier this year |
| 182 Smith St | Whole Foods (former Rite Aid) | Lease signed, timeline pending |
| 100 Bond St | Ingas sister bar concept | Following Lonnies |
Read that column of dates. Almost everything on it is a 2026 arrival. This is not a slow-drip transformation. It is a season.
Smith Street is not fading, it is specializing
Smith Street still carries the weekend crowd, but the character of its new arrivals has shifted from restaurants toward retail and specialty operators. Bar Rêve, a new cocktail bar inspired by the salons and soirées of Belle Époque Paris, opened earlier this month at 222 Smith St. That is a design-forward drinking room, not another neighborhood bistro.
The bigger Smith Street news is quieter and further out. Whole Foods has signed a lease to take over the corner storefront at 182 Smith Street between Warren Street and Wyckoff Street, in an approximately 35,000 square foot space recently vacated by Rite Aid following the pharmacy chain's ongoing bankruptcy closures. Because the lease was just signed, there is no official timeline yet for the build-out or opening day.
A 35,000-square-foot grocery on that block is a different kind of gravity. It will pull weekday foot traffic patterns that Smith Street has not seen since the pre-pandemic Trader Joe's rumors. If you live in the southern half of the neighborhood, that is a real quality-of-life variable to keep an eye on.
The free calendar worth memorizing
The programming on Atlantic Avenue continues to do more work per block than almost any comparable stretch in Brooklyn. Three dates to hold:
May, annually. The Atlantic Avenue ArtWalk transforms a 1.5-mile stretch of Atlantic Avenue into an open-air gallery from noon to 6 p.m., bringing together more than 125 emerging and established artists whose work is displayed inside over 60 local businesses. Free, self-guided, and it does the useful trick of getting you inside shops you have walked past for years without entering.
Sunday, September 27. The Atlantic Antic, the oldest and largest street festival in Brooklyn, spans 10 blocks along Atlantic Avenue, crossing through the Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill neighborhoods, with music, entertainment including kid-friendly activities, and vendors selling clothing, jewelry, gifts, food and drinks. Playtopia by Brooklyn Bridge Parents runs in Boerum Hill with free kids activities, the Brooklyn Museum on Wheels and more.
Year-round, on the neighborhood's own calendar. The Boerum Hill Association still runs its Hoyt Street plant sale and the biennial house tour in even-numbered years, along with block parties and greening days. Small, local, and worth putting on the family group text.
For culture that does not require a reservation, Roulette Intermedium at 509 Atlantic Avenue is an experimental music and performing arts venue founded in 1978, presenting 120 evenings of experimental performance annually in its 1928 beaux arts building. One-hundred-twenty evenings a year is a lot of programming inside a beaux arts room most people walk past without a second look.
The neighborhood's summer is not organized around one headline event. It is organized around the fact that you can build a Saturday out of a morning at the greenmarket, an afternoon at Roulette or the ArtWalk, and an early dinner at a new opening within a fifteen-minute walk of your front door.
A resident's weekend, roughly
If someone asked how to spend a July Saturday inside the neighborhood without leaving it, the answer now sounds different than it did a year ago.
Start with the greenmarket. Then push north instead of south. Walk Bond Street past the new corner at 112, up to Atlantic. From there, either west toward the ArtWalk footprint and the storefronts you never quite got around to, or east across Third to see what 540 Atlantic actually feels like from the sidewalk. The site sits just a few blocks from Barclays Center and is pitched as a neighborhood-scale hub for recovery and social programming. The word "neighborhood" is doing real work in that sentence.
For dinner, the new options join the standing ones: LDV Hospitality's Koju, a 14-seat omakase bar inside Ace Hotel Brooklyn, French Louie from the Buttermilk Channel team, Rucola for northern Italian at any hour, and the Brooklyn Inn at 148 Hoyt for a nightcap in a nineteenth-century wood-bar room that has not needed to change in decades.
That is the argument for the summer. The neighborhood has quietly widened. Its center of gravity used to sit near Bergen and Smith. It now sits closer to Pacific and Bond, with a second pole at Atlantic and Third. Smith Street is still Smith Street. It has just stopped being the only street.
The quiet read
None of this shows up on a map yet. It shows up in where you find yourself walking on a Thursday evening, which corner has scaffolding coming down, and which block has a line out the door at 7 p.m. that was empty at 7 p.m. last July.
For anyone thinking about how the neighborhood is changing in ways that matter beyond a summer, The Scott / Robles Team has spent enough years on these blocks to read the shift in real time. If you would like to talk about what the north-edge activity means for your block, your building, or your plans, reach out.
