Cobble Hill Blog

The Daily News spoke to Brooklyn small business owners who were left with no choice but to vacate the their space due to inflated rents. Mentioned in the article are Kyung Dong Oh and his wife Kyung Ja Oh, who closed the doors to their Cobble Hill dry cleaners for good in March of last year.

“It was hard,” said Kyung Dong Oh, an immigrant from South Korea who opened the shop in 1984, and saw it become a beloved neighborhood fixture. “My store was not only a store, it was a meeting place.”

Twenty months later, the space on the corner of Court and Baltic Sts. still sits empty. [New landlord Salvatore Prestigiacomo- note NY Daily News printed the wrong name in its coverage] is still asking $6,500 for the space - and no one has bitten.

It’s one of several cases around the borough where landlords saw gold during boom times and shed longtime tenants by raising rents, only to see their storefronts sit empty as the economy turned sour.