Walk the corner of Macon Street and Marcus Garvey Boulevard this month and you will see two storefronts that took two years apiece to open, sitting close enough that you could stand between them and see both awnings. One is a French-countryside bakery that opened its doors in July. The other, a bookstore and bar from one of the most recognized journalists in the country, has been "opening soon" since the fall of 2025 and is now, finally, pointed at a real date. Neither business is answering the same question the other one is. That is the part worth paying attention to if you live anywhere near Bed-Stuy right now.
The hardware store that waited two years to become a bookstore
Macon Hardware ran out of that corner building for close to a century, most recently under Peter and Clara Hayes, who bought it in 1987 after Peter had worked there since he was twelve years old. When it closed in 2023, it left behind one of the last true old-guard Black-owned storefronts on that stretch of Marcus Garvey Boulevard, and an empty two-story brick building inside the Bedford-Stuyvesant/Expanded Stuyvesant Heights Historic District.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist behind The 1619 Project and a Bed-Stuy resident of nearly fifteen years, had been trying to open a public literary space in the neighborhood for years before a lease fell through at the last minute. Rather than keep chasing another lease, she bought the Macon Street building outright, reportedly for $2.6 million in 2024, specifically so ownership of the space would not be up for negotiation again. She has said the point of buying rather than renting was to make sure the project could stay put: "the gentrification of retail and third spaces" was the phrase she used to describe what she was trying to avoid, and by her account Bed-Stuy's Black population share dropped from roughly 75 percent in 2000 to about 40 percent by 2023.
The result is The North Star Books + Bar, a bookstore, bar, and cafe she is opening with Rotimi and Ayo Akinnuoye, the couple behind Bed-Vyne Wine & Spirits and Bed-Vyne Brew, and DJ Johnson, who owns the bookstore and cafe Baldwin & Co. in New Orleans. The plan for the 2,200-square-foot ground floor is a reading room, a lounge, and a bar designed around Harlem Renaissance-era Art Deco, with shelving built to move out of the way for author talks. Upstairs, two apartments are set aside for visiting writers to stay in while they lead workshops in the neighborhood.
None of that came together on schedule. The building sits inside a landmark district, which meant the Landmarks Preservation Commission had a say in details as granular as the grout color on the brick, and renovation reporting from Brownstoner tracked the project through a full gut renovation and multiple stop-work orders. An opening projected for "early 2026" slipped to "spring 2026" by the time BK Reader covered it in December. By June, the project had shifted again: a hiring post reported by the Bed-Stuy Stoop newsletter had Hannah-Jones staffing up for a dozen bar and bookstore positions, with a new target of opening by September. That target lines up with where the calendar sits right now, which makes this less a "coming soon" story and more a "check this week" one for anyone who lives close enough to walk past.
"I want people to get off their phones and be in community," Hannah-Jones told the newsletter this past June.
The bakery that already answered a different question
Directly across the intersection, Saison has already had its opening. Sammy Rees, who grew up in Boerum Hill and previously worked as the Home Market editor at Vogue, started baking out of her Crown Heights apartment during the pandemic, handing out weekly boxes of homegrown vegetables and baked goods to friends before word of mouth turned it into a catering and wedding-cake business. She spent roughly two years hunting for a storefront that was walkable from where she lived and sat inside a tight-knit block, and landed on the corner of Hancock Street and Marcus Garvey Boulevard, a spot that had previously housed a Waffle House and sits across from Natty Garden.
Saison opened around the July 11 weekend of this year, and local coverage described the interior as leaning into limestone marble floors and a French and English countryside aesthetic, with vintage homewares and flowers sold alongside the pastries. Weeks after opening, Cititour's dining coverage noted the bakery had already landed on a Condé Nast Traveler list of the city's best bakeries, largely for cakes decorated with seasonal fruit and fresh flowers.
The prices are the detail that tells you the most about how the bakery sits in the neighborhood around it. An eight-inch cake at Saison runs $130. A block or two over on Bainbridge Street, Doc's Cake Shop starts its eight-inch cakes at $75. On Marcus Garvey itself, Sweet Tooth Catering sells a seven-inch layer cake starting at $45. That is not a small gap, and it was noticeable enough that Bed-Stuy Stoop's coverage of the opening mentioned that not everyone in the neighborhood was thrilled about the new arrival, even as the everyday bakery items mostly stayed under $10.
So on one side of the same intersection, a legacy Black-owned business became a project explicitly built to keep the corner Black-owned and rooted in the neighborhood's literary history. On the other, a newcomer from outside Bed-Stuy opened a business priced well above the block's existing cake shops. Both took roughly two years to get from idea to storefront. Both landed on the same corner within a couple of months of each other. That is not a coincidence you'd catch from a single business listing. You only see it by standing at the intersection.
What else is happening within a block of that corner
The corner is not operating in isolation. A few other projects nearby are working through a related question, which is how much of Bed-Stuy's history gets carried forward as the neighborhood keeps changing.
- A new mural at Tompkins and Jefferson, led by Isha Maat, president of the Bedstuy Block Association, depicts stoop culture in the neighborhood: kids playing hopscotch, double dutch, and rollerskating. Maat has described the project as an attempt to preserve that history for newer residents rather than assume it will be passed down on its own.
- An oral history project at GrowHouse, the community space at 410 Marcus Garvey Boulevard, has curator and cultural archivist Faith Hannah collecting old photographs, flyers, and family stories from legacy Bed-Stuy residents, with the material set to appear in a fall exhibition.
- A wider bookstore scene that North Star is positioning itself alongside rather than against. Dear Friends Books and The Word Is Change, both on Tompkins Avenue, and Gladys Books & Wine, which opened on Malcolm X Boulevard in a former Brookland Capital spot, are all part of a run of Black-owned bookstore openings in the neighborhood over the past few years. Hannah-Jones has said the goal for North Star is collaboration with those stores, not competition.
None of this is really about real estate. It is about what a two-block radius in Bed-Stuy is doing with its own memory this year, in the middle of visible turnover on its storefronts.
Why this particular corner is worth watching
If North Star opens on its September target, it will do so within weeks of Saison marking two months in business, on the same intersection, inside a landmark district that shaped both of their timelines in different ways. One project chose ownership specifically to slow down displacement. The other chose a price point that tested what the block would bear. Both are legitimate answers to the same pressure Bed-Stuy has been living with for years. Watching how each one settles in over its first season will tell you more about where this stretch of the neighborhood is headed than any single opening could on its own.
We cover this corner of Brooklyn because we work in it, not because it makes for a good headline. If you are trying to understand a specific Bed-Stuy block, whether that means Bedford-Stuyvesant or a street a few minutes away, The Dima Lysius Team can walk you through what is actually happening there before you make a decision that depends on it. Contact us when you are ready to talk.
