Atlantic Avenue (New York City)

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Atlantic Avenue is an important street in the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. It stretches from the Brooklyn waterfront along the East River all the way to Jamaica, Queens. Atlantic Avenue runs parallel to Fulton Street for much of its course through Brooklyn, where it serves as a border between the neighborhoods of Prospect Heights and Fort Greene and between Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights.

Public-relations minded officials in Kings County (coterminous with the Borough of Brooklyn) have dubbed Atlantic the "Champs-Élysées of Brooklyn" in an ambitious attempt to promote the street as a center of tourism, commerce and traffic.

In Brooklyn, the area of Atlantic nearest the waterfront has long been known for its antique shops and its notable Arab community, including mosques, specialty shops (such as Sahadi Importing Company, also known as Sahadi's) and restaurants specializing in Middle Eastern food. As it stretches east toward Flatbush Avenue, Atlantic passes through the rapidly-changing neighborhoods of Brooklyn Heights, Boerum Hill and Downtown Brooklyn. This section of Atlantic Avenue is the site of the Atlantic Antic, a street festival involving local merchants and artists held in September.

At Flatbush, the smaller shops, restaurants, churches and boutiques give way to the Atlantic Avenue Terminal, where nine subway lines of the MTA converge with the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR). The area is dominated by massive buildings used by storage companies, the Atlantic Center mall (opened in 1996, with tenants including P.C. Richard and Modell's) and the Atlantic Terminal mall (opened in 2004, with tenants including Target). Both malls are products of developer Forest City Ratner.

The rail yard area is currently the focus of controversy surrounding plans for development of the Brooklyn Atlantic Yards complex. This megaproject, designed by noted architect Frank Gehry and proposed by Forest City Ratner, includes a 800,000-square-foot, 20,000-seat basketball arena for the New Jersey Nets (which would be renamed the Brooklyn Nets), 2.1 million square feet of offices, 310,000 square feet of retail, as many as 4,500 apartments, and six acres of parks that would replace the existing landscape of low-rises and railroad tracks.

The face of Atlantic Avenue east of Flatbush Avenue, the site designated for the Brooklyn Atlantic Yards, is defined the LIRR tracks that run beneath (from Flatbush Avenue to Bedford Avenue), above (from Bedford to near Ralph Avenue), and beneath again (in East New York). The elevated portion of the LIRR tracks greatly limits the viability of the businesses and residences along Atlantic Avenue; many shops are derelict or defunct, a trend that continues on into Queens.