Junior’s Brooklyn Site Will Be Sold to Developer, but Restaurant Will Return


Junior’s Restaurant in Brooklyn, an unofficial landmark, will be torn down by a developer, but its owner says he plans to reopen it. Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times



The reigning dessert of Downtown Brooklyn is so creamy it sticks to the teeth, so famous it has fed presidents and princes, so precious that when the building where it is made nearly burned to the ground in 1981, people rushed to the scene to wail, “Save the cheesecake!”

On Thursday, it was not a threat to that dessert but the impending obliteration of its birthplace, Junior’s Restaurant, that brought forth howls and sighs of nostalgia. As news spread that Junior’s is planning to sell its building to a developer who will most likely transform the two-story restaurant into a luxury apartment tower — an alchemy repeating itself all over Brooklyn — there occurred a run on cheesecake.

“We literally had to cut cheesecakes quicker because people were buying them with a fervor this morning,” marveled Alan Rosen, who took over Junior’s from his father and uncle, who inherited it from their father, Harry Rosen. “People were under the impression we were closing, that we’re closing imminently. It was like a cheesecake panic.”

Mr. Rosen received several text messages from people complaining that the closing of this unofficial city landmark would upset their mothers. Calls came from all directions, perhaps most prominently from Marty Markowitz, the former Brooklyn borough president, whose fondness for Junior’s is well documented.

In fact, Mr. Rosen plans to strike a deal with a developer that will allow Junior’s to return as a ground-floor tenant, marrying the restaurant’s midcentury aesthetic, unfashionable quaintness and middling prices to a sumptuous, showy spire.

First opened by Harry Rosen as a sandwich shop and then as Junior’s on Election Day 1950, the building, at the corner of DeKalb Avenue and Flatbush Avenue Extension, is 17,000 square feet of red-and-white-striped menus, flashbulb-adorned signs, rust-colored booths and a wooden bar. A shrine to the Brooklyn of old, it has become a must-visit for politicians from Mr. Markowitz to President Obama, who bought two cheesecakes and a couple of black-and-white cookies during an October visit with Bill de Blasio, who was soon to be elected mayor.

The developer could build about 102,000 square feet, several times the current size, said the broker, Robert Knakal of Massey Knakal Realty Services.

“Land values in that part of Brooklyn have skyrocketed, and they are sitting on a tremendous” — as in, tremendously valuable — “piece of property,” Mr. Knakal said, predicting it would sell at a record price for Brooklyn. “We view it as the best development site in Downtown Brooklyn.” He has already received substantial interest, he said.

While the new building rises, Mr. Rosen plans to open a temporary beachhead and establish another Brooklyn location, possibly near the Barclays Center. (There are three other locations — in Times Square, at Grand Central Terminal and at Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut.) When Junior’s returns, it will have been refreshed, Mr. Rosen said, but all the essentials will be the same. And as he pointed out, Junior’s has already reinvented itself once, after the 1981 fire.

The menu has not changed much in years, though Mr. Markowitz said it was heavier on traditional Jewish dishes like boiled chicken with soup greens when he first started visiting in the 1960s. He and a date would have dinner — a hamburger, egg cream and maybe some cheesecake — and see a movie or a show at theaters like the Paramount, across the street from Junior’s, where Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald once performed, which is now the site of Long Island University.

With its white tablecloths and waiter service, Junior’s was not for every day. Only “very special women” got dates with Mr. Markowitz there, he said.


In the 1970s, when Ron Steinmann and Sy Diamond first began taking their lunch breaks at Junior’s and the theaters had closed down, Mr. Diamond, 55, remembered, the surrounding area as “a ghost town.” Where it was not dull, he said, it was often dodgy. (Mr. Markowitz recalled having to pass security guards before sitting down to eat during some of the borough’s most violent years.)

Lacking their own neighborhood restaurants, people from Brooklyn Heights often walked over for dinner; office workers like Mr. Steinmann and Mr. Diamond tucked into pastrami and turkey sandwiches. “It was kind of the place,” Mr. Steinmann, 66, said.

“They can’t rebuild it,” Mr. Diamond said. “It will never be the same.”

As Etta James’s “At Last” played at Junior’s on Thursday afternoon, Janet Simon and Ade Ademola debated whether to order cheesecake for dessert. They had been coming here since the 1980s, meeting for every celebration and sometimes for no better reason than to enjoy each other’s company.

“Junior’s is going to change from being an everybody-welcome kind of place to an exclusive kind of place,” Mr. Ademola said, foreseeing a price hike and an infusion of the “yuppies” who have infiltrated much of Brooklyn. But he will probably come back anyway: He has a weak spot — very weak — for Junior’s carrot cheesecake.

On Thursday, however, Mr. Ademola announced he was abstaining from dessert, to general surprise. Only later did it emerge that he had an entire Junior’s cheesecake awaiting him at home.