To walk the streets around the Brooklyn Academy of Music these days is to see a neighborhood changing before your eyes. Almost every block features some major construction project with cranes, scaffolding and new towers puncturing the skyline.  Much of this development has been fueled by the vibrancy of culture in Downtown Brooklyn, which now includes more than 60 nonprofit visual, performing and media arts organizations like the Mark Morris Dance Center, Theater for a New Audience and BRIC.  Some in the neighborhood want to be sure this cultural activity not only remains central to the area, but that it also retains the gritty, haphazard quality that has made it distinct.  So this week, local organizations are announcing a policy blueprint to try to help protect the area’s longstanding identity as the borough’s arts district, even as sleek buildings rise in it.  “We’re not just clear-cutting a neighborhood and building a monument to culture,” said Andrew Kalish, the director of cultural development for the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, a nonprofit development corporation. “We’re embracing the area’s past and enhancing it.”  The partnership — together with the Downtown Brooklyn Arts Alliance, a coalition of more than 30 arts groups — drafted “Culture Forward,” a series of 13 initiatives that includes giving artists access to affordable work spaces and housing, developing fellowships, linking areas through public art and raising money for a cultural investment fund.  “We want to maintain the authenticity and the Brooklyn edge of things,” said Karen Brooks Hopkins, the former longtime president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, who served on the board of the partnership and has become something of a self-appointed watchdog for culture in Downtown Brooklyn.  “We don’t want it to feel like Anywhere U.S.A.,” she added. “We want it to be chaotic.”  “Culture Forward” seeks to build on the area’s history as an arts hub by making it more hospitable to its creative population.  “One thing we don’t have is space for working artists,” Mr. Kalish said.  The plan, for example, calls for visual art studios that can be occupied for a minimum of six months and performing arts rehearsal spaces. It proposes converting 15,000 square feet of unused upper floors in the Brooklyn Bridge Park administrative building at 334 Furman Street and 14,000 square feet in a vacant lot at 31 Lafayette Avenue.  At the same time, the arts organizations involved want to visually connect their buildings, giving them a cohesive character. To this end, there would be a common streetscape, featuring a distinctive paving pattern and sidewalk lighting.  “How do we signal that culture lives here, when so much else is happening?” Mr. Kalish said.  An anchor of the area, the BAM Fisher, a 250-seat theater on Ashland Place, completed in 2012, will soon be joined by BAM Strong, a new arts complex with permanent exhibition space. (It will connect the BAM Harvey Theater (at 651 Fulton Street) with a vacant site (653 Fulton Street) and the ground floor of a high-rise condominium at 230 Ashland Place.  A striking new building under construction at 300 Ashland — designed by Enrique Norten and developed by Two Trees — will feature 50,000 square feet of cultural space (as well as close to 400 apartments, 20 percent of which are to be designated as affordable).  The tower is to include the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, known as MoCADA; 651 Arts; a new branch of the Brooklyn Public Library; and the BAM Karen, named after Ms. Hopkins, which will have three screens for BAM Cinemas and the academy’s archive.  The Center for Fiction’s new home, in a 10-story building at 280 Ashland developed by Jonathan Rose, will also include more studios for Mark Morris and house the first Brooklyn location for the chef Tom Colicchio’s sandwich shop chain, ’wichcraft.  The Ashland, developed by David L. Picket at 250 Ashland, will have 8,000 square feet of cultural space (as well as a food hall in its base), including rehearsal studios for Theater for a New Audience.  And the area’s public squares are to be populated by art and performances.  Ms. Hopkins has worked to get every developer represented on the boards of local cultural organizations, she said, “so the district would speak in one voice and that would be a voice of art.”  Mr. Picket, for example, is already on BAM’s board, and David Walentas of Two Trees is chairman of the board of Creative Time, which has produced major cultural projects in the borough, namely Kara Walker’s “Sugar Baby” installation at the former Domino Sugar Factory in 2014 and Duke Riley’s recent flying pigeons at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  “All of these developers have been brought into the process in a situation that is often very fraught,” Ms. Hopkins said.  Those involved in the blueprint have reason to want to safeguard the arts in Downtown Brooklyn’s future.  “It’s a way for us to be around the table and make sure that culture is not an afterthought for the development moving forward,” said Dorothy Ryan, the managing director of Theater for a New Audience, “that we are actually equal partners.  “We don’t want to make it all slick and shiny,” she added. “It’s a little different.”  Over the next two years, the population of Downtown Brooklyn is expected to rise to 30,000, compared with 5,700 before the rezoning of the area in 2003, according to the partnership. The area already has 65,000 commuting and resident college and graduate students, more than Cambridge, Mass.  One sign of downtown’s arrival was the cessation of the BAMbus in 2013, which transported audiences to and from Manhattan. Now the district will include many chic new restaurants, stores and apartments — becoming a place to live, not somewhere to just see a show and leave.  “People will be able to go to BAM and these organizations in their pajamas,” Ms. Hopkins said. “The days of the BAMbus are long gone.”
An artist-friendly blueprint called “Culture Forward” is meant to protect Downtown Brooklyn’s identity as an arts district amid sleek new towers.