Locals and visitors can often be found perched on the benches that surround the water watching the vessels go by, or just feeding the ducks. Fishing boats galore dock in the bay daily and offer commercial fishing trips, as well as dinner and charter cruises. For grocery stores, there’s a large Stop & Shop supermarket in the area, as well as a few health food store options, including Forces of Nature and Omni Health.īesides more affordable living spaces and lots of places to eat, the “appealing and quiet” neighborhood, according to Keane, “offers great quality of living, with access to the waterfront and open spaces,” including Holocaust Memorial Park, at the western end of the bay, which hosts commemorative events throughout the year. Restaurants span from famous retro fast food joint Roll-N-Roaster to Randazzo’s Clam Bar, an Italian Seafood restaurant, to OPera Café & Lounge, a Turkish eatery, to Chayhana Salom, which serves authentic Uzbek food, to Yiasou Estiatorio, which specializes in Greek seafood. “The neighborhood’s shops and restaurants along Emmons Avenue and Sheepshead Bay Road are reflective of its growing diversity,” says Keane. Keane has also observed that of the couples with young children moving to Sheepshead Bay, many actually grew up in the area themselves and are coming back to “be closer to their families for support, and also so their children may experience and learn the heritage and culture of their parents.” The bus ride is a little longer. And “for those who prefer to drive, there is easy access to the Belt Parkway,” she says.

It takes about an hour to get to midtown by train. “I have also noticed that clients are moving here for a better quality of life-meaning the area is less crowded than many other similarly priced regions in NYC, and there’s a lovely waterfront space to enjoy-“even if the flipside is a longer commute.” Although lengthier, daily travel to Manhattan is still rather painless from the region, what with two subway lines (the B and Q) and an express bus (the BM3) that run into Manhattan regularly. Other recent clients of Keane who settled in Sheepshead Bay have hailed from New Jersey and upstate New York, and made the move to be closer to work, she says. “Typically, people who move to Sheepshead Bay are looking to save money… or because they can no longer afford to live where they were before,” says Keane, referring to higher-priced locales like the aforementioned Astoria and Park Slope. In fact, according to StreetEasy, the median price for a one-bedroom condo in Sheepshead Bay is $489,500, while the median price for the same in Astoria is $620,000 and in Park Slope is $699,000.

“Since have increased at a faster pace, are now venturing further south to Sheepshead Bay,” she says. According to Keane, there’s recently been an influx of new residents from Astoria, Queens, as well as other, costlier neighborhoods in Brooklyn, such as Park Slope.

The structure will definitely stand out, says Keane, since “Sheepshead Bay housing is mainly comprised of six-and seven-story apartment buildings, low-rise brick row houses, as well as large individually-owned houses.”īut the new building isn’t the only thing that’s changing in the area, which, long known for its Russian/Eastern European community, is now becoming much more diverse. The proposed 331-foot, 30-story glass-and-steel tower at 1501 Voorhies Avenue will bring 232 residential units-both rentals and condos-as well as an additional 15,000 square feet of commercial space to Sheepshead Bay, a middle-class neighborhood in southern Brooklyn whose strange name derives from the sheepshead-a fish whose face and teeth are said to look like those of a sheep, which used to be plentiful in the bay’s waters.

Opera cafe sheepshead bay