Belfast leaders get inspired in Dumbo

“It could be Main Street, and not Brooklyn, New York,” said the city’s commissioner for small business, Robert Walsh, about an attractive commercial block in Dumbo.

Indeed it could be, if you ignored both the iconic Brooklyn Bridge off to one side and the periodic roar of trains traveling on the Manhattan Bridge overhead.

Walsh was hosting, on last Thursday afternoon, a three-person delegation from Belfast, another place that has seen massive changes and which hopes for many more. The visitors were the city’s young lord mayor, Niall Ó Donnghaile of Sinn Féin, Alderman Christopher Stalford, of the Democratic Unionist Party, and John McGrillen, Belfast City Council’s director of development.

“I’ve been trying to keep these guys on the straight and narrow,” McGrillen joked about his role.

“It’s been an absolutely fascinating couple of days,” he said. “So much of it is relevant to what we’re trying to do. It gives you a real sense of what you can do in terms of creativity.”

The two elected officials, who belong to a new generation of Northern Ireland politicians, were self-confident and curious and played their ambassadorial roles with ease in the multicultural metropolis.

“The lord mayor is 26 and I’m 29,” said Stalford, who has a 1-year-old and will become a father for the second time this year. He added that he was first elected to the City Council seven years ago.

The Dumbo tour group was generally youthful, including as it did members of Walsh’s staff and an Irish documentary film crew that has been following Ó Donnghaile for months.

Everyone met on that beautiful afternoon at the Pearl Street Triangle and Manhattan Bridge Archway.

“This was once filled with clutter,” said the commissioner about the archway, which for years was used for storage by the Department of Transportation. “Now we have a remarkable and amazing space.”

Walsh’s fellow host Alexandria Sica, the executive director of Dumbo Improvement District, took up the story at the next stop: Green Desk. The visitors were particularly impressed with 155 Front St, which houses more than 700 small businesses that rent small, enclosed office spaces on a month-to-month basis. The renovated old building was operating at 90 percent capacity, Sica reported, something that was evident from a brief tour.

“It’s cool and inviting,” she said. Nobody could disagree.

The group encountered on a stairway consultant Isaac Abraham, who was delighted to meet a mayor from Ireland. He asked if anybody had heard of Yankees’ legend Yogi Berra. The player, he said, when told in the 1950s that the mayor of Dublin was Jewish, exclaimed: “Only in America!”

That was a reference to Fianna Fáil’s Robert Briscoe, whose son Ben would also become the lord mayor in the 1980s. Stalford added that one of Belfast’s first lord mayors was Jewish – Otto Jaffe (a Unionist who held the office twice, in 1899 and 1904).

Abraham said that Ó Donnghaile wasn’t the only mayor to visit the neighborhood: “We’ve had Meyer Lansky, too.” Most were too young, though, to get the reference to the famous gangster.

What is rather better documented is the origin of the neighborhood’s name. The artists who colonized the waterfront area in the late 1970s and early ‘80s searched for something that could rival SoHo (South of Houston Street) and came up with DUMBO, Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.

The next stop on the walking tour was an institution that predates all that by decades -- Gleason’s Gym – although it began in the Bronx before World War II and only moved to 177 Front St., underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, in 1984.

And then it was on to something completely different: Galapagos Art Space is a 9,000 sq. ft. cultural venue, which has a 1,600 sq. ft. lake inside.

Next up was the last official stop, Jane's Carousel, which was made by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company in 1922 and has been completely restored.

“It’s great to see all the lessons we can apply to Belfast,” Stalford said. “We appreciate the time that people have taken out of their busy schedules and are looking forward to welcoming them to Belfast.

“We found a wealth of good will and we’re keen to build on that,” he added.

The delegation, he said, stressed to those they met in Washington and New York that they would get a return on their money if they did business in the North, and that they’d find also that “Belfast is the best part of the UK to live in and work in.”

Stalford said that he and his colleague had put whatever differences they may have to one side in an effort to attract jobs.

“That’s what the people who elected the lord mayor expect him to do and that’s what the people who elected me expect me to do,” he said.

Ó Donnghaile said that attracting investment would help all of Belfast’s communities, including the most disadvantaged.

“I enjoyed it first of all,” the lord mayor said of the six-day trip. “I found it very informative in terms of best practice. It was really worthwhile. This visit to Dumbo in particular fills us with vigor.”

And after a quick visit to a chocolate store, the visitors had time for one drink before picking up their bags and heading to the airport. The lord mayor had a Guinness, while his council colleague opted for a merlot.

The Belfast men presented Walsh with a replica of the Titanic and other items as gifts of appreciation. The commissioner was delighted and said that his son is obsessed with the ill-fated ship.

“Why aren’t you bringing him to the best tourist destination in Belfast?” Ó Donnghaile said.

Stalford said that more people in China had heard of the Titanic than had heard of Ireland. “That’s the strength of the brand,” he said.

Walsh, who has roots there, extolled Belfast’s virtues to Sica, who has yet to visit Ireland. Ó Donnghaile passed on an impressive piece of good news: the 5-star Merchant Hotel has been selected as the best UK hotel.

As they were leaving the bar, Stalford said to his fellow politician: “It went well.”

“It was good,” the lord mayor nodded in agreement.