Brooklyn’s New Williamsburg Square Mall Might Be Unique in the U.S.

In the morning after Yom Kippur, curious shoppers trickled into a gleaming new shopping center abutting the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on the edge of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and Clinton Hill neighborhoods.

The Williamsburg Square Mall won’t officially open until the end of October, according to its staff, but that hasn’t stopped many neighborhood residents, members of an ultra-Orthodox, Yiddish-speaking sect of Hasidic Jews known as the Satmar, from exploring its offerings during its soft opening.

“It’s a place for the community to have a good experience,” said Yerucham Sakowitz, a manager at the mall. “Everything is very high quality. The stores are not too pricey, but they’re definitely more than H&M. You get what you pay for.” 

It also happens to be the first religious mall in New York City and perhaps the entire country.

The 53,459-square-foot, Karl Fischer-designed shopping complex on Flushing Avenue between Kent and Classon avenues with two floors of stores is entirely kosher. It closes on Jewish holidays and every Friday afternoon before reopening on Saturday evenings once Shabbos is over. (The mall extended its hours to 9:30 p.m. on a handful of nights before the recent Jewish holidays.)

Its stores are filled with brands familiar to the area’s Haredi customers. Retailers include Think Closet: Ladies and Teens, Sparkle, Frank Olive and Little Dimples. Stores sell colorful children’s clothing; accessories like head scarves, women’s hats, hosiery and closed-toe shoes; designer dresses that button up at the neck; and long skirts that cover the ankles. A second-floor salon last week advertised services such as hair straightening, anti-frizz hair treatments and payot sidecurl perms for boys, while a jewelry store a few doors down showcased Cartier watches and $2,000 earrings with a multitude of diamonds. 

While it would be difficult to use the word “boutique” to describe these stores, they’re not chains with large footprints in the secular world — although some of the businesses do have another presence in Monsey, N.Y. (also an Orthodox enclave), like the hat store Frank Olive.

The mall also includes three levels of offices above the shopping floors, a rooftop space for community events, and a therapy center and a children’s play area on the ground floor, as well as indoor parking for 328 cars. 

But its biggest attraction so far is its food court. The fast-casual food hall offers muffins, coffee, salad and sandwich bars, pizza and pasta stations, two dozen flavors of gelato, and fresh sushi made on the premises — all without any meat options. To order something, customers tap their choices into electronic airport-style kiosks and swipe their credit cards before settling into seafoam booths to scroll their phones while they await their food. The salad station has proven one of the most popular choices.

“If you want to keep the carbs down, the salads are the way to go,” Sakowitz said. “People like to be creative and put a little salmon, tuna salad or grilled tuna on top.” 

On the Sunday between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, a typically busy shopping day in South Williamsburg, the food court took 2,000 orders. But the mall was still attracting plenty of newcomers after the two high holidays. (Almost everybody there when this reporter visited was Hasidic, except for mall security and perhaps a few of the servers.)

“It’s my first time here,” one man said, while punching in an order of spicy fries on the kiosk. “I’m not that into malls.”

His wife was more generous in her assessment of the venue. “It’s very airy,” she said. “The smell is great, it’s very calm.” 

A sleek shopping hub may seem out of step in a community that criticizes conspicuous consumption and that strictly adheres to a set of Orthodox rules and customs to govern everyday life. But the Satmar community has instead done something innovative by creating a semi-private space, predominantly for Hasidic women and children, that incorporates the benefits of modern living without sacrificing the traditions they brought with them from Central Europe more than 75 years ago.

“It’s a community where tradition is very important but is also very nimble when it comes to incorporating new technologies, even if it’s rejecting certain things it’s aware of,” said Nathaniel Deutsch, professor of history at the University of California at Santa Cruz and co-author of A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg. “That’s the engine of the community — the tension between a commitment to tradition and a careful and contentious use of new technologies.”

Since the 1940s, the center of commerce in the Hasidic community has been on Lee Avenue. The strip, which runs from Division Avenue to Flushing Avenue, is teeming with kosher bakeries, haberdasheries, hardware, and Judaica stores offering religious books and prayer shawls, as well as several modest womenswear and children’s clothing shops.

Over the past few decades, the Satmar community expanded beyond its traditional boundaries of Broadway, Flushing and Kent avenues as younger families were priced out of the original settlement area into other parts of Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Clinton Hill. 

They also started getting wealthier and traveling more widely. Some Satmar invested in nearby real estate, the value of which has skyrocketed since the turn of the century, while others created new businesses in health care, hospitality, food, and online media and technology that cater to the Hasidic community.

The advent of mobile internet access and frequent travel to foreign nations also exposed younger generations of Hasidim to luxury goods from different cultures. Soon higher-end stores like Chestnut — a kosher supermarket that offered higher-
priced produce, sushi, breakfast cereals and other processed goods — opened on the edges of the neighborhood. Hasidic media started to include advertisements for luxury clothing and foods in its Yiddish-language publications in print and online.

“Historically, the community had a strong strand that was very critical toward excessive consumption and materialism. But now, for a variety of reasons, there’s been the growth of an entrepreneurial class with disposable income,” Deutsch said. “You have a much more educated consumer who knows what the non-kosher options are and what the broader marketplace is. There’s an expectation now that the quality is equivalent to what you would find in other cultures.”

Perhaps it was just a matter of time, then, for developers to determine that Hasidic shoppers could support a luxury mall. In September 2019, Joseph Brunner and Abe Mandel of Bruman Realty acquired the Flushing Avenue lot with a $52 million mortgage, according to city property records. (Bruman Realty did not respond to several calls requesting comment.)

The developers, which have built mixed-income multifamily rental properties in Astoria, Williamsburg and Downtown Brooklyn, hoped to build the eight-story mall and business center in two years and welcome stores by spring 2021, according to leasing documents. Several women’s apparel lines quickly leased out stores at $45 per square foot per year, but the pandemic delayed the mall’s timeline, and the project wrapped in 2022. Tenants started to move wares into their stores this past summer.

So far there hasn’t been a visible backlash from community leaders, which sometimes occurs when new stores open in South Williamsburg. Deutsch believes that the developers have done the proper community outreach and demographic analysis to ensure that families feel comfortable inside the mall and want to purchase what its stores are offering.

“They’re very savvy consumers,” Deutsch said. “There may be a perception from outside that they’re not paying attention to fashion and design, but that’s not the case.”

Still, it’s a peculiar time to launch a new indoor mall, mostly because few are in the pipeline nationally. So far this year, only 6.4 million square feet of shopping center space has opened after a record low of 10 million square feet came online in 2023, according to a Cushman & Wakefield third-quarter 2024 retail report.

But the Hasidic-centered mall has different goals than a shopping center designed to appeal to everyone. The neighborhood’s younger, more upwardly mobile Hasidic population wants to shop separately from other New Yorkers, and perhaps from their elders in the community, without sacrificing the quality of the goods they’re buying.

“A lot of families don’t go to regular malls or they don’t want to take their kids to regular malls because they want them to grow up and educate them a certain way,” Sakowitz, the mall manager, said. “Then you’re on your own.”