To those of us in the Brooklyn Blog Zone, we knew him as John Brownstoner or Mr. B. Last year at the Brooklyn Blog Fest he came disguised — he looked like a GRUP sort of, and he wore these big sun glasses. It was kinda funny but we all knew that he was serious about being incognito.
It was common knowlege that he had a Wall Street job and that when he quit he’d come out in the open about his identity and it’s happened.
Turns out Mr. B’s real name is Jonathan Butler and he’s a 37-year-old Upper East Side native and Princeton graduate, has been blogging about Brooklyn real estate under the moniker Brownstoner for more than two years
Well, Mr. B. has quit his mid-level job at a large Wall Street brokerage and started working full-time on the site, at brownstoner.com, from a desk in DUMBO.
Here’s an excerpt from the piece in today’s New York Sun:
"He is uncertain of the blog’s future, and of his own. The two are now inextricably linked, with an audience of thousands waiting to see what happens.
“One of the fun things about the blog, especially in the beginning, was the fact that it was a way for me to live out my discovery of the borough online and to share it with people,” Mr. Butler said. He wore a pale green scarf draped over an orange V-neck sweater as he sipped chamomile tea in a Village coffee shop last Friday.
A choppy mantle of dark blond hair swathes his slender face—he calls it his “freedom beard,” and he began growing it after his trips to Manhattan ceased as a daily proposition.
“Most people,” he said, “reacted well to that level of earnestness, where I’m saying, ‘Here’s this wonderful, amazing thing I’m discovering, and you’re kind of along for the ride.’”
The ride, as many things in New York City do, began with a home hunt.
Mr. Butler and his wife of now nearly 10 years—they met through a Columbia classmate of hers—were hunting in Brooklyn, a borough they’d moved to in late 2003, settling initially in Williamsburg with the first of their two children, now ages 2 and 4. Mr. Butler had spent his entire adult life below 23rd Street in Manhattan (except for one ill-fated year, he said, back on the Upper East Side).
A renovations—it had been an S.R.O. before they bought it—and the fireplace repairs fell beyond their budget.
His early online musings about the project planted the seeds of Brownstoner.Mr. Butler was an associate editor at Worth magazine in the mid-1990’s, writing about stocks. He’d also dabbled in real estate, working on a deal involving 125 Maiden Lane in lower Manhattan in the late 1990’s. And, while earning an M.B.A. from N.Y.U., he raised $250,000 in capital to become a partner in Totem Design in Tribeca. (It has since closed.)
As the great-grandson, grandson and son of architects, Mr. Butler found that the journalism stint didn’t quite match up with his natural entrepreneurial leanings. And as he began to dig into the renovation project between daily C-train commutes to Wall Street, he began to think.
“I realized I had all this excess knowledge and nowhere to put it,” Mr. Butler said, “and I was also anticipating a significant renovation. I was also reading a couple of blogs, one of which was Apartment Therapy and one was Curbed, both of which had started six months before or so. I thought, ‘I can do this.’ I spent a couple of hours one afternoon setting it up.”
He blogged mostly about the brownstone renovations, then embarked on forging Brownstoner’s identity as an arbiter of development and real-estate deal-making in Brooklyn. It was largely virgin territory in the housing boom’s salad days of 2004.
“I look at my role more as someone starting a conversation as opposed to handing down the word from on high,” said Mr. Butler, who starts his days on Brownstoner by 8:30 and blogs one item every half-hour each weekday until noon; thereafter, he blogs sporadically as the spirit moves him.
