Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club: Kitsch as hell and knows it

Between a trendy neighbourhood and the bleakness is the Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club – an unexpected hit with the twenty- and thirty-somethings of New York, writes Holly Baxter

A bar and venue with a name surely better suited to Floridian retirement communities (Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club)

Sandwiched between upscale Park Slope and trendy Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn is a bleak-looking neighbourhood of low-rise industrial buildings called Gowanus. It’s a place that sounds like it should be idyllic, or at the very least desirable – dissected by a canal, a stone’s throw from Manhattan in one direction and Prospect Park in the other, very near the water – and yet it remains stubbornly desolate.

Even the area’s name is somewhat of a letdown: many New Yorkers will tell you it bears the name of a tribe who populated the neighbourhood before European settlers arrived, but further investigation has found that it was probably a useless exonym derived from mistranslation; it may have been named after a Native American called Gauwane, whose given name was mistaken for a tribal moniker.

New York’s strict laws about commercial versus residential buildings means that Gowanus – with its empty, unconverted warehouses humped along strangely quiet streets – hasn’t developed as much as it could have since the owners of those factories moved out. And it doesn’t help that the canal is fenced off with barbed wire in many places, the water a toxic mess of Environmental Agency violations ever since raw sewage was poured into it decades ago (that’s to say nothing of rumours that the canal also served as a notorious mafia dumping ground.)