2006 will be year for Downtown Brooklyn.

Much has been said in 2005 about the resurgent midtown office market and the beginning of construction of new additions The New York Times building and the Bank of America Tower, developments that, amid the tightening vacancy, seem like they can't come online fast enough.

Meanwhile, among the myriad of office and infrastructural projects planned for downtown, many have come came closer to being realized. The Calatrava Path Station began construction, 7 World Trade center was virtually completed, and the Freedom Tower's design was revamped so that its construction can soon commence.

But while midtown and downtown, the first and second largest office markets respectively, have grabbed headlines for all of its development, Downtown Brooklyn has quietly made strides of its own that will maintain its place as the city's third largest office market over the growing Jersey City office market.

Besides the Nets Arena and surrounding mixed use developments planned for the Atlantic Yards by famed Brooklyn developer, Bruce Ratner, the Downtown Brooklyn Council, along with area development corporations and private developers, have bold plans that will see growth of Downtown Brooklyn's cultural, office, retail, hotel and residential sectors.

"Downtown Brooklyn has always been sister to Lower Manhattan," said Michael Burke, executive director of the Downtown Brooklyn Council. "Since 9/11 especially, there has been a big effort to have offices there as well, mainly it serves back-office functions. We expect that relationship to continue but also for the area to really emerge a 24/7 type of office district with great residential areas, art and cultural attractions, a hotel, restaurants and retail. These are all the things that the Jersey gold coast doesn't really have."

The Downtown Council Brooklyn helped draft a master plan for Downtown Brooklyn in cooperation with Mayor Bloomberg's office that passed the public approval process in the summer of 2004. The plan, according to Burke, has made it far easier for developers to build because it rezoned the area, allowing for commercial development, while also saving them from having to go through a lengthy public approval process, dissuading factors in the past.

Developers have responded with projects planned for what will be an expansion of Downtown Brooklyn's successful office district experiment of the 1980s, the MetroTech Center, which was developed by Bruce Ratner. Thor Equities has plans for a 1.25 million s/f mixed use building that will border the planned Willoughby Park, a 1.5 acre public space to be designed in 2006 that will sit on top of a subterranean 700 car parking garage. Also zoned to border the park are two commercial properties that can be as large as 800,000 s/ f and 600,000 s/f.

Assisting Brooklyn in its continued emergence as a haven of cultural institutions is the famed Brooklyn urban arts center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which has formed a development corporation BAM LDC to encourage cultural organizations to develop on the BAM Cultural District's North Site, a partially vacant property bounded by Fulton Street, Lafayette Avenue and Ashland and Rockwell Places.

BAM LDC has already attracted the Theater for a New Audience, whose facility was designed in part by Frank Gehry. A public library will also be built in the vicinity of BAM. "Having great cultural institutions is essential to making this the kind of neighborhood that people want to work and live in," Burke said.

As for residential development, there is room for that too in the Council's master plan for Downtown. The landmark clock tower at MetroTech is slated for a residential conversion as is 7 MetroTech, an outdated office building erected in the 1920s. Burke said that there will soon be significant ground up residential construction on three consecutive blocks of Hoyt-Schermerhorn Street, that in total will add 1000 new units of housing. Two developers will be building separately, Boymelgreen on one plot, and a joint venture between Hamlin and Time Equities will develop another.

"There are so many exciting projects going on in Brooklyn that rival in size anything that's going on in the rest of the city," Burke said. "2006 is going to be a big year when a lot of these projects will either continue or start to get off the ground."