The NY Post via sister pub Brooklyn Paper covers the hullabaloo over developer Louis Greco’s project at 27 Cranberry Street. BHB broke the news from design architect/Brooklyn Heights resident/ former BHA prexy Tom van den Bout that he planned to build with real brownstone, from recently re-opened Victorian era quarries. That and the release of models and drawings of the planned structure seems to have blunted the concerns of some Brooklyn Heights residents.
NY Post: “It’s an entirely appropriate thing if you’re building a new building in a neighborhood dominated by brownstones already,” said architectural historian Francis Morrone. “Especially in historic neighborhoods I think it’s very important.”
That said, some neighbors have been a bit touchy.
“It’s a sensitive block,” said Judy Stanton, executive director of the Brooklyn Heights Association. If neighbors are ornery, it’s probably from the weight of 140 years of history on their backs. After all, the building material is as iconic in Kings County as the Brooklyn Bridge and Marty Markowitz’s accent.
The use of brownstone as a building material was a fad in the latter half of the 19th century — one so prevalent that author Edith Wharton would later deride the era as “the brown decades,” and famously called the rock “the most hideous building stone ever quarried.”
