Open Thread Wednesday

By on December 26, 2023 11:24 pm in open thread

What’s on your mind? Comment away!

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  • SBC

    Do any of our local sleuths know what’s coming to the former pet store space on Clark Street?

  • Andrew Porter

    Here (and in the 2 replies) are the gardens behind 46 Remsen Street, in the snow, on January 1st, 1887. Those gardens have been in the news, of late!
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/628689ba426ec01c3f605a9e109c7608c925bd12acb47c925f9066f0dd507620.png

  • Andrew Porter
  • Andrew Porter

    The gardens behind 46 Remsen Street, from the street next to the wall on Hicks Street:
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/05a2ef92164e8b859a6e8ec7fc8193baff4d89e60b863e7885f24941e9e4fe6e.png

  • RickP
  • Cardinal Bird

    That home in the center with the very ornate bay window that still exists has a cross atop its roof. Did it used to be a parish house?

  • Bornhere
  • Karl Junkersfeld

    Excerpt from the NYTimes:

    “Much of Brooklyn Heights, built in the 19th century, has survived into the 21st. Sometimes described as New York’s first suburb, it was also one of the first parts of the city to fossilize”

    ” For a time, nobody could be bothered to knock down the old townhouses. In the late 1950s, Truman Capote, living in a basement on Willow Street across from the old Moffat house, opened an essay about the faded neighborhood: “I live in Brooklyn. By choice.”

    “Today, however, the old houses survive because it is against the law to replace them with apartment buildings. New York has declared much of the neighborhood a historic district. Brooklyn Heights no longer sits on the outskirts of the city; it now sits pretty much in the middle. But it retains its original scale. It’s a New York version of Colonial Williamsburg, except that it sits on some of the most valuable real estate in the world.”

    Fossilize???

    “New York also needs to clear away some of the interlocked regulatory barriers that have long impeded housing construction, including a tax code that bizarrely penalizes large apartment buildings, rules that effectively give neighborhood residents the power to veto development plans and a byzantine permitting process.”

    “New York is not a great city because of its buildings. It is a great city because it provides people with the opportunity to build better lives.”

    “To preserve that, the buildings must change.”

    Unbelievable foolish article in NYTimes Sunday’s Opinion Section admonishing NYC’s Historic District Designations. .

    Unfortunately there is a paywall wall but hopefully some of you can access it:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/30/opinion/new-york-housing-costs.html

  • Nosey Neighbor

    May I ask, why did you move out of the neighborhood?

  • Karl Junkersfeld

    I can assure you it wasn’t because of lack of affection for Brooklyn Heights. My wife and I needed a building with an elevator for health reasons. We are still in the vicinity, in Downtown Brooklyn, approximately a 10 minute walk from Brooklyn’s City Hall.

  • Andrew Porter

    Weird. That’s a tiny space, unless they use basement space I don’t know about.

  • Andrew Porter

    I commented on the NYT site:

    As you can see, I live in Brooklyn Heights. In my time here, a highrise hotel, the massive block-square St. George, has been repurposed as apartments and student housing. Gas stations on Atlantic Avenue and Old Fulton Street have been replaced by buildings. A 1-story movie house, a 1-story factory, and a 1-story store have been replaced by apartment houses. A vacant lot on my street is now an apartment house. Numerous hotels in the area are now apartments—including the Miles Standish, where Matt Damon has an apartment.

    The numerous buildings owned by the Jehovah Witnesses—including their headquarters on Columbia Heights and their enormous paper storage building on Furman Street—are now housing, since the sect moved upstate.

    All this has been done without altering the basic fabric of the Brooklyn Heights Historic District, which limits the height of new buildings, and restricts the appearance of new construction.

    We like it like that. If Applebaum wants to see that building on Willow Street replaced by a high-rise, I guarantee he’ll have a real fight on his hands.

  • clarknt67

    You’ve made an excellent point that there’s plenty of underdeveloped space in Brooklyn Heights that sits empty year after year. Rescind the landmarking all you like, private investors will never, ever build anything affordable here. The only hope would be gov’t public housing, but that will never happen. They didn’t even allow affordable housing in the new library building.

  • Effective Presenter

    We had not known of a possibility for affordable housing in the new library.

  • Montague St. Resident

    Counterpoint: Brooklyn Heights is a neighborhood with a reasonable commute to a major metropolitan center. There are many, many people who wish to live in an area meeting that basic criterion. That fact is reflected in the price of housing and the level of rents in Brooklyn Heights and nearby neighborhoods, which give the lie to your comment about the small amount of densification that has taken place in the neighborhood.

    The truth is that constraining growth in a neighborhood like Brooklyn Heights executes a steep tradeoff between aesthetics and nostalgia on the one hand and affordability and exclusivity on the other. There’s a reason that the Black population in this area of Brooklyn has declined from 40 percent to 20 percent while the white population has increased from 30 percent to 50 percent over the last twenty years. It’s because nothing is allowed to be built here.

    Considerations like these leave the case for the Height’s status historic district pretty uncompelling. There’s a much stronger case for replacing it with higher-density housing.

    Imagine that world. Imagine how many more people could have a reasonable commute to Manhattan and live within walking distance of Brooklyn Bridge Park. That is the counterfactual you reject in favor of aesthetics.

    The author of the op-ed stopped short when he called Brooklyn Heights a museum. It could just as easily be called a mausoleum.

  • B.

    I stopped subscribing to The New York Times because I was tired of reading articles and opinions written by petulant, smug adolescents.

    What’s quoted here isn’t even good writing.

  • Nosey Neighbor

    So am I right in saying you were forced out of the neighborhood because of a lack of affordable and accessible housing? Such things are harder to find in landmarked districts.

    It also sounds like you benefited from the reasoning of downtown Brooklyn in 2003. Representatives from Brooklyn Heights wanted a height limit of ~300ft. Good thing they didn’t succeed. You really would’ve been out of luck if they landmarked all of it by including it in the new Skyscraper District.

    The area between Pierrepont and Orange was one of the areas to lose the most housing units in all of NYC the past 20 years and meanwhile people sitting in rent-controlled apartments (see below) are citing 4-story 6-unit condos that start at $12million as signs that BH is adding housing. The Standish was a 90-unit apartment building before it was converted into 30-condos.

    I wish you could still live in the neighborhood. My elevator building sits mostly empty during the summer and weekends because residents are at their second homes in Sag Harbor or the Berkshires. I’d rather have you as a neighbor than Matt Damon.

  • B.

    Well, just shimmy over to the north where there are many low-income buildings. Those projects on Sands Street and beyond replaced the small wood-frame walk ups that had been there for heaven knows how long, including the one in which my mother’s eldest sister was born c. 1918. One can walk to Manhattan easily across the Manhattan Bridge.

  • Nosey Neighbor

    The new housing you cite belies the byzantine fights those projects faced.

    St George took years to be converted to condos back when no one wanted to lend money to gut an entire hotel. That was over 40 years ago.

    The student housing is a leftover from when the city was closing all the welfare hotels, so an entrepreneurial slumlord realized he could lease all these decrepit hotels and not have to do much ot them to stuff students in them who had nowhere else to go. I remember Marymount students complaining they had to live in *gasp* Brooklyn!

    Brooklyn CInema: Remember how hard they fought to keep that building? Otis insisted that they keep the facade so they had to put up temporary supports to preserve it. I wonder if anyone walking by even notices. All that for five units.

    Brooklyn Eagle building was replaced by only 5 units

    The proposals for that vacant lot on Pineapple kept getting rejected by Landmarks. You’d think they would rather have a vacant lot.

    The Standish was a 90-unit apartment building after the JW moved out. My friend lived on the 6th floor. Nice views. they kicked him out. Now it’s 32 condo units. He moved to Sunset park.

    These crazy fights happen all over, not just in Brooklyn Heights. It’s no way to run a city.

    It just seems ungracious to deny people the same benefits you had. I hope you enjoy your rent-controlled apartment to the fullest. I just wish others, who aren’t the Matt Damon’s of the World, could have the same opportunity

    I’m sure that house on Hicks Street—currently owned by the former head of the IMF and former chief economist for JP Morgan—will be safe even if we aim for a net gain of housing units which is not happening in most parts of the neighborhood.

  • B.

    Evidently it was one of the early selling points (“there will be affordable housing included”), but then the affordable housing was offshored somewhere else, and who knows whether it’s been built or where.

    It was one of the things that opponents of the new library were so incensed about.

  • clarknt67

    Ultimately in the deal, they agreed to build affordable housing but in Boreum Hil. This was approved by the city counciel.

    My bigger point being again, that we can rescind landmarking all we want but they’ll just tear down historic architecture to build more empty condos for rich people. We lack the necessary compoonent to address the housing crisis: The political will to stand up to real estate interests.

  • clarknt67

    All the densest housing added to the area hasn’t been affordable by any stretch. What makes you think bulldozing a block of brownstones will be any different?

  • clarknt67

    But it isn’t the landmarking that led to Standish Hotel transisitng from rent controlled to Matt Damon’s home. The Old Brooklyn Fire Headquarters on Jay Street is affordable and landmarked.

  • Nosey Neighbor

    I never mentioned affordable housing. The Standish wasn’t rent controlled.

    I am actually against affordable housing because it distorts the market, restricts supply, and makes housing less affordable overall. We need more housing units

    I only mentioned rent control because a lot of older residents who benefitted from rent control have fought like hell to make sure no one else can live here.

  • Nosey neighbor

    Also, landmarking did help create the conditions for a 30-unit Standish

    The Fire HQ was required to be housing for people displaced by MetroTech. The city had to take it over because it was falling apart. Remember the roof was caving in well into the 2010s. Another example about how landmarking and lack of housing creates terrible incentives.

  • B.

    I should clarify: They were incensed by the bait and switch, not by the thought of affordable housing.

  • Montague St. Resident

    Because supply still has not met demand.

    NYC has underbuilt for decades. It is short hundreds of thousands of units. Until it builds what it needs, housing will remain expensive. And doing that requires unwinding all the regulatory burdens that prevent housing development. Among the most important are things like historic preservation.

    In the meantime, what little that can get built in places like Brooklyn is going to be expensive. Because that is the only thing that pencils out for the developer.

    Brooklyn Heights is some of the most valuable real estate in the world. It’s close to a major metropolitan center and a beautiful park on the East River. Those attributes make it place that many, many people want to live. And we should let them live here. That’s a more compelling cause than preserving brownstones that suit the tastes of millionaires.

  • B.

    “And we should let them live here.”

    Not everyone can live where they want. Not everyone can buy expensive clothes or cars. You can tear down all the brownstones you want and build “affordable” (subsidized?) 30-story towers in their place, and you’ll never build enough.

    The tax base in New York City resides in relatively clean, safe neighborhoods. With a lot of hard work and ambition and a little luck, it can take 2-3 generations to live where you want.

    I say let them be.

  • Andrew Porter

    So why did you not write this in the NYC comments?