Historic Heights Co-op Planning Arboricide?

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All is not right at the Mansion House, the 107-unit co-op at 145 Hicks Street in Brooklyn Heights. According to a poster in the Brownstoner Forum yesterday, the co-op board has decided to chop down the old, but quite healthy, Elm tree outside its front door. The reason, The Brooklyn Paper reports today, is that the board doesn’t want to spend the $8,000 to reroute electrical pipes ensnared in the 75-foot-tall tree’s roots. (The issue has some immediacy because there’s a leak coming from a broken pipe.) That’s what, less than $80 per apartment? Come on! Speaking of the Mansion House, we dug up a neat wood engraving that comes to us from the Long Island Historical Society via Clay Lancaster’s must-read Old Brooklyn Heights. According to the book, the Mansion House was built in the 1930s on the site of a former Brooklyn Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies. Check it out on the jump.
Mansion House to Kill Tree [Forum]
A Tree Falls in Brooklyn [Brooklyn Paper]

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