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All is not lost for Pratt Row, the group of 27 landmarked houses on Willoughby Avenue between Hall and Classon. Designed by Hobart Walker in the first decade of the 20th Century, the houses have been used as faculty housing for decades. (“Note the bay windows and alternating Dutch and triangular gables,” advises the AIA Guide.) In recent years, however, their deteriorating condition has led the school to not replace departing tenants; as of this semester, just 11 are occupied. At a community meeting on Wednesday night, Pratt Institute head Thomas Schutte said that the school wants to convert the houses to student residences. It just needs two things first: (1) The approval of the faculty union and (2) $12 million. “I hope very soon we will know for sure what the use will be and have the funding in place,” said Schutte.
Photo by pups vs. robots


What's Your Take? Leave a Comment

  1. just so you know, the 1996 fire wasn’t caused by students smoking. it was the boiler. how do I know?
    i was probably the last person out of that building that summer, other than the security guard who closed the door behind me.

  2. An interesting point brought up in the Wednesday meeting was that per FD records, most of the fires at Higgins Hall over the years (and there have been quite a few, including one in September) have been caused by students smoking illegally in the building while working there around the clock without supervision. The behavior of these architecture students is just irresponsible, yet when you bring it up, Pratt’s response is usually an apologetic, “our students work so hard all night long and have to blow off steam…” But these are architecture students, and they ought to know better. The 1996 fire at Higgins Hall, which involved all three buildings in the complex, was enormous. It almost set adjacent buildings on fire, and homeowners on Clifton and Lafayette were on their rooftops with buckets and hoses at 3AM. So if Pratt plans to put student residents into the landmarked buildings on Willoughby and leave them there unsupervised, it should institute a no-smoking policy there – or we could end up with another disastrous fire that would affect not just Pratt, but the entire neighborhood.

  3. I’m sorry, 3:57, but springing a last minute request to be excused from a zoning change that was three years (THREE YEARS!) in the making with little discussion with the community groups that worked on the plan qualifies as both dishonest and a trick. Oh sure, they got MARP and the Society for Clinton Hill to rubber stamp it, but I refer you to 12:47 and 3:34 above for opinions about the validity of that.