Even The Slope Not Immune to Bad New-Builds

In fairness, it is between an elevated, fenced lot (behind the 9th St Y) and an ass-ugly, Soviet-bloc ugly apartment building. Really, it is more contextual than an attractive brownstone would be. It is contextually ugly.

I may be remembering wrong, but I think the lot was vacant before. I don't recall anything being torn down to put this up. (Or whatever was torn town was torn down years before, if there was a building here.)

If you ask me and nobody did, this would have been a much better place to put the kind of modernist building that always gets reamed on this site -- lots of glass and light. Anything you put on this site would stick out anyway, so why not? Would beat this faux brownstone crap.

Landmarking in this part of the Slope only extends to 8th Ave, I think -- maybe 7th.

Posted by: linusvanpelt at February 27, 2006 10:46 AM

In that case, Shahn, there would be dozens of buildings like this across Park Slope. If you look at the map, landmarking covers a relatively narrow strip of a big neighborhood. But most of fthe non-landmarked blocks are pretty well preserved. Not perfectly, but this building is far from "the norm" in Park Slope, even though, as you point out, there's nothing legally preventing many more of them from going up.

To get back to my previous post, while agree this house is ugly, I'd be curious to hear what people would have preferred to go up. I wish Bstoner had paired this with a pull-back shot that shows what the house is surrounded by. You could have done something more attractive, but it would still stick out like a sore -- or in this case not-so-sore -- thumb.

Posted by: linusvanpelt at February 27, 2006 11:35 AM

Rose,

Is it too nosy to ask what it cost to get rid of the siding? I don't have siding but ask on behalf of a friend.

Posted by: linusvanpelt at February 27, 2006 11:39 AM

I can't speak to the motives of the previous owners of anon 3:50's house, but wasn't a big motive for putting up siding that it was cheaper than regular maintenance of a facade? It costs a lot of money to keep up a house in period style, and through the '50s, 60s and 70s you had a lot of Brooklyn townhouses whose owners couldn't really afford to keep them up, even south slope frames. I'm sure being "modern" and mimicking the suburbs was a factor, but wasn't siding also advertised as being permanent and care-free?

(As a side note, this is why it always amuses me to hear people talking about how Brooklyn is getting so unnaturally expensive, as if it were the normal course of things for people of modest means to own 4- and 5-story brownstones.)

Posted by: linusvanpelt at February 27, 2006 4:24 PM

5:01 p.m.: Yes, you read me right.

4:47: I'm not aware of many cases of siding being put on brownstones, if that's even possible. As far as I know, the siding in the south slope is mainly or entirely on frame houses. I'm sure those houses could have been had cheap, but the whole point of a price plunge, such as happened during the suburban flight of the era, is that few people are buying. And clearly at the time, in general, the people staying in the frame houses of the south slope -- by choice or because they couldn't afford to leave -- were not generally people with deep pockets.

Posted by: linusvanpelt at February 27, 2006 5:43 PM

adn,

I was just asking what the real reason was people put the siding up. Someone suggested it was because the owners just liked how it looked better. Maybe they did. But I think it's reasonable to ask whether, instead, some people instead did it because it was cheaper to maintain.

I think you're reading in more rationalization than I intended. Call me crazy, but I'm not especially interested in debating the ethics of putting up aluminum siding 50 years ago, one way or another.

Posted by: linusvanpelt at February 27, 2006 11:20 PM