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April 27, 2007

May 6: A Busy Day for House Tours!

clintonhillhousetour55.jpg
Sunday, May 6 is a big day in Brooklyn house tours. This year, the double bill includes the Clinton Hill House Tour as well as the Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill House Tour.

The 2007 House Tour, organized by the Society for Clinton Hill, will include 12 private homes, apartments, and private spaces in several public institutions. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the tour and will be celebrated by the inclusion of a couple of gems that have not been open to the public in 20 years like the Charles Pratt mansion at 232 Clinton Avenue and the George Dupont Pratt mansion at 245 Clinton; in addition, non-students will get a rare chance to see the Tiffany skylights and wonderful marble detailing in the Pratt Library. The self-guided tour kicks off at St. Luke’s Church at 259 Washington Avenue and runs from noon until 5 p.m. Tickets are available in advance at the Pillow Café (505 Myrtle), Outpost Café (1014 Fulton), Sister’s Hardware (902 Fulton), Tillie’s Coffee Bar (248 DeKalb), Yu Interiors (15 Greene) or online through the Society's web site. These nice folks, above, will also be manning their table at the greenmarket tomorrow as well. As a bonus, we will be hosting an off-site event with a more alcoholic than architectural bent at which to unwind post-tour. Stay tuned next week for details.

The PTA from Public School 29 is organizing the Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill tour for the first time this year. The tour starts at the Greek Revival John Rankin house (now the Guido Funeral Home) and includes seven other brownstones, including one that was recently renovated in a very modern style by the architect owner. The tour goes from 1 to 4. For more info or to volunteer, please contact ps29tour AT gmail DOT com.
The 2007 House Tour [Society for Clinton Hill]




Posted by Brownstoner at 12:01 PM | Comments (15)
Categories: Architecture, Clinton Hill

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how much $$ to go

Posted by: Anonymous at April 27, 2007 12:17 PM

The info, for ALL the house tours, is here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/26/garden/26WEBtour.html

Posted by: Bob Marvin at April 27, 2007 12:25 PM

Guido funeral home is very cool, it's where Joey Gallo's funeral was...I wonder if the architect mentioned is Mark Dixon. He lives in Cobble Hill. He has been doing a rennovation for about a year. He excavated his back yard to put in a "water feature" and turned the basements of three adjacent houses into "water features" of their own every time it rains. He completely changed the drainage patterns of his back yard, and damaged the foundation of at least one adjacent house. Swell guy. His wife writes about real estate for New York Magazine.

Posted by: anon at April 27, 2007 12:38 PM

Does anyone know about the actual houses to be featured on Clinton Hill tour? Unfortunately it wasn't so great a few years ago and I've heard they haven't gotten a whole lot of private houses on the tour, which is what most folks want to see.

Posted by: anonymous at April 27, 2007 1:01 PM

Also, are we gonna have to wear those damned blue booties?

Posted by: bob999 at April 27, 2007 1:36 PM

Here's the info. Tix are 20 bucks in advance. Sounds like it's worth 20 bucks to me. As long as I don't have to wear those damned blue booties.

CLINTON HILL, BROOKLYN, MAY 6 Visitors to this onetime Gold Coast section of Brooklyn will see Italianate brownstones and the occasional Beaux-Arts apartment building alongside neo-Georgian, Queen Anne, Romanesque and Greek Revival houses. Ten houses, some with gardens, are on this tour from noon to 5 p.m. They include a freestanding house built shortly after the Civil War with a mansard roof, columned porch and original wood moldings in the dining room and parlor; and the 1874 Charles Pratt mansion, an Italianate/neo-Greco villa that is now part of St. Joseph’s College, which has black walnut floors and 14-karat gold leaf molding bordering the ceiling in the former dining room.

The tour will include two properties of Pratt University: the 1896 library, which has Tiffany windows, a marble staircase, mosaic tile and a former children’s entrance with an English Romanesque porch copied from Canterbury Cathedral; and Higgins Hall, a space combined from two buildings in 1996 by the architect Stephen Holl and Rogers Marvel Architects. Tickets, $25, at St. Luke’s Church, 259 Washington Avenue (DeKalb Avenue). Advance tickets, $20, and information: (718) 857-4667 and at societyforclintonhill.org.

Posted by: bob999 at April 27, 2007 1:38 PM

The last CH tour I went to, I think in 1999, sucked. No old Pratt mansions (which I've yet to set foot in), just artists' lofts in back of the Broken Angel that Corcoran was trying to sell.

Too bad I have plans for Sunday. :(

Posted by: supergirl at April 27, 2007 2:52 PM

I enjoy the Brownstone Brooklyn house tours and wish that I had the time to attend them all. I will usually purchase a ticket for most of them and as a Ditmas Park resident I always go on the Victorian Flatbush tour. All of the tours raise money for various neighborhood improvement projects and its a great way to meet neighbors, get decorating ideas, meet propective buyers/sellers and to see how your home sizes up to others in your neighborhood. I am going to put this one on my calendar this year.

Posted by: Anonymous at April 28, 2007 1:00 PM

Wouldn't you want people to use booties if your floors were just finished and still almost wet? 1500 pairs of feet could make an awful lot of smudges!

Posted by: anon at April 29, 2007 10:07 PM

I've lived in the area a long time and have never gotten in the Tiffany designed library or any of the mansions except Carolyn Ladd Pratt. Pratt was such a patron of architecture, the arts, education, etc. I really want to see what the homes his family lived in look like. I mean he was really instrumental in the development of this incredible community. Why wouldn't we want to see those homes? For sure they didn't hire any schlub architects like a lot of the ones working today...they hired the best! Let's see what they did!

Posted by: anon at April 29, 2007 10:11 PM

I've heard there is a house on Gates on the tour that was bought recently and was once a dump with a bunch of crack heads in it. It is now really beautiful and shows what can be done. Whatever detail there was was saved, and it was done really well. I want to see the original mansions, but I also want to see something the average person could actually afford or do. Well, I hope I can soon afford a normal house...even a fixer upper.

Posted by: anon at April 29, 2007 10:17 PM

"I've lived in the area a long time and have never gotten in the Tiffany designed library or any of the mansions except Carolyn Ladd Pratt."

If you want to see the Pratt Library, just rent 'Debbie Does Dallas' ;) they filmed part of it in the Library. As for the Ladd Pratt house, I hope it is in better shape then back in the day when I was attending Pratt and they used it as the foreign students dorm.

Posted by: Anonymous at April 30, 2007 7:01 PM

Well, I think you are showing your age. The "foreign students" haven't lived, as a group, in the Carolyn Ladd Pratt house for decades and the interior was totally restored more than a decade ago. Didn't you see it in Architectural Digest? Also, the President has a home on one full floor and that was in AD too. The place is totally gorgeous in every way.

Posted by: anon at April 30, 2007 9:06 PM

The tour sucked - they should be embarassed that they charged $20-25 a ticket! If they can't get any decent houses (not public venues) they should not bother.

Posted by: Anonymous at May 6, 2007 4:35 PM

I thought the Clinton Hill tour was fine. A great pleasure to see the Pratt mansions. The parlor floor in the bldg on Gates was most likely included as an effort to promote the east side of CH, but what's wrong with that? I loved the top floor loft of the artist who took over the old Bristol Myers bldg. Nice, too, to get into Higgins Hall and have a chance to hear about the support the Broken Angel's creator is getting from Pratt.

Posted by: Chris at May 6, 2007 6:10 PM

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