Horror Show Friday

I can see where this one is going. Happy Friday, all!

The Sheepshead Bay house in the middle sets the fugly bar. The others can only strive to reach that high (low!). The horror, the horror.

Come to think of it, why can't they set horror movies in messterpieces like this? Since the house is usually burned down, imploded, sinks into Hell, etc, instead of sacrificing a beautiful, but troubled Queen Anne, how about one of these? I know having to spend a night in the middle house would certainly scare me to death.

Posted by: Montrose Morris at November 14, 2008 11:58 AM

Aw come on. Goodness knows I'm as serious and earnest as they come, but once in a while, frivolity needs to reign. We spend time and effort espousing our causes and positions on such heavy issues as the economy, housing, schools and politics, so trashing some truly bad architecture is harmless.

I could do without the ethnic references, but this stuff is fair game. Especially the middle one. The other two, which are the same style, are just unneccessary mediocrity, and should not be the templates for new construction in Brooklyn. Developers have to do better. If ridicule helps them along, then so be it. I don't see it as a class issue, or picking on "affordable housing". I couldn't afford one of these, myself. As countless people have pointed out, "affordable" shouldn't have to equal ugly.

Posted by: Montrose Morris at November 14, 2008 12:39 PM

Back to say, obviously the two end photos are not the same houses, one has a bay, the other pseudo Palladian windows. They still came from the same template of mediocrity.

Same entryways, though.

Posted by: Montrose Morris at November 14, 2008 12:41 PM

Benson, a great majority of these homes are built in "my" communities for my people, other people of color, and immigrants of all types. All definitely "other" for most of the Brownstoner crowd.

All the more reason for me to complain and ask for better. I don't think that we have to settle for dreck. I don't have a car usually, so I don't get around to the far reaches of BS, or Bushwick, East Flatbush, and I hardly ever go to Carnarsie, Sheepshead Bay or Bay Ridge. I know these houses have sprung up like mushrooms all over working class communities. I'm glad for the housing. We definitely need it. I've only ever been in one, and I found the ceilings too low, the rooms too small, and the finishings really cheap.

Most of these houses sell for close to $750K in some places, and for that much, I want better than no detail rooms with hollow core doors. I'd want better lighting than the four pack of dome lights with plastic "glass" covers. Maybe some new buyers, new immigrant families, etc, are happy with that, but that's not enough. Maybe that is way better than what they had in the old country, or in their previous rentals, but that doesn't make it good. I have the nerve to be pissed for them, because they are getting a bill of goods that would not be good enough for the developer if he was paying the same amount, and would not be good enough if he was putting his family or kids in the houses.

Middle income housing in the old days, I'm thinking of the 30's era, and later, row houses in Crown Heights, or Queens, or even the small houses in the North Bronx and East Flatbush, East NY, or Bay Ridge, were built better than these, and most importantly, were built so that owners had a pride of place. You could plant flowers under the window, here you have utility meters. You had a piece of lawn, here we have a parking spot. Now we stack 3 apartments in every building, but they jam them into squat rowhouses.

Your friend Polemicist's rant about density is not even really addressed here. If one is going to build apartments stacked on top of each other, why not raise the ceilings a foot, and give these houses room to breath, and not look like they came out of a compactor. If the rowhouse model is so desireable, why do so very few of these look like the rowhouses they are intermingled with? What's up with the pink and gold bricks? The fake mullions, Palladian windows, and the useless balconies?

Take a look at the development off Fulton St, near S Oxford, near Hanson Place. Those houses are successful and well kept because they are contextural, attractive, landscaped, and well designed. They used brick colored bricks, and other contextural materials. I remember when those were built. They still look good twenty years later, which I can't say for some of the Fedders in other parts of Brooklyn. These were built specifically as affordable housing, but were built with care and forethought. There are also some in Harlem which are different in style, but still look great in the context of their environment. Ditto for some on the fringes of East NY and Crown Heights. It can be done. I think potential buyers would snap these up much faster than a pink or yellow brick monstrosity.

For me, it's not a matter of going around to laugh at the locals. I think they deserve better.

Posted by: Montrose Morris at November 14, 2008 3:23 PM