Bushwick Community Calls on Landmarks to Protect Cook Mansion From Demolition by Neglect

Bushwick community members and preservationists will rally outside the more than 130-year-old Romanesque Revival Lipsius-Cook Mansion on Bushwick Avenue on Wednesday, calling on the Landmarks Preservation Commission to safeguard the building from further deterioration.

The Bushwick Historic Preservation Association and Historic Districts Council have organized the rally to “light a fire” under LPC and get the agency to demand the owner of the landmarked mansion at 670 Bushwick Avenue repair the property. The community is also calling on the agency to take Bushwick’s unique history and culture into account when making designation decisions, through what they say is a more nuanced and contextual assessment criteria.

Founding member of the Bushwick organization Dina Alfano said Lipsius-Cook Mansion, landmarked in 2013, is “an incredibly important property in terms of Bushwick’s history, and there’s so precious little left”.

“It needs to be preserved, and the community is not the least bit confident that LPC is going to do everything that it possibly can to make sure that it’s protected,” she said. The mansion was designed by architect Theobald M. Engelhardt and built in 1889-90 for Catherina Lipsius and her family, the prosperous owners of the Claus Lipsius Brewing Company.

It has been owned by the LLC 670 Bushwick Ave Rental since 2015, whose managing agent is one of its longtime owners, Jean-Baptiste Bruno, according to city records. It has a number of open violations, including for cracks in the facade, lack of hot water and electricity, and Landmarks issues. A lis pendens (warning of mortgage foreclosure) was issued in 2008 and 2015. In 2020, Jean-Baptiste Bruno and longtime co-owner Rosa Bruno were involved in a lawsuit regarding a 2016 deck collapse at the property.

Alfano said the community first started raising concerns about “rapidly deteriorating conditions” at the property with LPC in 2021, and since then the mansion has suffered cracks in the facade, buckled bricks, and deteriorating details. She said she believes the owners are trying to demolish the property through neglect so they can develop the lot with a larger building. Attempts to reach the owners by phone for comment were not successful.

The LPC told the community it had attempted to contact the building’s owners, but the LLC had been dissolved, Alfano said. She added the agency said it was still trying to track down the owners. An LPC spokesperson told Brownstoner the agency “is aware of the condition of the mansion and continues to pursue enforcement actions,” including issuing a summons to the building’s owners this year.

“The fact of the matter is that, you know, in terms of landmarking, Bushwick has had a very big uphill battle with LPC. So we’re not terribly confident that LPC is going to do everything they can, in as timely a fashion as they can, to preserve that building,” Alfano said.

“That building is basically the gateway building, along with the Ulmer row houses right across the street…to what was once a very illustrious boulevard on Bushwick Avenue.”

LPC recently rejected the community’s pleas to landmark the Ulmer row houses at 683-691 Bushwick Avenue, Mayor’s Row at 945-965 Bushwick Avenue, and the mansion at 751 Bushwick Avenue. The decisions came just months after LPC designated Bushwick’s first historic district on Linden Street, something Alfano said caused a lot of excitement in the neighborhood.

Some reasons cited in the agency’s rejection letters are that there are properties similar in style to Mayor’s Row in other areas of Brooklyn, and that some details, such as cornices, are missing from some of the properties, such as the Ulmer row houses.

Alfano said those justifications completely missed the point of the agency’s new equity framework, instituted in 2021, and went against the LPC’s stated aims of diversifying landmarking. She said it was inequitable to compare Bushwick to neighborhoods like Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights, given its socioeconomic landscape and history of trauma in the 1970s.

“While we well understand the need for some consistent framework by which properties are deemed meritorious, we are troubled by and highly skeptical of LPC’s stringent assessment of which buildings ‘contribute’ to Bushwick’s streetscapes and sense of place, reflecting the agency’s repeated refusals to factor in Bushwick’s well-documented history of trauma and citywide neglect (from which it is still recovering) when assessing ‘architectural integrity,’” BHPA and HDC said in a press release about the rally.

An LPC spokesperson said the Linden Street Historic District advances the agency’s equity goals “to prioritize designations in areas that are not as well represented by designations.” As well, “The district joins 12 other designations in the neighborhood, including that of the Lipsius-Cook Mansion at 670 Bushwick Avenue,” the spokesperson said. “LPC will continue to study the neighborhood for preservation opportunities.”

BHPA was formed by those organizing to save the more than century-old Lindemann Mansion at 1001 Bushwick, which was demolished in 2020 after LPC refused to consider it.

Alfano said the group already had “exhaustive” documentation on the history of the neighborhood and what should be landmarked with the 2011 historic resource survey done in conjunction with Columbia University and the 2014 Bushwick Community Plan. This year, Bushwick was chosen by HDC as one of its Six to Celebrate.

HDC Executive Director Frampton Tolbert said LPC had recently been approaching designation with a “stringent and conservative viewpoint” and an “increasingly orthodox evaluation process,” which cuts out much of what can be preserved and landmarked in neighborhoods that have suffered major trauma and disinvestment, such as Bushwick. He said the trend was concerning citywide.

Tolbert said rather than punishing communities in historically underserved areas by not landmarking properties that do not meet LPC’s standards, the agency should help homeowners restore them in an effort to preserve neighborhood histories.

In the press release, Tolbert said: “The LPC’s strict interpretation of which buildings ‘contribute’ architecturally to Bushwick’s streetscape, and the commission’s insistence that there are other ‘better’ examples of Bushwick’s historic building stock in other neighborhoods, continues to disregard its rich, but difficult past and devalue its cultural, architectural, and historical layers.”

He added the rally is intended to draw local politicians’ attention to the community’s desire to protect and preserve its historic buildings.

The rally will take place on Wednesday, July 19, at 10 a.m. outside the Lipsius-Cook Mansion at 670 Bushwick Avenue.

The rally comes at a time when landmarked buildings throughout the city are increasingly threatened by demolition by neglect and accidents caused by adjacent development. Last year, preservationists protested the razing of landmarked or calendared properties throughout New York City — including the Jacob Dangler mansion at 441 Willoughby in Bed Stuy and literary landmark 14 Gay Street in Greenwich Village.

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