Horror Show Friday
Maybe developers should be required to attend an architectural appreciation course before being allowed to file a new building application with DOB. $299000 LOVELY INEXPENSIVE CONDO Midwood Street [Craigslist] $850000 2BR.2BATH.DUPLEX Sheepshead Bay [Craigslist] $419000 NICE 3 FAMILY NEW CONSTUCTION Crown Heights [Craigslist]
Maybe developers should be required to attend an architectural appreciation course before being allowed to file a new building application with DOB.
$299000 LOVELY INEXPENSIVE CONDO Midwood Street [Craigslist]
$850000 2BR.2BATH.DUPLEX Sheepshead Bay [Craigslist]
$419000 NICE 3 FAMILY NEW CONSTUCTION Crown Heights [Craigslist]
Benson-
I hear ya too…but this site is for those with more of a traditionalist/old school taste to Architecture, and thus your opinion above will be not accepted by a majority of the people here. Im gutting a Victorian in Bay Ridge and turning it into a Spanish Colonial Revival…to most people here it will be called a McMansion and it would not be accepted.
Montrose;
Let’s start with some common ground. There is no doubt that the rowhouses built in the 20’s (not the 30’s, I would argue) are better-built and aesthetically more pleasing. Prior to my present condo, I lived in a two-family rowhouse in Gravesend, and it was a simple but graceful home.
I would ask that you recognize that these 1920 homes, as well as the Brownstones were ALL built by the private market, at a time when there was far less regulation than today. Polemecist tried to point this out recently, and for reasons I don’t understand, you went ballistic on him. The point he was trying to make, which you didn’t appreciate, is that the private market produced high-grade homes on a grand scale – something the public sector will never be able to do. If you want a return to high standards, handcuffing or cursing out the private sector is not the answer.
Why then, can’t the same thing be done today? That’s a good question that deserves debate. As you know, I’ve tried to point out some of the reasons in past posts. I know the homes of which you speak on Fulton Street, but I do not factor them in. Why? Because they were built with heavy subsidies.
May I suggest one possible other factor: there has been a general decline in some of our standards and common culture. You talk about pride of place, but I wonder if folks have much pride in general, and that cuts across all classes. A simple example: my father was a sanitation worker, yet I do remember this: whenever he went to Mass on Sunday morning, or out for dinner with my mom, he was dressed in a better manner than most CEO’s today, and he made sure that we were dressed well too. Ever see how the fans dressed for a 1920 Yankee game – do you want to compare that to today?
I also know this: running a weekly column of fedder homes so that some folks can engage in a snarkfest to demonstrate that they have superior taste to the “greedy” developers or the great unwashed who buy these homes is not helpful, nor adds any understanding to the matter.
Have a good weekend. I’m sure we’ll be debating some more.
By the way, I think I can say two more things with certainty:
-I won’t be invited to the next Brownstoner poster party!
-Brownstoner will never feature me in the QOTD. He and Lisa are thin-skinned.
Maybe it’s just me…. but do I see a little bit of Gaudi in these?
I love that cut off turret thing on the Crown Heights one!
But come one…all my wife’s Russian friends would love that Sheepshead Bay place!
I should do a re-write:
Polemicst is the other idiot.
Meeeoooow!
Every time someone uses the term “other” in a sentence, God kills a kitten.
“Snark…are you that old????”
A psychic told me that I have an old (and cantankerous) soul.
Bklnite,
Fortunately this Midwood Street dreck is not in PLG [or Crown Heights, for that matter]. Midwood St. is quite long. This gem, which is about a mile east of my house and 1/2 mile from the eastern [NY Ave.] boundary of PLG is in East Flatbush/Wingate, between Albany & Troy Avenues.
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.