Bigger But Not Better in The Slope
Looking at this kind of before-and-after is a good way to get depressed. The transformation of 561 11th Street was noticed and mused upon by the blog Save The Slope: We have no idea if the new building is great architecture or not. Personally we prefer the old building. One wonders, though, what has really…
Looking at this kind of before-and-after is a good way to get depressed. The transformation of 561 11th Street was noticed and mused upon by the blog Save The Slope:
We have no idea if the new building is great architecture or not. Personally we prefer the old building. One wonders, though, what has really been gained in this process? The new building is not dramatically larger than the old one. The old building could have been a 1- or 2-family; the new building appears to be a 3-family. Perhaps we have managed to squeeze another couple of people into Park Slope, which is great. Probably someone has made a lot of money in this transaction, or hopes to. But the one certainty is that we have lost a bit more of Park Slope’s historic fabric and unique “sense of place”.
Bummer.
11th Street: Another One Bites the Dust [Save The Slope] GMAP
well, it doesn’t look horribly super bad or way out-of-scale for the neighborhood.
For truly horrendous Hasid-erific architecture you have to go to Bed Stuy: http://deadstuy.blogspot.com/
Tybur, I will grant you that their statement smacks of hyperbole, and I wouldn’t have gone that far. I do agree with the rest of their sentiment. But that’s me. This is not an easily fixed topic or issue. But I do think it’s important enough to be out there in the public arena, and perhaps a decent compromise can be reached. I do not think one’s ability to pay for whatever they want trumps the good of the many, generally speaking.
Jailbait and Ty hit it out of the park.
I just want to add one more comment about the preservationist community. Do they have a regard for the cost of housing? They claim they are not elitists, but that rings very hollow to me.
If NY had a fully functional housing construction market, the cost of housing would naturally be higher: the logistics would just make it so. Add on top of that the constant pressure to downzone, one of the most stringent building codes in the country, wide swaths of land removed from possible development (landmarking, housing projects, rent-controlled buildings in which it is extremely difficult to evict,etc.) and you wind up with the high-cost of housing that we currently have.
Now you are proposing that we have some type of “taste commisioner”. Great!!! Just what this city needs – more regulation to drive up the cost of housing.
The preservation community should get a grip, and develop a realistic vision of its mission.
I would hardly call MM’s post “extreme.” It was nothing if not reasonable, as were pretty much everyone’s. The preservationist standpoint is from a historical perspective as well as a design perspective. Developers come in from a totally different perspective. Of course, they conflict. Would be more sensible if they could sit down and talk, not snipe.
My apologies for snark. I think it’s perfectly acceptable to pressure developers and architects to create ‘desirable’ structures when they build (btw, I think this building will probably prove to fit that requirement)… but to create this pressure through “something between landmarked and free for all” (read = government approval) would be folly.
Builders may create buildings of architectural significance today… new buildings that are recognized in the future. These should be landmarked when that recognition takes place. In the meantime, protecting non-significant buildings just to maintain some sort of false sense of continuity, purity, contextualism, etc. is ridiculous. How would the new buildings of significance take shape?
Say I buy and demolish the parking garage… what “standard” would I be required to uphold? Would my new building(s) have to look like it was built in the 1890s or does it have to have the *exact* proportions of the rest of the block? Is glass OK? What about wood?
This is what i’m talking about. You can (and should) most certainly apply soft pressure on the developers/owners/architects… but anything beyond that is protectionism for protectionism sake.
Take this building. In what way has this made Park Slope “less desirable” to live in? I’m not being snarky — I really want to know. Was that old building really that amazing that “we have lost a bit more of Park Slope’s historic fabric”?? (an absurd statment by Save Park Slope if I ever heard one)
The preservationists are really caricaturing themselves with this one — the old place was not worth preserving, the new place is not that bad, so get over it.
And the fact that there is an ugly garage next door is very relevant. If the idea is that, even though this particular home was nothing special, we should preserve it for the sake of the block, well I would say that the garage already ended that debate.
These extreme preservationists have an “idea” of what the perfectly “in character” Park Slope looks like. Unfortuntely, fundamental principles of ownership (and differing opinions as to taste) make the real world diverge from your architectural dream. Too bad.
Over the weekend we visited a friend a she had a book with aerial pictures of New York from the mid 80ies. Very interesting were some comparisons between aerial pictures from 1920 vs 1980 in the book. The current 9 PPW seemed to have replaced a lower scale, but equally nice and not really small, residential building.
Of course the difference is not that we fast forwarded 90years ahead and ending with mediocre replacements.
These old neighborhoods have always had a cachet that makes them appealing. Not only in Brooklyn, but Manhattan as well. I don’t know how to address the conflict of the rights of a homeowner versus the needs of the community – maybe that’s a problem we will never fully resolve.
But again, ‘desirable’ is a subjective term! But I do understand where you are coming from, MM.