Chipping Away at P.S. 133
The dismantling of the beautiful turn-of-the-century school building at Butler Street and 4th Avenue in Park Slope is underway. The P.S. 133 building sat covered in netting for most of the summer. “They’re taking P.S. 133 demolition verrry slowly. I see it from my rooftop every day,” writes a tipster. “Seems they’re trying to salvage…
The dismantling of the beautiful turn-of-the-century school building at Butler Street and 4th Avenue in Park Slope is underway. The P.S. 133 building sat covered in netting for most of the summer. “They’re taking P.S. 133 demolition verrry slowly. I see it from my rooftop every day,” writes a tipster. “Seems they’re trying to salvage a lot of components.” Well, that’s good news at least.
PS 133: A Memo on the Demo [Brownstoner]
PS 133 Shrouded and Ready to Go [Brooklyn the Borough]
Develoment Watch: PS 133 [Brownstoner]
What’s Doing at the PS 133 Site? [Brownstoner]
SCA Marks its Turf at PS 133 Site [Brownstoner] GMAP
How many Park Slope eco-boutique tchotchkes made from recycled rubbish would it take to = the volume of landfill created by this grotesque waste?
Ah MM, Minard, bxgrl et al – it still breaks my heart to look out my door in the morning and see the school coming down – God knows we tried to save it, but as was noted, the SCA wasn’t hearing any of it (as well as lying about almost everything about their plans, such as saying they had a go ahead from SHPO, which didn’t support the teardown —though absent landmark status, SHPO did not have any legal standing.) SHPO had the same questions we all did about inflated costs for renovation and concerns about preserving some very distinguished architecture.
I wouldn’t count on any preservation of detail by the SCA – while they originally claimed they would keep one of the outside arches for a new garden entrance, and that a small part of the facade will be inside the school as “tribute to the school design”, the slowness of the take down seems more related to small demolition crews and the fact that the SCA was told by the city that they had to hand demolish the top floors of the school due to neighborhood safety reasons. There has been no sign of saving anything and they really aren’t the saving sort of guys…sigh…
Montrose, agreed!
Montrose- of course they didn’t want to. Rehabbing takes creativity and imagination plus a respect for beautiful old buildings.
Salvaging the gargoyles, etc, does make a lot of sense, but keeping them as they were, on the facade of a functioning school would have made more sense. I understand the need for a larger school with modern facilities. What I don’t understand is why they couldn’t have done that here by using this school and building an extension/annex on available land, right on site. The school building authority just dug their heels in and said “no”, without even considering alternatives. Snyder schools are some of the masterpieces of NYC school architecture, and this was one of the best. What a waste.
Oh, and the price they are paying to carefully deconstruct the building could have gone towards rehabbing it, and building the annex. It could have been done cost effectively if they wanted to. They didn’t want to.
the gargoyles and other facade decorations are beautiful on Snyder schools like this one. Salvaging them makes a lot of sense.
Sad that they’d demolish a building like that.