CG Atrocity: There Goes the Neighborhood
Carroll Gardens better get off its ass and create some historic districts pronto. Here’s the poster child for the cause: The addition to this house at 3rd Place and Clinton Street, made all the worse by its corner location, has to be one of the greatest bastardizations of a beautiful old brownstone we’ve ever seen….
Carroll Gardens better get off its ass and create some historic districts pronto. Here’s the poster child for the cause: The addition to this house at 3rd Place and Clinton Street, made all the worse by its corner location, has to be one of the greatest bastardizations of a beautiful old brownstone we’ve ever seen. May their condos languish on the market indefinitely. Do you think it would be possible to organize a buying strike against this place? Picket the open houses? GMAP P*Shark
Here’s the rendering of the finished product:
i mean I grew up in the neighborhood, cobble hill to be precise, and played little league baseball for sacred heart / st. stephens right down the street from that corner, and I can assure you the potential for gentrified ossification is almost inevitable. The neighborhood/era I grew up in had a good bit of ethnic diversity and cultural flair, and now, thanks to early stage gentrifiers like my family, is almost as homogeneous as it’s even bluer blood uptown neighbor Brooklyn Heights. The least the new money could do is bring some stylistic variety with it, rather than just donning the musty shroud of old money and drifting into a cultural slumber like some dowdy old matron.
i love it and can’t believe how may prissy, conservative nostalgists are out there insisting that no one touch a brick on these precious brownstones. same attitudee that so badly compromised the whitney expansion. god forbid the city evolve. it’s this nimby reactionary philosophy that has made new york the architectural wasteland it is. let the damn brownstones breathe before the whole neighborhood suffocates under the weight of upper middle class wasp traditionalism.
Lots of things to respond to:
Ghidra – you’re right, it would have been better to just demolish the brownstone. But anything would be better than this.
3:05 (becuase 8:14 asked) – I’m not an architect, but I think the rules are different on a corner lot.
4:14 – that’s Hegelian, not Hagalian. And no, there is no synthesis here.
2:49 – the ShOP building is very different that this. That building juxtaposes the new and the old in materials and massing. This building swallows up the old, leaving no room for dialogue. Compare ShOP with Graves at the Whitney – like Graves, the Carroll Gardens building really has no respect for the original artifact.
Anon2 @ 2:08 – I don’t think any amount of lipstick (brownstone or otherwise) will stop this from being a pig.
who cares what you think, posters? you don’t own it. okay, obviously i do care because i’m posting, but that’s not the point. i grew up a block away from there. if 30 years ago, someone bought that house, the owners could have vinyl sided that baby and the neighbourhood would have been joyed beyond belief that it wasn’t another flop house. but fancy pants manhattan folks think it’s a quaint neighbourhood now. oh, wait, i’m a fancy pants manhattan folk now, but i think as long as it’s not blocking anyone’s light, it’s okay. and you’d rather have this on a corner then in the middle of a block, i’d think. most zoning laws allow larger buildings on corners because they are less imposing there.
oh, and historic zones suck, you end up with beacon hill boston then. viva diversity, viva property rights.
(1) I wish someone has the knowledge to response to 3:05;
(2) what is the cut-out space on the “parlor-floor” level of the addition – is that the “juliet balcony” as 10:12 dubs it? Is that a zoning loophole? Does a balcony not count towards FAR, so you have lot area left over that you can cover with the garage?
Also: can you walk from the juliet balcony to the roof of the garage and then drop into your convertible Porsche? 😉
why bother with a f***you fence when you can build a f***you extension?
Quasimodo comes to Brooklyn.
This just made me toss my cookies. The owner should be dragged out in the middle street and beaten with a cinder block. It is revolting.
I can’t believe that I waded through 70-some-odd posts before stumbling on to DN’s wise words. Why didn’t I start with the most recent post?