Even The Slope Not Immune to Bad New-Builds
Down the block from the Methodist Church is this rather unfortunate contribution to the neighborhood’s landscape at 310 8th Street. Guess this block isn’t landmarked, huh? Looks to us from the records like this was built in 1999. GMAP P*Shark
Siding certainly was a way to carefree way maintainenance, but keep in mind that Brooklyn brownstones in the 50s-60s could be had for a song, and re-doing the facade wasn’t beyond everyone’s pocketbook. The smart ones were those who snapped up b’stones when they went for $3,000 to $5,000 apiece (yes, this is very true and not an exaggeration). Also, the only people of “modest means” today who own brownstones are either the ones who were lucky enough to buy before the boom or have lived in their homes for decades. Brooklyn HAS become unnaturally expensive, and unless you’re an investment banker/lawyer or have two sizable incomes, most of these homes are now way beyond the average person’s reach.
Choose a different color for the house, paint the white railingsand window grates to black, and get a nice door…
and would look just fine. But the neighboring lots still will be dumps.
I can’t speak to the motives of the previous owners of anon 3:50’s house, but wasn’t a big motive for putting up siding that it was cheaper than regular maintenance of a facade? It costs a lot of money to keep up a house in period style, and through the ’50s, 60s and 70s you had a lot of Brooklyn townhouses whose owners couldn’t really afford to keep them up, even south slope frames. I’m sure being “modern” and mimicking the suburbs was a factor, but wasn’t siding also advertised as being permanent and care-free?
(As a side note, this is why it always amuses me to hear people talking about how Brooklyn is getting so unnaturally expensive, as if it were the normal course of things for people of modest means to own 4- and 5-story brownstones.)
This stuff DID look good to folks 50 years ago. I can’t tell you how many beautiful turn-of-the-century details were removed by the previous owners of my brownstone…in the name of 1950s modernity (I get the impression a lot of posters here weren’t even born then)…three marble mantles; walnut wainscoting in the parlor floor hallway; pier mirror in the main parlor; stained-glass insert in the main entrance interior door. Now if I could only win Mega-Millions, I would not hesitate to restore it all.
Hi Linus – It was in the neighborhood of $20K to remove the aluminum, put up new wood siding, window pediments (is that the word?), new cornice, new door, etc.
Practically my whole block is aluminum siding. It must have looked GOOD to people 50 years ago or whenever it was done. They must’ve thought the old cornices and window details looked like crap, the way we think the aluminum looks like crap now. So who knows what people will be thinking in 2056?
To Anonymous at 10:52 –
We’ve largely lost the ability to build anything of lasting quality, so the good news is that this particular bit of architecture will probably not survive one hundred years.
Rose,
Is it too nosy to ask what it cost to get rid of the siding? I don’t have siding but ask on behalf of a friend.
In that case, Shahn, there would be dozens of buildings like this across Park Slope. If you look at the map, landmarking covers a relatively narrow strip of a big neighborhood. But most of fthe non-landmarked blocks are pretty well preserved. Not perfectly, but this building is far from “the norm” in Park Slope, even though, as you point out, there’s nothing legally preventing many more of them from going up.
To get back to my previous post, while agree this house is ugly, I’d be curious to hear what people would have preferred to go up. I wish Bstoner had paired this with a pull-back shot that shows what the house is surrounded by. You could have done something more attractive, but it would still stick out like a sore — or in this case not-so-sore — thumb.
Um, Rose, aluminum siding will never be cool.