Brownstone Painted Green?
Does anyone know if brownstones in the North Slope – or elsewhere were typically painted different colors 30-40 years ago? Inside and out? Our neighbor tells us that when she bought her brownstone 30 years ago that it was painted green. Our duplex rental has very old green paint everywhere – in the basement, and…
Does anyone know if brownstones in the North Slope – or elsewhere were typically painted different colors 30-40 years ago? Inside and out? Our neighbor tells us that when she bought her brownstone 30 years ago that it was painted green. Our duplex rental has very old green paint everywhere – in the basement, and peeking through/under the white paint on all the original molding, shutters, doors. There is even old green paint on the cement below the front iron fence. It reminds me of the pale green of hospital scrubs. I am just curious if anyone knows more about the former pointed lives of brownstones or even where I might find photos of the neighborhood from 40 years ago. I’m guessing that is when it was.
Thanks
on St. Johns, we too had lots of light avocado remnants and a gold (and we’re not talking harvest gold)fireplace and mantle. We’re the fourth owners and the people we bought the house from spent years stripping. maybe we should start a facebook group for recovering green brownstone interiors….
30 years from now people will probably be saying the same thing about minimalist faucets and penny tiles.
our old house on 3rd street between 7th and 8th was painted brown inside in the 1950s… also was festooned with dead cats.
I know there was green paint too, kind of a light avocado, my dad and I scraped it off the oak paneling on the garden floor. Not sure if that was under the brown or separate color. I was about 3 when he stripped it.
jre!!!
THAT IS THE COLOR UNDERNEATH THE PAINT ALL OVER OUR PLACE!!!
Totally weird former lives of brownstones.
Thanks for all the responses, endlessly interesting to me.
By the time I moved to the Slope in 1979, there was only an occasional exterior-painted Brownstone. They stood out on every block as eyesores. Don’t know from before then, though.
http://img514.imageshack.us/img514/4963/october5200310.jpg
The interiors of my place (& I’m only the 3rd owner since it was built in the 1880s) had layers of paint & paper – red & pink in many places. My shutters were so painted up you couldn’t see there were any there & all the mantels had been painted several times – one in gold! There are photos of the exteriors from all over but they’re in black & white & you can’t tell what colors they were.
Fashions come and go. White interiors became very popular starting in the 1950s. Greens were big in the 1960s, but so were many other colors. In the 1880s and 1890s, dark woodwork and dark colored walls and wallpaper of all sorts were popular.
When we moved to Brooklyn in 1970 we rented an apartment in a white-painted brownstone on the park block of 13th Street, in the South Slope. All woodwork on the parlor floor was painted glossy brown. The owner, who had bought the house the year before, told us that the seller had painted it just before putting the house on the market “to make it look nice’. There was only one coat–I hope a subsequent owner has since stripped it. OTOH the woodwork in our ground floor apartment [which my mother affectionately called “that filthy basement slum”] had at least 1/4″ of white paint layers.
Many of the houses on that block were painted. When we moved to the next block (14th Street) a couple of years later residents pointed out a newcomer’s house, which had been painted brownstone color as an example of a meticulous renovation.