A Last-Ditch Effort to Save Admiral's Row
Until the Navy Base at Wallabout Bay was closed in 1967, if you were a married officer, you got a chance to shack up in one of the ten historic row houses looking out over Flushing Avenue (drawn here as they were in 1855). When the Army Corp of Engineers took over the location, the…
Until the Navy Base at Wallabout Bay was closed in 1967, if you were a married officer, you got a chance to shack up in one of the ten historic row houses looking out over Flushing Avenue (drawn here as they were in 1855). When the Army Corp of Engineers took over the location, the houses were left to decay, though some Navy families continued to live in the houses into the 1970s. In 1996, the New York State Historic Preservation Office signed off on an agreement that gave the Army Corp the right to demolish the houses without any landmark review. The city, which took control of all of the Navy Yard except Admiral’s Row in 2001, is planning to knock the houses down to make way for a supermarket when it finally takes control. (The transfer is still hung up in bureaucratic red tape.) Despite the efforts of various preservationist groups in recent years, the Bloomberg shows no signs of budging, citing the $25 million cost of restoration as being prohibitively high. Now a group known as Brooklyn’s Other Museum of Brooklyn has made an eleventh-hour appeal to Governor Spitzer in a letter last month:
I am but one American, yet Admiral’s Row is mine and belongs to every citizen of the United States of America. Don’t allow the Mayor of the city of New York to demolish a national heritage site to satisfy a political favor. It appears you are the only person who, with a stroke of your pen, can undo this madness and insure longevity for Admiral’s Row. Please rescind the A.R.M.O.A. (Admiral’s Row Memorandum Agreement).
Does anyone know more about the “political favor”? How about a timeline for the expected demolition>
Admiral’s Row [B.O.M.B.]GMAP
Retail May Trump Admiral’s Row Preservation [Brownstoner]
City Trying to Demolish Admiral’s Row [Brownstoner]
Group Asks for a ‘Pardon’ for Admiral’s Row [Curbed]
It seems like America is just too young too fat to aprreciate it’s past. The majority only cares about thier bellies and wallets.
Let’s just hope that this thread and all other efforts to save the row are avialable for students to read in the far future.
Also all this talk about the area needing a supermarket is all Bull Shit. The projects across the street are at least 40 yrs old and now all the sudden a new fancy supermarket is needed because the area is gentrifying.
I really hope that Mr. B has some sort of coming out party so that I can meet the regular posters to this board. I want to see whether they cop their smarmy attitudes when they’re talking to others face-to-face. I seriously doubt that they do because otherwise they wouldn’t have survived into middle age.
No one is advocating bulldozing history. We simply don’t want to sacrifice the future on the altar of the past. We can’t preserve everything. At some point we have to move on.
Wow, 10:07, that added a lot to what was a substantive discussion. And was so vague as to not mean anything about anything. Amazing.
Last I heard, Arkansas was also working to preserve its past, through adaptive use and other preservation methods. You need to get on the bandwagon, bulldozing history is not the way to “a wonderful present and a brilliant future.”
Nor do you usher in the future by burying your head in the past. And no one is advocating forgetting the past. We simply advocate not living in the past at the expense of a wonderful present and a brilliant future. If you’re unhappy with the direction Brooklyn is taking, I’m sure you can find a nice place in Arkansas.
The Navy yard is owned by the City and the BNYDC, while a not-for-profit organization is hardly a charity. it is a managing agency
Granted the Navy Yard is fighting an uphill battle, but it is still an immensely historic area, and AR is a row full of historic buildings. If you think people aren’t interested in military history or wouldn’t be thrilled to do a tour of the Navy yard, then you obviously don’t know what the Intrepid is. And if you think the Intrepid doesn’t make money, you are delusional. If The BNYDC really looked into all these plans, as you claim, then the reason they could not make it work was that they were too lazy to make it work.
Yes the Navy yard is an industrial park, not a museum, but seeing as how successful it is (as asserted by the Mayor -http://www.gothamgazette.com/community/36/officialword) and is continued expansion, they cannot claim to be desperate.
Don’t know how many of you remember the old South St. Seaport, before it became a theme park. It was full of character, odd, curious, alive with history. Old seamen used to be down there- incredible living history- what an education. Today it’s the disney version, pretty, bland, and lifeless.Do your kids get educated at the food court? Or learn about whaling days in Williams-Sonoma? Not bloody likely. That’s the real shame- you are all too willing to allow the destruction of an important piece of Americana, and of Brooklyn in order to give us…shopping! Sets a great example for the future. Just great.
You don’t hold back the future by holding onto the past. You enrich it. And Ella- I’ll throw out another literary quote you’ll probably also dismiss: those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
Anyone who has rehabilitated a brownstone for their family, or has taken a chance on moving to a neighborhood that the real estate market hasn’t yet validated will understand that a feeling for preservation has little to do with an immediate bottom line concern
People react to this block deep down because in the midst of all the other lots, industrial buildings, and potholes, this block plaintively testifies to the lost potential of beauty, scale and attention to detail.
Fix these back up because no one can even think of building something like these from scratch ever again.
Fix these back up because the people in the neighborhood deserve to live across the street from these beautiful buildings. Fix the park up that they sit across the street from. Clean up and light the underside of the BQE and fix the potholes on Park Avenue. Then you create a real connection to the rest of Brooklyn. Then you don’t have to create subsidies to attract a pathmark.
One big flaw in your theory there Anon 9:45 – The Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corp is a mission based non profit corporation. They do not act because of greed, because it’s not like they make a profit. Any money they make gets put back into the facility. Just a little history lesson for y’all. When the Navy turned the yard over to the City it was in crap shape. In the 1990’s the city almost had to close down the whole yard because the place was literally falling apart. For the past 10 years or so the Navy Yard has been investing around $10 Million a year in the facility. That money has gone into replacing roads, replacing water sewer and electric infrastructure, and even into restoring some of the other historic buildings in the Yard. Even after investing all this money, there is still almost $100 million in deferred maintenance to make up. So if the Yard is trying to maximize their profits on Admirals Row it’s not because of greed, it’s to allow them to further their mission. Which by the way is to provide cheap space to over 200 companies that provide over 5,000 blue collar jobs to the working class population in NYC.
That being said the big problem with all these comments is that you assume that the Navy Yard hasn’t looked into these alternate methods you’re suggesting to save the houses. But your wrong. They’ve looked into many of these plans – including the suggestion of looking into federal grant programs that CHP suggested – and it doesn’t work.
And finally, the reason that buildings even older than AR are in good shape is because they were recognized as treasures early on and were never left to rot the way these buildings were. I think everyone would agree that if these buildings were in better shape there’s no way anyone would tear them down. This all happening because the Navy Yard believe that these buildings are beyond the point of being salvage.
Here’s the real story….Ella is wrong. The Fort Greene Association made a presentation to the local community board and advocated for this entire row to be saved, yes that is true. And so did other community activists. But the bottom line is that these community groups and activists ALWAYS said that they understood that the entire row probably couldn’t be saved in any way that was affordable to a private developer. So that left two options that they were in favor of: a developer to come in through a RFP (request for proposal) process and detail how they could save some of the row; ie: the facades of some buildings, etc. or a subsidy from some govt entity that would encourage a developer to bid (again through an RFP) to save some of these historic elements. Neither of these options was explored by our LOCAL politicians. Because they were obviously on the take from the developers and their interests. The guy who used to run the Navy Yard’s private corp. (can’t remember the guys name) is very influential with developers and developers are very influential with him. The Navy Yard isn’t run like anything but a corporation. And corporations being what they are, are hungry for more to add to their bottom line. So when the idea of that corp. getting the admiral’s row under their domain first floated of course they looked for the most money they could get and the least concerns for the surrounding communities’ needs and the historic nature of the area. They just want cash. Plain and simple. But it’s our money they are taking. The citizens. And we don’t want a box store. And it’s disgusting that they are playing it off like we do. The tenants assoc. from BOTH sets of nearby projects don’t want a box store to go in there. They want something that will attract people to the community so it will be linked in a nice way. Not a drive in, drive out kind of way. So thanks anyway you guys in suits. You sure know how to ruin a nice opportunity to make a nice area!