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]
Actually ella- if anyone is pontificating, it was you. As for people disparaging the City government, (in your opinion, those who don’t know what they are talking about), in fact anyone who lives in this City and has been affected by the decision making of those ” most moral, intelligent and imaginative people” you know, I bet dollars to donuts they know a lot more than you think. They see the results- like the school bus re-routing. That was an sign of intelligent life, just not in this universe. from all of my dealings with the City on issues, the decision-makers have developed a know-it-all arrogance that they feel entitles them to make decisions based on their friends, the money they can make and the need to stay in office. I’ve seen enough of it to know first hand how they work.
So just where are those intelligent, creative moral types if the best they can come up with is to tear down an important part of American history and put up a supermarket?
too bad you don’t see the connection between what Margaret Mead said and CHP. Instead of disparaging her ideas, seems to me a creative, intelligent member of the City Government would have listened to her and tried to come with solutions that could keep everyone happy. Instead they went for the option most likely to produce an negative reaction and they knew it.
All that proves is that the person with the real brains and creativity is CHP. Sorry Ella- methinks you are mired in your muddy thinking.
Damn Typekey. That, of course, was me at 7:07.
Ella, I can pontificate with the best of them, but that doesn’t make me wrong. I also do more than read a few articles in a magazine. No, I am not a developer, Nor am I a “he”, but it is part of my business to try to find creative solutions to problems, and try to find a way to “make a way out of no way”, as my old pastor used to say. If I want to make my career and personal goals come true, and I don’t win lotto, which hasn’t worked for me yet, I need to think outside of the box and figure out which people and what organizations can help me. You don’t know if you don’t try, and if you don’t ask, you don’t get. That’s all I ask of my elected representatives and of those who work for them. I also know many city employees in many different sectors, and have never said that they are all bad, or good, or even unimaginative.
I do know, for a fact, actually, that some of these ideas would resonate with some of the organizations I suggested. Seems to me that you have just dismissed it all out of hand because the easy thing to do is just tear them down. It really doesn’t matter that there are better examples of architectural detail in other brownstones, or that there is not much left. This is still history that can be preserved. We need to have more to show our children and their children than a brass marker on the corner of a cookie cutter supermarket that says “Here stood Officer’s Row”. Why not explore the possibilities? What’s the rush?
Exactly, NeoGrec. Europe has plenty of really, really old building complexes that make this one a spring chicken in terms of age, and they have done wonderful adaptive use projects with them, especially with market type structures. It could easily be done here. Why are we as Americans always so lax in preserving our history, and compared to Europe, we have so little to preserve? Even a Fanual (sp?) Hall, or South Street Seaport kind of place would be better than the gleaming plastic of a C-Town. And we could certainly come up with something better than both of those projects.
Ella, instead of dismissing my ideas as pipedreams, you could at least say why they wouldn’t work. I have no problem with anyone proving something won’t work, but have a hard time being dismissed out of hand. Have you spoken to Columbia, or to the National Trust for Historic Preservation? I’ve been a member for years, and even the most rabid preservationist would prefer adaptive use over a hole in the ground. How do you know NeoGrec’s ideas won’t work? Has anyone drawn up plans? Has the field been opened for ideas to be proposed, or is the whole process the usual bunch of unimaginative suits who are just there to yes the major, and rubber stamp the demolition in the name of progress and some noble sounding ideal of feeding the people?
I may be sounding pissy, but it galls me no end in a city that is always touting the so-called valuable contribution of its creative sectors, never seems to try to find solutions for preserving its physical history, (or solutions for a lot of other things, while we’re at it), from that very creative sector. I don’t consider myself some kind of visionary planner, but if I can figure out four or five different ideas for alternative funding, and/or places to go for help in this project, I’m sure there are plenty of well connected creative people who could be brought on board who could think of thirty more, and have the juice to make it work. Why shouldn’t they/we be given a chance? You don’t get do-overs with history. When it’s gone, that’s it.
Nice try, but wrong. I’m not a community board member. I’ve got nothing invested in this. I just get frustrated by know it alls who think that everyone is government is either incompetent, corrupt or unimaginative. Some of the most moral, intelligent and imaginative people I know work in City governemnt (as did I earlyier in my career). It bugs me when people who don’t know what they’re talking about disparage those who do. And as for margaret mead, yes, that’s a very nice turn of phrase but it doesn’t make CHP’s proposals any more pie in the sky. If CHP tells me that he’s a developer who’s actually used those strategies in the past and managed to fund a project using those sources, I’d be less dubious. But I suspect he’s got no experience with development and he’s just pontificating about funding sources that he’s heard someone mentioned in some magazine article and has no idea how those sources would actually play out in the real world, whichas I’m sure you know Bx2Bklyn, can be swampy ground.
anon, 6:14- theres no reason at all except someone’s greed
a-non- not nearly as much as they blew trying to get the Jets stadium built.
How much money does the city spend on Public Housing every year?
Why coudln’t the shells be saved and re-used as large one family middle or low income housing? Seems like a pathmark could be built on any number of othe underutilized and similarly abandoned sites within a few blocks of there.
Perhaps some people should heed the words of Margaret Mead: “Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world – for indeed that’s all who ever have” I’m sure CHP does.
Ella- you sound like a community board member with some sort of investment (political or otherwise) in this. As you should well be aware, politics is swampy ground. Don’t bet too surely that what CHP and the rest of us want for Admiral’s Row is a pipe dream.
Nope – married.
CHP – All of your ideas are interesting, but ultimately they are all pipe dreams. Realistically speaking there’s a 1% chance of any of those ideas panning out.
ANd neo grec – in general I am not opposed to combining new construction with historic (some preservationists hate it an refer to it as facadomy or facadism) but in this case, I don’t think you’d wind up with a functional and attractive building. It’s been looked at.