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Despite having had a house in a landmark district for five years, the owner of 470 14th Street in Park Slope couldn’t be bothered to play by the rules when she decided to spruce up the exterior of her 1892 William Hawkins-designed townhouse earlier this year. Now, after the fact, she’s having to go back to LPC to try to get approval for the unauthorized windows and paint job. While they’re at it, they should take a look at that door. It doesn’t exactly scream “original!”
December 18, 2007 Agenda [LPC] GMAP


What's Your Take? Leave a Comment

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  1. For every person that says Landmarks should be more lenient there are two or three who say it is too lenient and is compromising our heritage.
    If you are new to this you should know that there are no thank-yous in landmarks land. Everything is fraught, everything is an issue. Nonetheless neighborhoods are clamoring to be designated so it must say something positive for the net effect of landmarking.

  2. I am still on the fence as far as landmarking is concerned. I am not in a landmarked district but most people in my neighborhood do take care to preserve the historic exteriors of their homes. We do have people on every block that insist on making their Victorian style home into a Bensonhurst mortar monstrocities complete with cement ballustrades and lions heads on end posts. There has to be a way to preserve a neighborhoods integrity without the restrictive convenants of the LPC. Perhaps it is time to make the LPC rules more lenient. This way unless someone decides to do something way out of character for their area, the average homeowner won’t be tied up in red tape to make simple changes, like a change in windows.

  3. Honestly, I think landmarks is often more than needed. The positive side of landmarks designation could be gained with a far less restrictive method in which a block is protected from major changes and any development must go through additional scrutiny, but homeowners avoid major scrutiny for renovations like the one here.

    A fedders building is a lot worse than white windows.

  4. So now I’m totally confused about Landmarks. If they issue a violation, what does that mean? Posters here make it sound like you can just ignore it, more or less. But it took 10:38 FOUR YEARS?? to clear the violation. What a nightmare. What’s the right thing to do, especially if the changes that earned the violation were done decades before you owned the place?

  5. Some in my neighborhood have started the process to begin consideration for landmarking. I know that a certain percentage of the community has to favor the designation and I don’t know yet if I am in favor or not. What if you are not in favor or landmarking? What are your options. As for those who purchased in an already landmarked area, they should just follow the rules.

  6. This topic/discussion gets to the very essence of why brownstone brooklyn is so unappealing. It’s socially engineered utopianism (for bourgeois aesthetic ideologues) at its worst. You should create a kangaroo court where the enforcement squad can prosecute these trumped up charges and the ‘guilty’ can then be banished to a life sentence in a condo in williamsburg. Stalin is dead. Long live Stalin.

  7. LPC is all bark and no bite. They can fine you as much as they want. But when was the last time someone lost their house due to landmark violations.

    Furthermore, title companies don’t even look for LPC violations, so they’re not a hindrance to securing a mortgage.

    In short, F the LPC.

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