Brooklyn Inside & Out

"A downdraft stove hood behind the oven pulls air down and through a duct that goes out to the backyard" Is this correct? I ask because it looks like the stove is along the street-side wall and it seems awfully long to vent out to the back yard.

I love unique properties like this and the renovation looks quite nice. Curious to see as a rental and the before/after rents, wondering whether the increase covered the cost of the renovation. It had a lot of charm pre-reno as well from the 2018 pics.

The Hypocrisy of One Hanson Place Reaches New Heights For nearly a century, the owners of One Hanson Place (the old Williamsburg Savings Bank Tower) have wrapped themselves in the flag of “historic preservation” while blocking desperately needed housing next door. Let’s remember what they’re actually “preserving”: In 1928 the bank couldn’t get a branch license here until they promised to lend into the surrounding Black and immigrant neighborhoods.
Over the next 50 years they extracted $932 million from Brooklyn while lending only $32 million back to the community that money came from, diverting 97% ($900 million) to their wealthy white clients elsewhere. Classic redlining, plain and simple. When they tried designate the building this a landmark in the 1970s, Congressman Fred Richmond publicly protested the proposed Landmark designation NOT to make this tower “a monument to bad history.” The bank cut a deal: they’d create a $10 million community lending fund (less than 1% of what they choked and stole generational wealth from) and in exchange got the landmark designation they now weaponize. It gets worse. Having learned that rules are for little people, the bank’s successors illegally replaced 906 historic windows, radically altering the building’s appearance without Landmarks approval. They were caught, violated, and fined, then turned around and vacuumed up over $60 million in taxpayer-funded preservation grants meant for actual stewards of history. Now the same crowd is back in front of the Landmarks Commission, clutching their pearls and crying “context!” to stop a beautiful, perfectly massed residential building on the shell of church next door, the bank walls facing this church were deliberately left blank and windowless BECAUSE THE ARCHITECT ALWAYS EXPECTED A BUILDING TO RISE THERE. This isn’t preservation.
This is generational thieves who redlined Brooklyn and Fort Greene, gamed the landmark system, broke the rules they now hide behind, gorged on public money, and are still trying to control what the rest of Brooklyn can build, because God forbid anyone else gets housing. The proposed building is elegant, contextual, and exactly what that site has waited 95 years for. One Hanson Place had its chance to be a good neighbor. They chose exploitation then and they’re choosing it now. Build the damn building.

"South Midwood" next.