House of the Day: Bushwick Battered Beauty
A reader brought this crumbing Bushwick mansion to our attention yesterday and it was love at first sight. The three-family corner prop is at 747 Bushwick Avenue, the area’s “mansion row”. The ad spends a lot of time laying out the mortgage math for potential buyers which always makes us a little suspicious (“methinks thou…
A reader brought this crumbing Bushwick mansion to our attention yesterday and it was love at first sight. The three-family corner prop is at 747 Bushwick Avenue, the area’s “mansion row”. The ad spends a lot of time laying out the mortgage math for potential buyers which always makes us a little suspicious (“methinks thou doth protest too much”) but we’re in love, right, so it doesn’t matter. The two-car garage is another bonus. And if that’s not enough to convince you, the broker’s got the most rocking tie we’ve ever seen. In all seriousness, we can’t make a reasonable evaluation without knowing the environs a little better, so we’re hoping that those more knowledgeable than ourselves will drive the discussion.
Corner Historic Brick [Elliman via Craigslist] GMAP P*Shark
I can confirm the kid has style.
About the tie…If that excites you, you need to start hanging out with more creative people instead of that Wall St crowd.
Can you imagine how much this house would be worth in Tribeca? Are you kidding? What if it were on the top of the Empire State Building? How about if it floated around on the Staten Island Ferry? What if it were at home plate in Yankee Stadium? Imgagine the price then? It’s a bargain at 10 million dollars!
And as for people who don’t speak English, try these examples:
“he bought a wreck of a house that would of fallen down in a few yrs for over 1 mil”
“if bushwick resident’s remain the same the neighborhood will never reach it’s full potential”
These aren’t typos, I fear, just simple illiteracy…
I grew in Bushwick and lived there pre and post the blackout. It was like Katrina in Brooklyn. Few houses and families survived.
Thanks CHP. I’m the person who works at the non-profit Make the Road in Bushwick from the earlier thread and your comments are right on.
Electricgreek, you gotta find a little empathy in your soul! You may not see it this way, but the neighbors you dislike so much have suffered through a tremendous amount in the last 30 years. Did you know that the large housing project Hope Gardens, which goes on for BLOCKS and BLOCKS in Bushwick, was new housing constructed after the blackout? Yes, that whole area was burnt to the ground…quite astounding. And very little attention was paid to Bushwick until very recently.
Bushwick High School is finally closing–it had been one of the worst in the city–and is being replaced with small high schools. So many of your neighbors have crappy housing, failing schools, and no jobs or sweatshop jobs–their priorities and life experiences are probably not the same as yours.
The longtime residents are not bad, and the artists and gentrifiers who move in are not bad either.
They are simply different groups of people who have different interests and different tastes.
However, without any value judgement, I can say that when artists and gentrifiers move in to a neighborhood, rental and property values tend to skyrocket.
Such a prime mansion in a neighborhood where this has clearly already started happening could be a good buy and a great long-term investment. Can you even imagine how much this house would be worth on the Northside of Williamsburg? Or in SoHo or TriBeCa?
Electricgeek, anon 3:07 is correct, these issues are more complex than just black and white – you versus them. The above poster is also correct, you need to know the recent history of Bushwick in order to understand what has gone on there. The blackout of 1977 did a number on the neighborhood which is only now beginning to rise from the literal ashes.
You may also need to develop some empathy for people, some of whom are desperately poor, in situations you can’t even imagine living in. Add to that a sizable population who can’t speak a word of English, and whose employment possibilites are extremely limited, as they are for many of the rest of Bushwick’s poor. Places like Bushwick and Brownsville have not been on the city’s radar in thirty years, and frankly, it’s only the recent influx of people such as yourself and your tenants, that has improved anything much at all.
While poverty is not in itself an excuse for garbage in the streets, or trashing a building, it does rob the spirits of too many people. As someone mentioned in a recent similar thread about Bushwick, it’s hard to muster up too much care about your surroundings when you are fighting to put food in your and your children’s mouths. Add to that the soul numbing power of substandard, yet overpriced housing, absentee landlords, little or no city services and rats and roaches, and little hope for improvement – well, let’s see how civic minded most of us would be in those situations.
Of course that is a simplification, and is not the situation of everyone in Bushwick. And I am not so naive that I don’t know that as in all places – you got your creeps, predators and a@@holes. Kudos to you and your tenants for working on a new Bushwick. But please do your best to help bring as many of the good people who have been through the wars, with you as well. It’s their neighborhood too.
Speaking of Bushwick and the way it came to suffer over the last 30 years, you folks should read “Ladies and Gentleman, The Bronx is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics and the Battle for the Soul of the City” by Jonathan Mahler. It’s all about NYC in 1977 – it covers a lot of different events, personalities, etc. but does a great job describing the blackout and how the neighborhood of Bushwick suffered the most. You can really see that a number of factors contributed to the downfall of Bushwick – most notably, the city’s fiscal crisis.