House of the Day: 570 Bergen Street
We’re suckers for a good back story. According to a reader who heard it from a neighbor, the previous resident (it’s unclear whether he was a real tenant or a squatter) at 570 Bergen Street in Prospect Heights lived in the house for many years with a dozen or so dogs. With the house already…
We’re suckers for a good back story. According to a reader who heard it from a neighbor, the previous resident (it’s unclear whether he was a real tenant or a squatter) at 570 Bergen Street in Prospect Heights lived in the house for many years with a dozen or so dogs. With the house already in complete disrepair, the man got very sick and the dogs were abandoned in the house. Noise, more filth and even some canine cannibalism ensued until the Department of Health stepped in. Luckily, some nice details remain in the three-story house, including a marble fireplace and the old stoop hand rail. We also think the raised front terrace has a lot of charm. The price of $900,000 certainly is interesting. Can anyone give us an eyewitness account of how bad the interiors are and whether there is a lot that could be restored?
570 Bergen Street [Douglas Elliman] GMAP P*Shark
I’m just wondering that if the partition wall between the houses are also damaged by dog urine or whatever, a buyer would have to take responsibility to fix neighbors’ wall as well?
i once bought a house from the estate of 92-year-old with five cats. had to remove sections of kitchen floor linoleum to get rid of the urine smell, though it would come back anytime it was humid. finally put down new floor and figured i’d licked it forever…until plumber came to put in new stove and drilled through the floor to run the gas line.
Nothing gets the smell of animal urine/feces out of walls and floors. Except demolition. So you’d have to decide how much smell is bearable, if you wanted to save any “detail”. Or maybe you could just gut it and coat the support beams and interior of the facade in plastic, to create a “shield”. Like they’ve been doing in Williamsburg when they decide to build on a site that has toxins in the soil: just cover the ground with a plastic sheet and build luxury condos on top.
I followed the thread on the Prospect Heights discussion board and was wondering when this house would go on the market. I wonder what happened to the owner.
A broker told me that she has seen over 700 brownstones in her career and this was the worst thing she had ever seen or smelled in her life. The person living there obviously was mentally ill and ignored the leaking roof hole until it became a gaping hole and there is a huge gaping hole in the flooring which completely rotted; you can be assured that if that level of water damage existed, you need to gut the place. Not to mention that that level of animal excrement is going to overwhelm every porous surface. You can’t kill a fireplace and maybe you can save some of the staircase (railings etc) but you don’t want details. I also think that you would need to have some kind of fung shui convention over there to rid the place of the bad energy, if in fact you could. I also heard that you had to sign a release just to see the place. Eww.
Too bad they never made the movie about the ‘Flippers from Hell.’ Similar theme to that in ‘Poltergeist,’ where the developer was too cheap to move the bodies buried under the subdivision. And yes, the stench of an ‘animal house’ does require total gutting–I have it on authority of a friend in Calif. whose neighbor in a pricey cul-de-sac went nuts, kept a zillion dogs, and left the place reeking as far as Oregon. They had to tear out the (virtually new) walls and floors and ceilings down to the studs.
OK, this wins the most revolting Brooklyn property award (in the under million dollar category).
That’s awful about the ASPCA not doing anything until the neighbors called the local news. Makes the Animal Planet TV show seem a bit of a “fluff piece” doesn’t it?
Hey Brenda from Flatbush, there was a movie in development years ago at a major movie studio similar to what you proposed. A dark comedy about a bloodsucker couple who make a lot of money buying and flipping houses where murders took place. They buy the house from vulnerable, surviving family members at a lowball discount price then sell later at a big profit. Until they buy a house where the murderous ghosts are still in the house. The script never got made, but I read it back in the day.
“Does anyone know the status of the Bergen St house? Will it be sold, fixed or demolished? From the rear, one can see that several of the windows are still missing and covered with flapping plastic. The quality of life of the immediate neighbors will continue to suffer until the house is completely cleaned up. If demolition sounds radical, what I’m really referring to is retaining the facade of the house but rebuilding everything else. The neighbors used to wash their walls down with ammonia to kill the smell so it’s doubtful the basic fabric of the building could ever be properly salvaged.”
So basically it is 900k for an empty lot, and a facade that (if retained) limits what you can do.
Thanks for the correction. Whenever I’ve walked by at night, the lot looked empty, and there were always dudes hangin’ around or parked oddly in the middle of the street– thus the comment about loitering and dumping.