House of the Day: 1290 Pacific Street
Wanna live in a house designed by the same architect that designed the Museum of Natural History (or a wing of it, anyway? This spectacular 2-family brick sits on a double-wide lot at 1290 Pacific Street and is absolutely dripping in details. (In addition to the museum, the architect JC Cady also desgined the Union…
Wanna live in a house designed by the same architect that designed the Museum of Natural History (or a wing of it, anyway? This spectacular 2-family brick sits on a double-wide lot at 1290 Pacific Street and is absolutely dripping in details. (In addition to the museum, the architect JC Cady also desgined the Union Methodist Church around the corner on Dean and New York Avenue.) In addition to almost 5,000 square feet of interior space, there’s also a long driveway that leads to the rear of the house. The major drawback of the house is that it is wedged between some larger apartment buildings and is a little too close to a rather noisy corner of Nostrand Avenue. Interestingly, this house was bought by a couple of British artists back in 2003 for $610,000. While renting part of the house out to some other artists, the owners renovated the house and did a lot of work on the front garden area as well. It’s tough to know what to make of the asking price of $1,450,000. On the one hand, its a one-of-a-kind house with an impeccable architectural pedigree; on the other, unfortunately many of the people who have that kind of dough to spend aren’t ready to rock Crown Heights yet, historic district or not. We hear that the owners briefly tried to go the FSBO route before handing off the Brooklyn Properties. This’ll be an interesting one to watch for sure.
1290 Pacific Street [Brooklyn Properties] GMAP P*Shark
FUNNY I USE TO LIVE ON THAT BLOCK RIGHT ACROSS THE STREE 1331 PACIFIC BACK IN THE 80’S I REMEMBER THERE WAS ALWAYS SOMETHING SPOOKY ABOUT THAT HOUSE. WE USE TO PLAY BASKETBALL ON THE GARRAGE FENCE ALMOST EVERY DAY. THERE WAS A STRANGE LOOKING WHITE MAN THAT USE TO BE THERE,ALWAYS WEARING DARK SHADES. YOU ALWAYS SEE HIM FROM TIME TO TIME LOOKING AFTER THE GARDEN. WHEN THE BALL WOULD SOMETIMES GO OVER THE FENCE ONE OF US WOULD CLIMB OVER TO RETRIVE IT AND HE WOULD COME RUNNING BEHIND YOU WITH A GARDEN TOOL. SEEMED LIKE HE LIVED IN THAT BIG HOUSE BY HIMSELF. U NEVER SEE ANY BODY COMING IN OR OUT OF THAT HOUSE FOR SOME REASON. EVERY BODY KNEW EACH OTHER AND THE LANDLORDS OF EVERY BLD ON THAT BLOCK BUT NOBODY KNEW WHO OWNED OR LIVED IN THAT HOUSE. KINDA SPOOKY BACK THEN.
Its people like the owner of this house, who have no commitment to the neighborhood, its history and absolutely no principles, not even an ounce of decency. He bought the house for $610 in 2003, as a one family, he put NO money in repairs or renovations, he went to ikea or walmart and bought the cheapest kitchen he could find, converted the house “legally” to two family, but actually put in three kitchens–an illegal three family conversion, then the sucker rented out each room as a single room occupancy–claiming its a share between “roommates” BULLSHIT. Now in only three years he wants more than double the amount he actually paid. HAS THE RENT doubled since he bought this house? This house is not set up where you can realistically rent out any floor as a separate apartment, unless one separates the floors, which would be a crime to close up the master staircase, or convert the original plans, which is the highlight of the house, into separate private units. No one can really rent out any part of the house because there is no separation or privacy to enter one’s own space, the rooms are even railroad style–roommates or single room occupancy, what is the difference? Its people like Mr. Lee Boroson, “a single man”, who are part of the nastiest gentrification of all, cheap conversions, cutting up spaces ghetto style, and ILLEGALLY, in a predominantly black neighborhood, and then they expect to get rewarded for their greed. The house needs a lot of work to modernize it, he has not even added one new water faucet, the bathrooms and kitchens are crap. The house is so huge, the fuel required to heat it is immense and it has absolutely no energy efficiency because he is a cheapo.
If you want to buy an SRO at the cost of a mansion, then this it!!! There is no bank that is going to approve this. And if you are buying SRO’s then you should get one at an SRO price. As soon as any appraiser comes to see this house, it will be coded as an SRO or an illegal conversion. The owner is a typical jackass that exemplifies the worse of gentrification.
Please people, stop being so goddam greedy, or atleast do it in park slope or somewhere else. There is no decency. No sense of karma. 1.3 million, is ridiculous, and he’s been offered pretty close to that amount, he is not trying to sell it because he is a typical greedy landlord. The worse kind of all–absentee–in the ghetto–with illegal conversions. Did i mention he is white? Look white people shouldn’t buy in black neighborhoods if they don’t intend on living there with love, and fixing up properties with love. and making a home a home in the hood. We love the hood. Let’s fix up the hood, but how can we with people like Mr. Lee Boroson?
Still sitting on the market, but reduced to $1.290M
Montrose Morris:
Our notes prompted me to look up the designation report for the Crown Heights historic district. The photographs make the neighborhood look as good as — in some cases better than — I remembered. But many blocks from Bedford Avenue to New York Avenue, as far as Eastern Parkway, are excluded. These have many buildings that are the equivalent of those inside the district. Is there a local movement to extend the designation? I hope so.
In many ways, Crown Heights is superior architecturally to Park Slope, where my mother was born. She recalled having as a girl to get especially dressed up to visit people in the Heights, which speaks of the relative status of the neighborhoods in the 1920’s. As the cycle of New York neighborhoods goes (rising and falling within 50-60 year periods), my guess is Crown Heights will surpass the Slope once again. (Sorry Wont UB My Nabor, but the writing’s on the wall!)
Nostalgic on Park Avenue
Hopefully ignorance and myopia will keep our little jewel of a neighborhood protected from the masses a little while longer!
Montrose Morris:
Well, you take the boy out of Brooklyn but you can’t take Brooklyn out of the boy.
Best wishes to you and the old neighborhood.
Nostalgic on Park Avenue
Nostalgic on Park Avenue, thank you so much for your recollections. I’m glad you got the name reference, too. I really love my community, and am working to make it the best it can be. I know a lot about our glorious past, but I tell people there has to be so much history in the last 50 years, and not all of it bad. A neighborhood cannot be an upper class enclave one day and then decline without a whimper. There have always been those who have endured and thrived, and I’m always finding out about the real lives of people who lived here. I’m so glad you wrote in.
Montrose Morris:
Here’s the note my brother just e-mailed me when I sent him the link to the house on Pacific Street. You might enjoy it.
“Yes, I always have a picture of that house in my mind that comes up when thinking of the old neighborhood, and memories of the aura of mystery it had. I remember the old lady at the window, but never saw anyone coming out of or going into the house. Only one time a man who was doing gardening came after a bunch of us kids with big shears ( I think he was just having some fun ) and we all scrambled back over the fence. What a beautiful place.”
Nostalgic on Park Avenue
Montrose Morris:
I like your name, i.e. that of one of Brooklyn’s greatest architects and designer of the fantastic Imperial Apartments down Pacific Street at Bedford Square. Fifty years ago the building that interests you was a very proper and middle-class apartment house with, as I recall, one unit per floor. Like the other buildings on the block, it retained a certain elegance against tides of change, which brought a lot of red-lining and racial steering to Crown Heights. (One of my strongest childhood memories is of black and white neighbors joining each other to march against the growing numbers of absentee landlords and shell companies that were taking over properties, to little avail, I’m afraid, although stretches of Dean Street and other blocks were able to stay in family hands.) Your corner at Pacific and New York Avenue was very kid-friendly. We’d ride our bicycles there away from the traffic on Nostrand Avenue and pass every day on our way to P.S. 41, a Victorian brick pile at Dean and New York. It’s a high-rise apartment house now, I believe, which is too bad, because the old building was quite wonderful, a classic little red school house where all the classroom walls would slide back to make an auditorium for assemblies. The school was a great complement to the original Children’s Museum nearby in Brower Park. This occupied two mansions from the same period. Old parlors and diningrooms with menageries of small animals. A neighborhood built for kids! The late fifties and early sixties were, of course, transformative times in Brooklyn and the city, reflective of the rest of the country. I remember watching the Birmingham demonstrations in the Art Deco apartment of a friend on Prospect Place. Her building had casement windows and curvilinear balconies, and the serenity of her home made the violence down South even more vivid. (I’m sure this building still stands!) Other friends had duplex apartments off St. Marks Avenue, or Romanesque Revival row houses, or lived in that grandaddy of them all, the Imperial. What a castle! Apartments sprawling in every direction. Fire places (although I don’t recall any lit). And broad, wooden stairs that rose from the lobbies and creeked with every step — a great fun house! The people who lived in the neighborhood back then included professionals, artists, and working people and their families. Many were progressives involved in the labor and Civil Rights movements. Looking back, they lived pretty well. One friend’s parents kept a 30-foot sailboat in Sheepshead Bay. Another had a house in the Hamptons. Again, these were black and white families who, momentarily, at least, captured the hopes and promise of the period. Dead or scattered to the winds now. But I do dream of the old neighborhood sometimes, and find myself as a boy flying over Brower Park and its trees, down the brown- and limestone blocks, and above the mansard roofs of the Imperial.
Nostalgic on Park Avenue