House of the Day: 52 South Oxford Street

Okay…so you can have a meal for $20 with the tax and tip but not in too many places these days. If you go to places that even have the slightest veneer of anything, you’ve got entrees at $15 to $25. Or, if you have a burger with a beer it’s $19.99 with the tax and tip…come on…that’s on the low side. Be real.

Where are you going to go in FG for less? Even nothing meals in other nabes in NYC end up costing $30/person. It all adds up very quickly.

With friends visiting from abroad a couple of weeks ago we had a $60 coffee break/snack at the cafe across from St. John the Divine just for a pee-pee break basically (plus the car was $15 plus tip to park for the 45 minutes or whatever it was). Then a late lunch in Chelsea by the galleries and eventually dinner…Look, it all adds up.

The minute you have a drink or a glass of wine even at a “cheap” place, fuggehdaboudit…it adds up.

Even in Middle America, meals out are not dirt cheap any longer.

E.,
The houses on either side of the HOTD are apartments. Much of S. Oxford is still apartments. Not everything has been turned into a single family home…don’t fret. Most of what happened since I’ve been in FG is that affordable apartments had their rent jacked up and the tenants were displaced for tenants who could pay the crazy-rent. Also, any place that was coop or condo got churn so if an apartment was rented out, the owner selling that apartment would ask the tenant to leave.

Then again, there were some lots that remained unbuilt and some houses that were empty for many years well into the 90’s. Either they were flipped in the 80’s too much and someone got burned or they had other issues. There are now very, very few open lots anywhere which has added living space…and yes, it’s arguable what was added benefitted many.

I have to say, on both facing sides of our block, occupancy has not changed very much at all. There was some reconfiguring (by a current owner who still lives with family and boarders in the house). And a building that was mysteriously empty, though renovated, for a decade it seemed, got tenants in the late 90’s…I think the apartments were actually sold. I can’t say that FG has been that depopulated…yes, there has been displacement, but it seems like there are a lot of people nonetheless…and a lot of the houses are still rundown inside. If they’re rentals, they are often still pretty cruddy. It’s the full renos that get all the Benjamin Moore and skim-coating!

Thank you Nokilissa,

I know how you feel. That heavily commented thread for the apartment in BH (over 100 comments, no?) became tiresome quickly. There have been some really hot topic threads at times cresting at 300 comments…maybe fewer now that the market has slowedddd dddownnnn.

At least we can see the quick change in tenor from last year when we had to read the “my kitchen’s way cooler than your’s!” features and the ensuing fights and rows in the comments! Hahahaha!

Our house in FG has some ghosts. We have neighbors who have been in their house since the early 50’s so I know of the people who used to live in the house…and then by chance, we recently came across the information about a dentist who owned the house in the late 1800’s. I can’t imagine all the pain the patients went through in that house back then. I certainly hope it is not reverberating still!!!

Anyway, we narrowed some of the period redos (house is from mid-1800’s and the dentist came later) down to the dentist wanting to update the house into a “modern” look which explains the neo-grecque woodwork added to a romantic Italianate house.

Kind of interesting…I guess…

Found an old, pale blue, elixir/medecine bottle from the 1800’s a couple weekends ago in the backyard. I don’t, for the life of me, know how it had gone unnoticed. I think it must have been slowly forced up through the soil by tree roots and finally had an edge washed clean by rain.

Yes, I really like living in Brooklyn. There you go.

And thanks to the Flea, BAM (love it or hate it) and other things, we in FG are A LOT more on the map than 10 years ago. I always laugh when the double-decker tourist bus goes driving by!

Unfortunately, there are ties with the 1800’s that are dying away. People who are older now had grandparents who were born when some of our houses were new (!)–espeically all those “newer” houses in PS from the 1870’s and 1880’s… [I wonder if by slipping that reference to PS in we’ll get a row going…ya’ think?…shhhh…]

In fact, my great-aunt who is very, very aged now, when she was little knew her great-grandmother (who hugged a doll and rocked in a chair all day long and passed away at the age of 106). This great-grandmother was born just after Napoleon’s fall! I kind of feel that being with my great-aunt is like reaching back in time…I guess it kind of is.

I get tired reading these threads with all the back-and-forth know-it-alls fighting over “historical” house prices and “the last major recession” when they were only 6 years old at that time…or whatever. It’s sometimes a little like, and as absurd as, the rather fresh-faced 28-year-old talking heads from the major financial “institutions” blabbing at a stationary camera in the AM for CNBC when they’re talking about historical trends, “back in ’82” (often before their birth but talking about it like they lived the period as an adult), or even, more horrific but catching on and making me mad: “back in 2004” I mean, come on!!! I think I even heard “back in 2006” the other day…hhh…

I guess it par for the course…as you get older it all seems so silly out there. At least I enjoy my late day reading of some of the stuff Brownstoner and Company puts up on the site.

Thank you so much 7:26. I can’t imagine the cognitive roledex of facts and stories you’re carrying around in that head of yours.

People like you give this whole site some perspective. The lust for class warfare and the sniping and interest in the ups and downs of real estate is certainly entertaining and interesting, but it is a love of homes and neighborhoods and neighbors and their stories that breathes life into it every so often. you just did.

And I learned something too.

Someone above made a comment that SROs in FG went from being SROs to being millionaires’ homes in one leap.

Now…houses that were SROs *were* bought up in the past and changed around pretty easily …at one time…but because of the wave of conversions and tenants being booted out, the City brought in the SRO “moratorium” which is the legacy we are living with.

Because of the process, these buildings are not converted overnight into millionaires’ townhouses. Many SROs have gone through long periods with various permutations…(right on South Oxford in a very nice house down the block from the said-façaded HOTD the SOR tenant lived for years basically IN the couples home who took over everything around the tenant’s small apartment.

SROs often did not have any cooking in the rooms, just a bedroom with a shared bathroom on the floor or the next floor up or down. I had a musician friend who lived in a Manhattan SRO for years, and she had a hotplate, etc. I think there was some sort of reg that allowed people to have these even though they heightened the risk of fire.

Back in the day when you could manage to eat “decent” lunches and dinners at lunch counters and diners, a time way before going out for a just-okay, rather blah meal would be $30-50/person like it now is, many respectable working people lived in SROs, rooming houses, were lodgers. They didn’t expect, couldn’t afford, or need, to have individual refrigerators/iceboxes or cooking facilities. Food delivery was quite different 70 to 50 years ago in NYC.

These days, in relation to income left over after paying for housing, and many other things NYC residents now spend on that they did not spend on through the mid-20th Century, “grabbing a bite” for someone who was a boarder or in an SRO in, say, 1948 was relatively less of that persons disposable income compared with working people today. I believe that historically, food costs were more of a households expenses but still, eating out was just part of the daily grind.

Plus, so many men living on their own, they were not expected to cook for themselves so either had board were they lodged or ate out.

So back to the story of this house:

Used to be that FG had a LOT of boarders/lodgers in the days the Navy Yards served as shipyards. By the 1940’s and 1950’s the “SRO” was brought in and townhouse owners were obliged to run sprinkler systems up the staircases. (and yes…not a few of the buildings became flog houses…)

Because of the requirement to install sprinklers, many houses got their first (often only) plans ever filed with the City. Plumbers filed their work leaving us with something to look at when we go downtown and “pull the plans”. 3-family-and-up houses required sprinklers as well but I believe this code came in later. Someone reading this can probably inform us.

If houses remained one- or two-family, they didn’t necessarily ever have drawings filed. Sometimes houses went beyond the legal 2-family limit but sailed under the radar and the house didn’t get a sprinkler system either (much like the non-documented “basement” conversions in Astoria which turn 2-family houses into 3-families which usually don’t get any sprinklers installed.)

I personally really dislike sprinkler systems in townhouses. They really depress me. You have an expensively done-up owner duplex, sometimes triplex, and ugly pipes down the staircases and in the hallways.

So, normally, this house should go for noticeably less than the market for a 5-story S. Oxford house. If there are tenants in the house right now… Going through the legal process and paying off tenants and former tenants is just the cost of doing business and would have to be factored into the purchase costs. And, of course, this house is now stunner from the curb. What with the ugly façades on either side…it’s kind of too bad.

It is depressing what happened to this whole string of townhouses on S. Oxford. They got SOOOO uglified with the brick-facing. Really depressing. One is owned by a lady (Ms. I.). It had a fire 30 years ago and she has had (or had and finished with) a long battle with the insurance company. She lets it sit there empty and derelict. I take it the insurance will never come through. Miss I. actually owns other properties and is apparently VERY well-set…but she is famous for collecting cans from the recycling bins…and people put them out in separate bags on their railings for her. Little do they know… She tells everyone it is her Atlantic City money. And I believe it really is! FG still has its charm. I love it!

I keep hoping some starry-eyed someone will buy one or more of these brick-faced South Oxford houses and have the façade(s) put back right. With windows reconfigured back, new “brownstoning”, a cornice and possible a stoop and iron work, what would a full restoration cost?