House of the Day: 135 Westminster Road
After last week’s listing for a Albemarle botch-job, today’s House of the Day at 135 Westminster Road looks positively like a bargain at $1,699,000. Recently restored, the house retains is old-school gingerbready goodness. Plenty of original wood paneling, stained glass windows and light fixtures. (Check out the kitchen appliances!) What’s not to like? The first…
After last week’s listing for a Albemarle botch-job, today’s House of the Day at 135 Westminster Road looks positively like a bargain at $1,699,000. Recently restored, the house retains is old-school gingerbready goodness. Plenty of original wood paneling, stained glass windows and light fixtures. (Check out the kitchen appliances!) What’s not to like? The first showing is on Sunday but we bet this one won’t last long.
135 Westminster Road [Mary Kay Gallagher] GMAP P*Shark
11:41 –
You have an overly inflated of both Park Slope and your own vaunted place in the universe.
Residents of Victorian Flatbush are delighted to see more and more businesses opening up on Cortelyou Road. That doesn’t mean we can’t venture out of our homes to eat or shop in other neighborhoods. I guess you never dine out or purchase anyhing in Manhattan?
A lot of people are sick of Park Slope and the overwhelming sense of entitlement that people like you espouse.
I used to live in Park Slope and people like you are one of the reasons I left. It’s got none of the edge of Manhattan and all of the offensive attitude.
10:24 a.m.: I’m the poster of the “permit parking” post above. I don’t have any animosity toward the neighborhood, even if I chose to buy a house elsewhere, nor do I think the house is overpriced.
What I do have animosity toward is people who have this my-home-is-my-fortress attitude, who buy up houses in neighborhoods like this one but don’t support the local schools, don’t work to build up local institutions and clog up the streets in neighborhoods (like mine) because they want to lead a suburban life of driving elsewhere for entertainment, then returning to Fortress Victorian to park their big-ass cars in the driveway.
(As for the argument that they’re “propping up” neighborhoods like Park Slope, I’d actually be delighted if permit parking closed some of our trendy restaurants, etc. by keeping them out. We could lose half of them and still have plenty to do in PS.)
By all means buy one of these awesome houses in Victorian Flatbush if you want, but do like people have done in other neighborhoods and work to build up your own neighborhood and support your own businesses. (As it sounds like you do, 10:24, and good for you.)
Bravo, 10:47…
And I’m a Tudorphile.
OK, let me try to be objective here. I hate this style of house and decor; I wouldn’t feel comfortable living here without wearing a dirndl, or big buttons made of pink frosting. But–just like with house done to my modernist tastes which posters here often hate–that doesn’t matter. What matters is it’s a very well-done house in its own style, and it’ll be bought by someone who appreciates that style. Someone who thinks it needs $200K to be updated will just spend their money elsewhere, as I would, but there’s plenty of room in Brooklyn for all tastes.
This neighborhood may have been “working class” for many years…. But do you really think these homes were built for the working classes? That the working classes could really maintain them over the course of say, thirty years?
Yes, people with more money are buying in. Yes this means the neighborhood is becoming more eclectic. But it also means that people are resurrecting homes that not all, but many, previous owners, couldn’t really afford to maintain.
New blood, with new money, has to have a knock on effect on the local economy… More stores, with premium goods.
I think yes, we do need to find a way to keep families who have been here for many years in the community, keep services that they rely on, etc… but there’s some truth to the notion that Victorian Flatbush has come full circle: money (mostly white) took flight 30-40 years ago for the suburbs. Now money is returning, and not all of it is white this time. I know more than a handful of well-off famlies of color who have chosen to live here and have paid big money to do so.
We moved here a few years ago, and absolutely love this neighborhood. It doesn’t have the sense of money and entitlement one finds in Manhattan virtually everywhere, not a single Bugaboo stroller to be found, a very active left-wing community, and the most diversity in all of New York City. There is every single economic, ethnic, and religious group in this area, and all are represented in equal measure. This neighborhood provides the best of all the things we could imagine. Walking to amenities, great public transportation, extraordinary diversity, old trees, apartments, houses, proximity to the park and museums and botanic gardens and the beach! excellent public schools, yoga studios, karate studios, artists’ studios, a variety of restaurants. We often walk over to Flatbush Ave for Haitian food, down to Midwood for pastrami sandwiches, Cortelyou for burgers, Coney Island Ave for sports bars. We also walk or bike to Park Slope where we survive the stroller brigades in order to see doctors or go to the bookshop or the Food Coop. But next year we’ll have a huge Barnes and Nobel at Brooklyn College and a huge olympic pool at Brklyn College that the community is welcome to use! The anger above is shocking, I agree. The house is fabulously priced, given what it offers. And I’d be surprised if they hadn’t already blown insulation into the walls, making the house more green and saving significantly on fuel bills. Those of you who are so full of animosity to the neighborhood, I invite you to come to the Flatbush Frolic in September and see exactly how diverse and welcoming and active this fantastic community is! You’re probably just jealous that you don’t already live here, and lashing out. Get over yourselves and start exploring this awesome city, including Victorian Flatbush.
Please tell me what is freakish about giving a kid a pony ride on their birthday? It’s not just rich yuppies that do this. I have lived here all of my life and I love the diversity that this neighborhood now has. Yuppies included. As far as working class old school Brooklyn and keeping it that way; I remember my brother’s “old school” friends chasing Black kids down Rugby Road into the train station where the Black kids damn near had to jump in the tracks to keep from getting beat up. I remember my “working class” neighbor who would get drunk on Thursday and not sober up until Sunday night and then sit out on his porch with his fly open! I remember kdis that I grew up with smoking crack, selling crack and stealing from my house to buy crack. I welcome the rich yuppies and anybody else who chooses to live here, so speak for yourself.
This chain of posts is very odd to me. A lot of hostility brewing. It reminds me of the posts about park slope (especially the ones about houses between 5th and 6th avenue) when this site was first started. I feel like some of the above posters are people who have been priced out of the area, can’t believe they can’t afford it and are becoming bitter and lashing out. This always seems to be the reaction on the board when a neighborhood is really starting to get more expensive. Honestly, when I moved from Manhattan a few years ago and thought I was taking a big step down coming to Brooklyn, I was bitter about the prices in the changing areas of Brooklyn and shocked that I could hardly afford them. I wised up after a while and realized some people (including me now) prefer Brooklyn and what it has to offer and that I am no pioneer so if I am looking at a neighborhood, there is a good chance a lot of other people have also discovered it and prices will be driven up due to the amount of interest.
This neighborhood isn’t for everyone, but I have lived here for a couple of years now and I could not be happier with my choice. I like having both yuppies and working class people in my neighborhood. That should be the norm, as in Europe, but often isn’t in this country. I disagree with the above poster that yuppies are not welcomed. This is a very welcoming neighborhood with a true sense of community and all income classes and tastes seem to mix very well here, in my experience.
By the way – these houses have been assessed by the city at over a million for a couple of years now, so it seems a little silly to be shocked that they are selling for over a million.
The last 2 posts are beyond ridiculous. It would not “cost a bundle to make this look like something other than a funeral parlor” – it would require nothing more than a few gallons of white paint. That being said, I really hope no one buys this house with that intention. Unpainted original woodwork is a treasure. And to say that it “looks like” the electrics and plumbing haven’t been upgraded – what are you, X-Ray Vision Man, seeing through walls? As an old house owner I can tell you that it is completely possible to upgrade electrics and plumbing inside the walls while keeping period (or period-looking) fixtures intact. This kind of house is not to everyone’s taste, but to imply that it “needs” some kind of Dwell magazine upgrade is preposterous. Go buy a condo if you don’t like this style. Some of us prefer history, warmth and charm. Diverse housing stock is a good thing.