Painting an Icon (Again and Again)

Brooklyn-based artist Robert Goldstrom has painted one building, the Williamsburgh Savings Bank, 108 times and counting — in every season, weather, time of day, and from every possible angle.  Goldstrom never intended to paint one subject so obsessively, but since starting the series in 2002, he has found the 37-story Art Deco clock tower endlessly inspiring.

“As the sky and weather change, the building changes,” says Goldstrom, who lives in Clinton Hill.  “It can be warm or silvery or fogged-in, with glowing orange hands, or steam coming out the top. It can be front-lit or back-lit. Shadows pass across it.  Depending where you are standing, it can be a sliver or a massive hulk.  It has such emotional presence.”

Goldstrom (who also paints fish, people, and other Brooklyn scenes) came to Brooklyn from his native Detroit in 1979 after studying art and English at the University of Michigan.  He is represented by Brooklyn’s Underbridge Pictures and Carrie Haddad in Hudson, N.Y.

You can see a few of his ‘Bank paintings’ each weekend at the Winter Pop-Up Antiques Market in DUMBO, where his partner, David Sokosh, a restorer of antique clocks, displays them alongside his own wares.

“Brooklyn has wonderful light,” Goldstrom says. But it’s not just the quality of the light. “It’s what the light hits.”

Urgent Real Estate Questions: My Two Cents

C.W., a reader from Brooklyn, e-mailed to ask my advice on, as she put it, “what/if to buy right now.”

So here’s my advice. But please, take it with a keg of salt.  We’re dealing in opinion here, not fact.

C.W. wrote: “My fiance and I rent a pleasant 2BR in Boerum Hill for $2,500.  Our lease ends in September, and we could certainly renew.  I have a job that pays $84K, perfect credit, and $100,000 cash to put toward a home purchase.

I’m torn between wanting to buy the best apartment we can afford in Fort Greene/Boerum Hill/Park Slope/Windsor Terrace, OR a one- or two-family somewhere in upstate New York, the North Fork, or PA that I can rent out, at least for part of the year, to generate income.

Ideally, I’d like to do both, of course, but I suspect that NYC prices haven’t fallen as far as they may, whereas we might find a bargain out of the city.”

That’s the prologue.  Here are C.W.’s questions and my answers:

Houseboat on the Hudson $117,500

OK, it’s a converted houseboat — near the water, not in it.  400 square feet of cute on 1/10 of an acre in the historic Hudson River town of Athens, recently profiled in the New York Times as a second-home hot spot.  Rear sunroom and back deck face the river; there’s 1 bedroom and a tasteful, vintage-style kitchen and bath.

Two doors north of the Van Loon House, a 1724 stone Dutch Colonial. 15 minutes from the town of Hudson and its Amtrak station.

At $117,500 (just reduced from $125,000) with low taxes ($1,170/year), it’s the least expensive listing on the website of Gary DiMauro, a broker who specializes in vintage properties.  For more info: go here or call Susan Lyne, 518/929 7048.