February’s Snowy Wallop

February in New York City packed a snowy wallop, but we hardy Big Apple types shoveled and sloshed our way through — one major snowstorm early in the month that dropped nearly two feet of the white stuff upon us, another the following week that was less big but still not small, and a few additional dustings and flurries.

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I don’t mind being under house arrest in my Brooklyn apartment, which is just as hygge as could be, filled with books yet to be read and an inexhaustible streaming supply of music and movies.

hyg·ge/ HOO-guh A quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being (regarded as a defining characteristic of Danish culture).

I managed to get out for neighborhood rambles, ever mindful of the importance of ultraviolet rays to one’s mood, not to mention a respectable step count in lieu of the gym. I met friends for hot toddies at St. Julivert in Cobble Hill and Lavender Lake, on the shores of the Gowanus Canal, below, and cheered myself up with weekly tulips.

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What’s gratifying is that it looks like many of our local restaurants, some of which have invested tens of thousands to build plywood-and-plexiglass structures where coated, hatted, scarved and masked diners huddle under heat lamps even in sub-freezing temps, are going to make it through. The city has announced that the makeshift dining cars will be allowed to stay into the foreseeable future, a distinct and dramatic change to the streetscape.

Toward the end of the month, the worst happened. A dear friend of forty years died unexpectedly, casting everything in sorrow. The world lost an extraordinary soul, loving and clever, an accomplished origami artist and baker whose creations in both areas were works of visual art. She and I were besties when our children were small, pushing strollers together through the streets of Brooklyn Heights. Our families celebrated Chanukah and Halloween together, and camped out at Hither Hills in the summer. We stayed in touch after her family moved away, spending hours on the phone back when you could only stray as far from the device as its curly cord would reach. Our conversations and correspondence were marked by our pleasure in communicating with each other, and her always witty, always honest take on things.

I dedicate this post to Ellen, who was a devoted reader of my blog. After my last post, in January, she emailed to thank me for the “beamish” (bright, cheerful, optimistic) entry, writing “Love seeing your perspective, hearing your voice  — missing both Brooklyn and you!” The feeling is forever mutual, my friend <3

Remains of the Day: Fort Greene Ramble

Getting on for 4PM yesterday, I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to get out of my apartment. The sun had been teasing in and out all day. It would suffuse the front windows of my ground-level brownstone apartment with sudden, glorious light and I would make a move toward the door. Then, just as suddenly, all would go dark and gloomy, my motivation would flag, and I’d collapse on the couch again with my phone. This cycle repeated itself about five times.

But in the last hour of daylight, I rallied. With formal exercise options limited to the occasional Zoom class and some desultory stretching, the mainstay of my regime, such as it is, is walking the streets. Fortunately, I live in Brooklyn, New York City’s most architecturally rewarding borough, so it’s never dull.

I headed out of my own neighborhood of Prospect Heights and into Fort Greene, toward the grand park designed in the 1860s by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who also envisioned Manhattan’s Central Park. Fort Greene Park, top, is a 30-acre square full of majestic old trees, surrounded by blocks of brownstones and rising to a central mound that is one of the highest points in Brooklyn. The hill is topped by a towering Doric column commemorating the 12,000 who died on a British prison ship in New York Harbor during the Revolution, itself surrounded by a fine stone plaza that makes an obvious destination.

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I walked along Cumberland Street, above, where rare wood frame houses with front porches, dating to the mid-19th century, are unusually numerous, and back along South Oxford, another street with much to admire, including the cheerful yellow buildings below.

I was glad to observe a couple of my favorite parkside bar/restaurants, Cafe Paulette and Walter’s, below, on corners right opposite the park, apparently thriving and filled with semi-outdoor diners on this relatively mild mid-winter Saturday.

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Brooklyn was in the midst of rapid transformation from low-rise to hi- when the pandemic hit. As much as I would prefer it to remain just as it looked 150 years ago, no one sought my opinion. Some construction projects seem to have stalled out; others seem to be proceeding apace.

Although still ludicrously out of scale with the surrounding four-story row houses, I find some of the new residential towers bearable — the masonry ones that recall the stocky, substantial buildings of the Art Deco era. The really tall glass towers going up along Atlantic Avenue offend me. They don’t belong here. They are ugly to my eye and likely to age poorly, but, again, I wasn’t asked.

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My final reward for rousing myself to action was a vibrant sliver of sunset as I headed back to my sofa. The late-day light glinting off the western facades of the gargantuan new buildings made me think, so be it. The world moves on.

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Back to My Roots: Cheap Old Houses

If you are an old-house aficionado, you may already know about the candy store of vintage American architecture that is CIRCA. and the constellation of old-house websites and Instagram pages that surround it, bursting with eyebrow Colonials, Victorian gingerbreads, American Foursquares, Italianate jewel boxes, historic churches and more.

These covetable buildings are all for sale. Elizabeth Finkelstein, who has a Masters from Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute in historic preservation and writes a column for Country Living magazine, along with her husband Ethan, a digital designmeister, founded the sites to share their love of old houses while indulging their obsession with searching listings far and wide. They are not real estate brokers; the user-friendly sites link to the official listings.

The Finkelsteins call their enterprise “a curated online marketplace.” From dire fixer- uppers for $1,000 to properties with National Historic Landmark status, from humble one-room cabins to a San Francisco Beaux Arts masterpiece for $10 million, it’s a rabbit hole you’ll enjoy falling into.

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What intrigues me most, bottom feeder that I am, is the sister site Cheap Old Houses, which focuses on listings under $100,000. The catch? Maybe that they’re mostly in far-off (from NYC, at any rate) and possibly far-right places like Ames, Iowa, and Vicksburg, Mississippi. There are intrepid folks, documented in a 2019 story in New York magazine, who will buy an old house sight unseen for a pittance, then move across country to sleep on an air mattress in an unfamiliar place to renovate on a shoestring. That’s not me anymore. But as eye candy and fantasy fodder for an armchair renovator, these sites are pure delight.

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Top to bottom: Lexington, MO, sold for $60,000; Towanda, IL, $150,000; Bristol, CT, $175,000; Bergton, VA, $70,000

You can check out CIRCA and CIRCA-adjacent websites and follow them on Instagram for free, or get three weekly newsletters for $12/ month, including a “secret” Instagram feed plus Cheap(ish) Old Houses, Cheap Old Farmhouses and Cheap Old Houses Abroad, which promise a total of 2,000 additional listings.

CIRCA has been around as a website since 2013, Cheap Old Houses as an Instagram feed since 2016 (now with 1.4 million folowers!) “We started @cheapoldhouses because we were enchanted with the untapped beauty that is hidden in so many pockets of this country,” reads Cheap Old Houses’ About page. “These homes tell the stories of the everyday people who lived here, worked here, and made America what it is… They are not the fancy landmarks—they are our true history.”

I commend them for doing their part to help save it.

Who Knew? Greenpoint’s McGolrick Park

The impressive 9-acre Monsignor McGolrick Park, an urban oasis tucked between Williamsburg and Long Island City, is surrounded on all four sides by vintage row houses from fine to funky.

The park has been there since the 1893, a welcome leftover from the City Beautiful movement the swept the nation in the last decade of the 19th century, but I had never been there until an errand took me to Greenpoint this afternoon.

Established as Winthrop Park and renamed in 1948 for a beloved local priest who was instrumental in the creation of a new church, convent, rectory, hospital, school and playing field for the neighborhood, it’s a classic late Victorian New York City park, with wrought iron fences, wooden benches and towering sycamores.

Though McGolrick Park is new to me, savvy folk have already pushed the prices of even the vinyl-clad buildings past $1.5 million, and the renovated ones much higher (a minuscule house on the north side of the park, bought for 675K three years ago, turned over recently after being tripled in size for well over $2million).

Russell Street, along the south side of the park, has substantial, well-maintained turn-of-the-century brick and limestone buildings.

A curved Neoclassical pavilion with wooden columns, built in 1910, was restored in the 1980s and is now on the National Register of Historic Places.  

On the north side of the park, this row of humble two-story buildings looks like it belongs in another city altogether. Baltimore maybe? 

Monitor Street, along the north side of the park, is unusually colorful for Brooklyn.

I love the French blue trim against the terra cotta brick on this tiny house.

This one made me laugh. A bit of Venice in Greenpoint.

A Renaissance Revival school building elevates the architectural tone in the northeast corner of the park.

Among the few grocery stores and restaurants ringing this square of green (visualizing it in summer), there are none you could call upscale…yet.

Hudson on a Tuesday Afternoon

THE UPSTATE NEW YORK TOWN of Hudson is an extraordinary repository of 19th century residential and commercial architecture.

Its main drag, Warren Street, is a mile-long stretch of clapboard and brick buildings — mostly row houses, many with storefronts, but there are also some grand freestanding homes from the town’s 1860s whaling heyday. There’s virtually nothing more recent than the year 1900 to mar the street’s historic purity.

For decades, Hudson had been an economically depressed community, like many Hudson Valley river towns that lost their industry in the 20th century, and its back streets still have their fair share of poverty.

I hadn’t been in Hudson for some years and had heard there were new shops and restaurants, a whole lot of renovation and restoration, and that real estate prices had gone up alarmingly since I wrote a tongue-in-cheek article in The New York Times about spending my weekends doing recreational house-shopping.

Antiques are Hudson’s stock in trade, and there are dozens of tony shops full of fine furniture and art (priced to rival NYC), architectural salvage and vintage clothing. One would think they might be doing some brisk business in the week before Christmas, but last Tuesday afternoon, most of them were closed. Likewise the restaurants.

Hudson is a weekend community, it seems; it does not have the population to support businesses in mid-week.

But the town itself is an open-air museum for the old-house lover, and it was fun to explore the shops that were open, including the impressive multi-dealer Antique Warehouse on Front Street, chock full of stuff that made me wish I had a new house to furnish. And what I saw through the shuttered storefronts made me want to go back again to Hudson…on a weekend.