Springtime Fix-ups in Boerum Hill

CHOOSING EXTERIOR PAINT COLORS is even more nerve-wracking than choosing interior paint colors. After all, everyone will see them. And you have to consider context. You don’t (I don’t anyway) want it to clash with the house next door.

I’m doing some spiffing up at my 3-family rental property in Boerum Hill this month. It’s an 1830s Greek Revival with, remarkably — considering all the trials the building has been through in terms of ownership, receivership, and changing neighborhood over almost two centuries — a nice original doorway, left, with fluted pilasters and egg-and-dart molding.

In addition to a new wood vestibule door, below, which replaced a salvaged French door that never closed properly and had cracked panes of glass (and therefore did nothing to exclude noise and dirt), I’m debating colors for a partial re-painting of the building’s facade.

The block is not landmarked, so I could do chartreuse and hot pink if I wanted, but I’ve decided to stick with the same general scheme as before. When we bought the house in 1979, it was dark red. We changed it to the present gray with white trim — probably a bad idea in any urban environment. I’d love to repaint the entire facade, but that will have to wait. Right now I’m just doing the ground level, from the cornice down, and I’ve chosen a medium gray (Benjamin Moore Platinum Gray) for the concrete section, pale gray (Ben Moore Cliffside Gray) for the wood door surround, and dark gray-blue (Ben Moore Hamilton Blue) for the door itself. Classic, conservative, safe. Very safe, as the paint company pairs the three colors on one of their “Color Preview” chips. Why mess?

As long as we’re discussing the ground floor of this building, I have to admit to making a pretty dreadful design mistake there when I was young and ignorant. The building, when we bought it, had a bodega in the ground floor with an ugly aluminum storefront. The c. 1940 NYC tax photo shows a store with an old wood storefront, but that was long gone. Wanting to convert the ground floor store to an apartment, we decided against restoring the old wood storefront (probably for money reasons, but also practical ones — it seemed less secure than concrete). We built a new solid wall with these odd windows, which look much better from inside than out.

If I had it to do all over again, I would restore the storefront, as I’ve occasionally seen done. It can still be used as an apartment. There’s one I know of in Carroll Gardens, on Hicks Street and Union, and another that springs to mind on Court between Kane and DeGraw.

Meanwhile, I wouldn’t mind doing some planting in large tubs or containers below those awkward windows. The building next door (to the right in the photo), which has an unusual-for-Brooklyn cast-iron decorative front, has an old clawfoot tub in front with evergreens  that persist year after year, despite passersby chucking trash in there and spotty watering.

Spare Us the ‘Fancy Houses’

PROSPECT HEIGHTS in Brooklyn was designated a New York City Historic District  in 2009. Now any external changes to a house’s appearance are subject to the guidelines and regulations of the city’s  Landmarks Preservation Commission. No longer will it be possible for something like the crazy-quilt travesty, left, to occur.

This, er, unique facade is on St. Marks Avenue near Carlton. I pass it frequently and it never fails to shock me. It’s beyond “remuddling,” a  term coined by Clem Labine, the original publisher of Old House Journal. More like “radical bastardization.” Why oh why would anyone do such a thing to a 19th century brownstone? Seems impossible that someone could fail to appreciate the charms of, if not the individual house, at least the uniform row.

A little light was shed on the “How could they?” question by a friend in Cobble Hill many years ago. There was a house on Amity Street with a similar ‘permastone’ treatment — I believe that’s what it’s called. The house belonged to the mother-in-law of this friend, whose husband was of Middle Eastern origin. She told me that her mother-in-law had created this monstrosity in the 1950s, saying she wanted her house to look like one of the “fancy houses in Damascus.” So that explains something. I haven’t been to Damascus; perhaps the house wouldn’t look as out of context there.

Today, I drove down Amity to see whether that facade is still there. It isn’t. Then I drove down Pacific, to make sure I hadn’t mis-remembered the street. It wasn’t there either (does anyone else recall that house, or did I dream the whole thing?) Anyway, I surmise the building was restored when I wasn’t paying attention, and now blends perfectly with its Victorian neighbors.

Yes, the good news is that such a building is salvageable. At great cost, of course. A year-old post on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s blog tells the story of Joe Delgado, a Wall Street trader turned licensed contractor who bought the four-story building, right, in Clinton Hill in 2007.

BEFORE —>

The building was “a disaster,” the article reads. “A previous owner had covered the building’s facade with white Permastone, added pink awnings, installed an after-hours club and two bars in the basement, and rented the top floor to drug addicts.”

Hard as it may be to believe, the Landmarks Commission told Delgado the building had once been a carriage house.

<— AFTER

Delgado located a photograph that showed “a little girl on the steps of a brick double townhouse built in the 1870s. Prompted by the photograph, Delgado removed a massive addition from the back (complete with the club’s tiny stage and shag carpeting). He restored the facade and the original window lintels and sills, which had been hidden behind the Permastone. He also rebuilt the cornice and back wall, and installed exterior doors custom-built from antique wood to replicate the doors in his photograph.”

The house now looks like this, left. It’s good to know that even a house as badly compromised as this one can be rescued. “Finding the photograph made things easier,” Delgado said, “but not less expensive.”

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Rainy Night in Brooklyn

WHEN IT’S DAMP AND DRIZZLING AND DARK BY 5, and some trucker has sideswiped your car and taken off your driver’s side mirror, and you find yourself walking home in the rain from an auto body shop in gritty Gowanus, you’ve got to seek out beauty wherever you can find it (or become powerfully depressed).

A pretty iron railing, a rare gem of a 19th century wood-frame row house with a mansard roof, the warm light emanating from the windows of a brownstone parlor, whimsical stone faces carved in a Romanesque facade…

a purple painted doorway in a montone row of brown stone, a crazy turquoise bay on an otherwise somber apartment building…there’s plenty to smile about, even through the raindrops.

Things are changing in Gowanus, signified by the coming of Whole Foods, announced yesterday. A movement associated with the Park Slope Civic Council, Future of Fourth Avenue, hopes to beautify what seems a hopelessly ugly strip, below.

Within three blocks of the body shop, where used to be other auto body shops and a church called Jesus Never Fails Church of God, there’s the welcoming Bar Tano, on the corner of Third Avenue and 9th Street; the three-month-old Michael & Ping’s which bills itself as modern Chinese (the decor may be modern, the food seems about the same); and a tin-ceilinged pie shop called Four and Twenty Blackbirds, filled this afternoon with laptop-wielding hipsters with a hankering for homemade bourbon sweet potato, honeyed pumpkin, or caramel apple pie ($4.50/slice). I resisted.

Romanesque Revival mansion on Sterling Place and 7th Avenue, Park Slope

I’ve been reading about the history of my new neighborhood, Prospect Heights. It boomed in the decade between the 1873 opening of Prospect Park and the 1883 opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. Horse-drawn omnibuses plied Flatbush Avenue from Fulton Ferry landing, from which 1,200 ferry boats a DAY made the crossing to and from Manhattan.

Romanesque Revival apartment building, Prospect Place near Flatbush Avenue, Prospect Heights

Romanesque Revival style prevailed, with hefty arches over doors and windows, and terra cotta facades heavily carved with flora and faces and other motifs (maybe because Chanukah starts tomorrow, I kept seeing six-pointed stars, below).

Brooklyn is rich in architectural decoration. That’s even more apparent now that I’m living deep in late-Victorian territory. There’s always something new to notice.

Above, Disgruntled, apprehensive, rageaholic: three faces from the facade of the red Prospect Place building above.

Anybody care to venture a guess as to who these gargoyles were, and why they look so pissed off? Were the faces modeled on real people? They look anything but generic.

House, 412, in London’s V&A

AT THIS TIME OF YEAR, my thoughts turn to London. I used to go there often, usually in November when air fares dropped. On my last visit, I went to the City of London Museum and saw a huge exhibition on the Great Fire of 1666. What I remember most was the exquisite garnet and gold jewelry that had been buried in people’s backyards as the fire raged, and was later excavated. The jewelry was so fine that it struck me anew how advanced, in some ways, civilization was in those medieval days, lack of indoor plumbing notwithstanding.

I became fascinated with the remnants of London’s pre-fire architecture, much of it located in the area around Bishopsgate and made of stone.

On December 2, the New Medieval & Renaissance Galleries will open at the Victoria and Albert Museum — ten rooms of material chronologically arranged from 300 to 1600 AD. Among the highlights: the façade of Sir Paul Pindar’s timber-framed house, top, a rare survivor of the Great Fire.

Sir Paul Pindar’s house in the 1860s

Here’s some backstory:

In 1597, Sir Paul Pindar, a tobacco merchant and financier with connections to James I and Charles I, bought several properties just outside London’s city walls. In this area, he built a new three-and-a-half-story house. To the left, the older existing properties were adapted to form part of an impressive new frontage. To the right, a gateway led down the side of the house. Between these, Pindar built a new bay, above, and it is this that has survived…

In 1890, the property was demolished to make room for the expansion of Liverpool Street Station, but fortunately, the façade was recognized as an architectural rarity and presented to the V&A.

To read more about the house and the New Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, go here.

Colors of Brooklyn

IF YOU’VE GOT A BROWNSTONE, you’re going to keep it brown, one hopes. If you’ve got unpainted brick, you’re going to keep it unpainted, most likely, because it’s easier to maintain that way. But that leads to a sea of brown and dark red buildings, which is nowhere near as cheery as it might be.

Here’s to the rare, vividly painted facade. These happen, mostly where a building was painted before and the maintenance solution going forward is either to strip or re-paint. Re-painting is less messy, less costly, and brings a welcome dose of color to our streets.

Tuscan Yellow on Third Street

Kelly Green in Gowanus

Wood clapboard is always painted and often colorful, but there are relatively few of them in Brooklyn.  Wonder what the number or the percentage of wood-frame to masonry is?

Clapboards in Clinton Hill