This research project is based on a longitudinal case study of a neighborhood community in New York City. As I have already discussed in the theoretical introduction, a neighborhood can be understood as a dynamic space, characterized simultaneously by change and stability, because of an interwoven set of social, political, organizational, cultural, and physical constraints and opportunities which constitute its fabric. An urban setting is open to change,
is not a closed system; its boundaries are not fixed in space or time. (An) institutional setting may have well defined physical limits, but its organization, the activities that go on it, when they begin and end, and the number of people involved, and, therefore, even its properties as a physical setting will be influenced by and it turn influence the larger more encompassing and interlocking physical and social system of which is part” (Ittelson et al. 1974:91).
The space of a neighborhood can be understood as an inclusive environment though, in which it is fundamental to consider the process whose participating components define and are defined by the nature of the inter- relationships among them at any given moment and over time. Moreover, if a neighborhood is a dynamic space in its organization, it also possesses an historical dimension to take into account. To understand patterns of neighborhood change it is then central to consider the sequence and interaction of a succession of events that shape the neighborhood over time. Furthermore, addressing patterns of change in an urban community means also to relate the process at the city-wide level, since a “residential community in a large city is an artifact of the process of change within the city” (O’Hanlon 1982:viii). In particular, changes in the context of New York City, will be examined as they manifest themselves in the local housing market and other institutions. In turn, these changes will be analyzed as they affect the
Chapter 3 GIVE ME A BREAK! I’M FROM BROOKLYN, WE’RE NOT FANCY
neighborhood’s internal change, its impact on residents and community groups.
The setting of the case study comes from the New York urban scenery, and more specifically, from Park Slope, a neighborhood in southwestern Brooklyn, roughly bounded by Prospect Park West to the east, Fourth Avenue to the west, Flatbush Avenue to the north, and Fifteenth Street to the south. (See at the end of the Chapter the geographic information of the study area reported in Plate I). Park Slope is separated from Manhattan by the East River. Its eastern border rises to an elevation of approximately 180 feet on the crest of a terminal morain which is the current site of Prospect Park. To the west, it slopes downward from the Park to the sea level at the Gowanus Canal, which was the site of a salt water marsh. Only three miles to north there is the super- gentrified (Lees 2003) neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights and one mile further lie City Hall and Wall Street within the Financial District.
The character of the neighborhood of Park Slope was achieved by the establishing of a unique architecture that features charming Victorian brownstones, townhouses and apartments, as well as the aesthetically pleasing public places and vistas like the monumental Grand Army Plaza or the named streets on its north. Identifiable landmarks and focal points are connected to the 526-acres of Prospect Park, which offers recreational areas, a zoo, a bandstand, ponds, a lagoon and picnic grounds. Nearby are the Brooklyn Museum and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Other key elements of place-making include: two lively commercial avenues (the Fifth and the Seventh), the nation’s largest member-owned and operated food co-op, five subway stops and two bus routes and some activist community projects, like restoring bluestone sidewalks, hosting the first citywide household hazardous-waste collection day, and an intensive recycling program.
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Seventh and Fifth Avenues are its primary commercial streets, while its east- west side streets are populated by many historic brownstones. Park Slope features historic buildings, top-rated restaurants, bars, and shops, as well as proximity to Prospect Park, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, and the Central Library (as well as the Park Slope branch) of the Brooklyn Public Library system. This contributes to a stimulating cultural scene and a family-friendly ambiance.
Moreover, Park Slope is considered one of New York City's most desirable neighborhoods. In fact, in 2007 it was selected as “one of ten Great Neighborhoods in America” by the American Planning Association, "for its architectural and historical features and its diverse mix of residents and businesses, all of which are supported and preserved by its active and involved citizenry”10 and in 2010, it was ranked number one in New York by
New York Magazine citing “its quality public schools, dining, nightlife, shopping, access to public transit, green space, quality housing, safety, and creative capital, among other aspects”11.
However, Park Slope was not exactly that kind of successful neighborhood as it is known, enjoyed and represented nowadays. It grew as Brooklyn did, from a sleepy string of farm villages into a “bustling, teeming place that large in the nation’s imagination” (Robbins and Palitz 2001:7).
3.1.1 Park Slope: a name, a place, and a community
Named for its proximity to Prospect Park and its location on land “which gradually elevates from the low-lying meadows of Gowanus to the highlands
10 Source: “Park Slope Brooklyn, New York", article published on the website of the American Planning
Association -‐ Accessed on December 17th, 2011.
11 Source: "The Most Livable Neighborhoods in New York", article by Nate Silver published on The New
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of the park” (Merlis, Rosenzweig, and Miller 1999:5), Park Slope is a name, a place, and a community, each telling of a distinctive part of Brooklyn, New York City's most populous borough.
As a name, it is evocative of shady tree-lined streets whose rows and rows of brownstones slope up to broad avenues parallel with Olmstead and Vaux’s other masterpiece – Prospect Park. As a place it holds the historic site of the Old Stone House which was the central location of a clash between the mercenaries of the British Empire and the united rebels of the newly-declared republic of The United States of America. As a community, it evolved from the hunting grounds of Native American Lenni Lenape clans and the farms of Dutch colonial homesteaders to an elegant neighborhood of brownstones and community institutions becoming part of a great urban spread with its declines and its upswings in its popularity and its development (Merlis et al. 1999:3).
Physically, Park Slope was a wild upland and a swampy meadow. In fact, it is part of the Harbor Hill Terminal Moraine of the Wisconsin Glacial Ice Sheet that covered most of Canada and the northern United States. When the glaciers melted over 10,000 years ago, it left hills that became hunting ground for the Native Americans, and then for Dutch and French trappers. Later on, British farmers cut down the trees to plant their grain crops, and so farmers from Netherlands, Germany, and Scandinavian countries did. For the purpose of this study – as I will better explain later – I consider the physical boundaries of Park Slope as roughly the Prospect Expressway on the south, Prospect Park West (the former Ninth Avenue which extends south of the park for seven blocks to Greenwood cemetery) on the east; Fourth Avenue on the west; and Flatbush Avenue on the north. Thus, Park Slope borders Boerum Hill on the northwest, Gowanus on the west, Windsor Terrace on the southeast, Greenwood/Sunset Park on the southwest, Prospect Park on the
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east, and, at the northeast, Prospect Heights. All of these neighborhoods save for Windsor Terrace, were part of the original Town of Brooklyn, established under the Dutch West India Company in the mid-Seventeenth century then later in the century grouped by the British colonists into Kings County12.
Historically, Park Slope is one of the most important sites of the American Revolutionary War. It was at the Old Stone House13 during the August of 1776
that General George Washington’s special troops diverted British attention from the retreat of the American army across Manhattan. Afterward, this battle site14 –bounded by Third and Fifth Streets, and Fourth and Fifth
Avenues – became Washington Park and was the home of one of the major league baseball team Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers15 during 1883-1891.
Communally, Park Slope became urban in the 1880s. It was the developer of the Gowanus Canal – Edwin C. Litchfield, the owner of the Brooklyn Improvement Company – that in 1857 built one of the first mansion, a Tuscan Manor house first known as “Ridgewood” and later “Grace Hill”, which still stands near Fourth Street within Prospect Park and held a superb view on the Gowanus Canal and the harbor of New York. That Italian villa style mansion was built by Alexander Jackson Davis, one of the most prominent antebellum architects in America.
12 Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with approximately 2.5 million
residents, and the second-‐largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-‐most densely populated county in the United States, after New York County (Manhattan).Kings County was created in 1683 from the West Riding of Yorkshire, Province of New York, and earlier part of New Netherland. The county was named in honor of King Charles II.
13 Located in a reconstructed 1699 Dutch farmhouse that was central to the Battle of Brooklyn, the
Old Stone House is a museum and community resource that explores the American Revolution, colonial life and Brooklyn.
14 Historically known as the 1976 Battle of Brooklyn.
Chapter 3 GIVE ME A BREAK! I’M FROM BROOKLYN, WE’RE NOT FANCY 3.2 The Role of Urban Forms
Urban design is the process of giving form, shape, and character to groups of buildings, to whole neighborhoods, and the city. It involves the arrangement and design of built forms, public spaces, transport systems, services, and amenities. In urban studies we can interpret this as a framework that orders the elements into a network of streets, squares, and blocks. More importantly it blends architecture, urban landscape and city planning with whom is using and experiencing that space; urban design is about making connections between people and places, mobility and urban form, nature and the built fabric. It draws together the many strands of place-making into the creation of urbanities with distinct beauty and identity.
Park Slope of course has an economic, cultural, and political history of remarkable proportions, and the visual evidence of this past accounts for much of the strong neighborhood character. Indeed, to understand this character and its changes, it would be more accurate to analyze the physical structure and its interactions with social groups’ action and desires.
It is suggested that designed things and urban landscapes are artifacts of material culture, and provide information about it (Low and Chambers 1989). Accordingly, the term an urban setting can also be interpreted as a system of designed forms related to a culture-making process. If, then, we assume that design is a social production of ideas, values, norms, and beliefs – spatially and symbolically placed – we can relate it with the cultural patterns and motives of different social groups’ minds and study it as such.
Park Slope retains a certain “authentic aura of the past” to an extent which is remarkable in New York. While there are an unusual number of fine townhouses and other buildings of extraordinary interest, as well as a few imposing free-standing mansions – survivors of a greater number which once
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stood on Eight Avenue and along Prospect Park West – it is the long block- fronts of two-and three-story row houses, set behind deep front yards, which gives the neighborhood its unusually harmonious character. The wealth of architectural details and the exceptional quality of the individual townhouses and other structures play an important role in enhancing the overall picture which makes such an extraordinary impact upon the passerby.
With the aim of provide some insights on the understanding of the overall process of gentrification in Park Slope, I will analyze the urban fabric of a neighborhood, the vividness of its physical elements, and the symbolic processes that have become an integral piece of its inhabitants’ lives.
To these clear and differential forms people have made strong attachments, whether of past history or of their own experience (Lynch 1960:92).
Above all, then it would be possible to analyze its changes, and people’s meanings and connections, approaching a neighborhood community as a “a total field” (Lynch 1960:109).
3.2.1 Secrets of Beauty and Attractiveness. An Architectural Introduction
Park Slope possesses such a distinctive quality that on entering it from any side, one “becomes aware of a distinct, separate neighborhood16.” In fact, the
overall neighborhood’s character and development was determined by its prime location adjacent to Prospect Park. The Slope is almost exclusively residential, with little inroads by commerce. Its pleasant tree-lined streets and wide avenues, with houses of relatively uniform height, punctuated by church spires, provide a living illustration of the Nineteenth century characterization of Brooklyn as “city of homes and churches.” Some of the basic features which
16 Portions of this section relating to the neighborhood’s early history and its architectural variety are
adapted from Landmarks Preservation Commission, Park Slope Historic District Designation Report and Park Slope Historic District Extension Designation Report (City of New York 1973 and 2012).
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contribute to the interest of the block-fronts are the variations in the depths of the front yards, the variety of stone or cast iron railings which enclose them, and – most especially – the general physiognomy of the buildings, whether sedately flush-fronted or given animation by bays, oriels, turrets, towers, gables or dormer windows.
The row houses as promulgated by the Park Slope developers, is most interesting as an instance of unconscious town planning, particularly where it fills an entire block with high end houses, as often on the avenues, or, on the longer blocks of the east-west streets, where rows of from four to twenty-six houses lend interest and variety through their individual architectural characteristics. Even within the rows, variety is often intentionally achieved through the alternation of curved with three-sided bays, or through the use of houses of different materials or combinations thereof.
In considering the individual townhouse the question of quality is of foremost importance as it relates to form, materials and architectural details, as each house must stand on its own merits. Although quality is hard to define, it is much in evidence within Park Slope due to the thought and care expended on the design of so many of these houses by their builders and architects. In some, the designers have created striking or unusual effects, but what is most notable here is the remarkable coherence and distinction of the block-fronts where individual houses, rows and low apartment houses have been so freely combined.
The architectural styles which found their best expression in the Historic District are generally representative of those which swept the country between the civil War and World War I. these styles included a late version of the Italianate, the French Second Empire, the neo-Grec17, the Romanesque
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Revival and the picturesque Queen Anne, or “French Classic” style which co- existed with the late Romanesque Revival. After the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 at Chicago, a new eclecticism swept the country opening up to the architect the classical styles, ranging from the most academically correct Greek and Roman precedents to the widest range of Renaissance styles and their very free interpretation propounded contemporaneously by the French Ecole des Beaux Arts. Among the architects, indications of this new Classicism were evident even before 1893, usually used in conjunction with the more romantic styles creating houses which, in their designs, may be considered transitional.
The materials used in the construction of the houses were closely related to the various architectural styles. The basic construction of these masonry houses was brick, with a representative variety of masonry veneers. The earliest Italianate houses had face brick veneers, the French Second Empire, neo-Grec and Romanesque Revival generally favored brownstone, the Queen Anne face brick with narrow joints and colored mortars, decorative terra cotta and an array of slate shingles, while the Romanesque Revival, in its late phase, introduced the warm-colored elongated, Roman brick combined with a wealth of carved and rough-faced stonework. The neo-Renaissance and neo- Classical styles generally favored the use of limestone or light shades of brick with limestone trim. The later neo-Georgian and neo-Federal returned to the use of red brick as a veneer material, with pre-cast limestone trim. Roof cornices with brackets were generally of wood in the Italianate and French Second Empire houses and in the later styles were constructed of sheet metal. The use of cast iron for hand railings and newel posts at stoops, and for yard railings, was general throughout the area until wrought iron was reintroduced
interesting to note that there was a time lag of as much as a decade, during which this style continued to be used by the conservative buildings in Park Slope long after the architects and Manhattan builders has ceased to employ it.
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with the Queen Anne and Romanesque Revival, a material which was also espoused by the architects of the new Classicism which followed them.
Given these architectural specificities, I will consequently discuss the research context through an historical overview of the most important urban forms which have constituted the development of the built environment of Park Slope.
3.2.2 The early neighborhood development
The Park Slope has had a life of barely ten years. In 1884 the region now splendidly built up with private residences was little more than fields and pastures. To-day it is a place of the Romanesque, with a score or more houses of the French chateau type. It is a land of terra cotta and redbrick, of gable roofs and dormer windows. It is a
place of charming homes, of quaint designs,
little invaded by flats and apartments (Livingstone 1893).
From the time of its colonization by the Dutch in the 1600s until the middle of the nineteenth century, the land of what is now conceived as Park Slope was