Los Beneficios de estas propuestas son:
CAPÍTULO 4: CONCLUSIONES Y RECOMENDACIONES
3.4.1 Urban Pioneers and the Brownstone Revival Movement
Its Victorian brownstone cityscape with its rows of trees, stoops, and small street blocks became the template for a new romantic urban ideal. The brownstone was not just another city building to a new middle class in the 1960s and 1970s. the brownstone was cityness (Osman 2011:27).
At the end of the 1960s in Park Slope a citizens’ committee had begun a private effort at neighborhood rehabilitation. The group, called the Park Slope Block-Betterment Committee, aimed at stabilizing the neighborhood by encouraging families – especially young families – to buy houses that had come up for sale there:
The four-story brownstone house on Sixth Avenue, occupied by a local physician since 1905, had come up for sale. Mr. Ferris immediately placed a binder on the house with a local real estate broker; and then called two friends – Everett Ortner, a magazine editor, and Robert Weiss, a publishing executive, both of whom reside in Park Slope. They, in turn, called several friends, and the house was bought – for $18,000 – the next day by a Brooklyn Heights couple who were friends of Mr. Weiss. In the wake of this, Mr. Ortner and Mr. Weiss joined Mr. Ferris in proposing a permanent committee to take similar actions. “There is one thing I want to stress”, Mr. Ferris said. “Park Slope is an integrated neighborhood – one of the most decently integrated neighborhoods in the city. We want to keep the Slope open and attractive to Negro families. This is one of the stated purposes of our organization. What we object to are absentee
Chapter 3 GIVE ME A BREAK! I’M FROM BROOKLYN, WE’RE NOT FANCY
landlords who own apartments or rooming houses here, who just collect rents and have no interest in the community”23.
In particular, it was the activism of Everett and Evelyn Ortner that changed perceptions of Brownstone Brooklyn and encouraged families to come back to the city. Perhaps their crowning achievement, by virtue of their unrelenting advocacy and research, was to secure the designation of the Park Slope Historic District in July 1973. No other single event so marks the renaissance of Park Slope. In fact, its architectural variety has always shaped the different kind of people interested in occupying the neighborhood. Since the beginning of the gentrification process, the preservationist citizens’ committee recognized this feature, for instance, talking about the 14-room Ward Mansion at Seventh Avenue and Sterling Place built at the end of the 19th century,
“It needs paint, but the wood work and parquet floors and the Art Nouveau decor are in perfect state. The mansion is for an owner- occupant who knows the value of such beautiful things,” Mr. Ferris asserted, “and not for someone who wants to make apartments out of it”24.
At the other end of the spectrum, another kind of building, like the rooming house between Sixth and Seventh, just around the corner from St. Augustine’s Roman Catholic Church,
“It has a good heating plant and is a solid four-story brownstone. But it has fallen to rack and ruin. For that kind of house we need somebody like the artists who have come into the neighborhood and ripped out the top floor to make the studio and who redid the rest from the bottom up.” What could possibly be the attraction of such a decayed house? “The price,” Mr. Ferris said. “It can probably be bought for under $10,000. There aren’t many brownstones around for that kind of money.” (Ibid.)
Mr. Ortner was one of the founders of the Brownstone Revival Coalition in 1968, in the days when brownstones in New York City were being razed in
23 Source: “Park Slope Group Presses Renewal”, article by Charles Monaghan, published on The New
York Times – July 10, 1966, Section Real Estate, page 1 and 9.
Manzo 2014 The University of Trento
favor of “modern housing projects”. A noted preservationist, he personally spearheaded effort to convince banks to lean money on brownstones at a time when such a view was not so popular. By organizing grassroots fairs and conferences, fighting banks who habitually “red-lined” mortgages in struggling brownstone neighborhoods, and founding several local and national preservation organizations, including Back to the City, the BRC (Brownstone Revival Coalition), Preservation Volunteers, and Preservation Action, these pioneers helped save hundreds of Park Slopers to buy brownstones on reasonable terms25. Ortner, who very recently passed away,
was described by this neighbor as one of the persons “most responsible for Park Slope’s renaissance and its status today as one of the country’s most desirable neighborhoods26”. Indeed Mrs. Ortner, an interior designer before
she became a preservationist, was so enchanted by her brownstone, with its original mahogany woodwork and papier-mâché and linseed-oil wallpaper, that she began a campaign to save thousands of other brownstones. To attract other preservationists, the Ortners and a small group of like-minded Brooklynites began conducting some historic-house tours to present dilapidated houses as opportunities. Mrs. Ortner used to publicize the tours by dressing in clothing and posing for newspaper photographers27.
This historical overview of the initial process of urban renewal in Park Slope is important to understand how the beginning of the gentrification process in Park Slope was driven by the effort of a specific group of people. Pioneer gentrifiers whom perhaps would never recognize themselves with this kind of “label,” that were undoubtedly the “booster” of the changing of Park Slope to
25 Source: “Tribute to Everett Ortner”, published on the website Brownstone Revival Coalition,
www.brownstonerevival.org – Accessed on May 22, 2012.
26 Source: Eric McClure in the Park Slope Neighbors newsletter of June 2, 2012.
27 Source: “Everett Ortner, Leader in Brooklyn Brownstones. Revival, Dies at 92”, article by Dennis
Hevesi published on The New York Times – May 26, 2012 and “Evelyn Ortner, 82, a Booster of Brooklyn Brownstones, Dies”, article by Anemona Hartocollis published on The New York Times – September 22, 2006.
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a historic site while most Manhattanites still considered it an unacceptable place even to go for dinner. By organizing, raising money and agitation for preservation, by lobbing bankers to limit redlining, the pioneer gentrifiers were very vocal and effective champions of the brownstone revival that spread from Brooklyn to the rest of the country. If preservation constitutes an alternative strategy for the revalorization of the historic heritage of a district (Zukin 1982), gentrification in Brooklyn began as a grassroots movement led by young and idealistic white college graduates searching for authenticity and life outside the burgeoning suburbs. As Osman (2011) argues, this first stage of gentrification was in a sense idealistic and anti-chic, anti-corporate. All of the pioneer gentrifiers had their moral code focused on giving the neighborhood a new life.
Brooklyn’s young white-collar émigrés moved there with a sense of zeal. They started block associations, organized street festivals, and opened food cooperatives to foster a sense of community, place, and history. As they planted trees and dug community gardens in abandoned lots, they described themselves as “greening” the city ad echoed the themes of a nascent environmental movement. They avidly renovated houses, stripping away paint and aluminum siding, as well as symbolically ripping off the trapping of mass consumer society, to return to an older, more authentic form of life (Osman 2011:15).
In fact it seems that the preservationists of Park Slope were never motivated by money or economic interests in real estate. The only house that most of them ever owned was their own Park Slope Brownstone, where they were always been living. (See in Figure 4 the Ortners’ in front of their home in 1980). The first wave of gentrifiers were young families attracted to Park Slope by the low prices of brownstones. At the time, $25,000 (about $170,000 in today’s dollars) really did seem a lot of money for a house in the area, but the people moving there were not exactly “rich.” They were teachers and nurses, artists and writers, architects and engineers whom were able to get a mortgage during the critical problem of red-lining. Mr. Ortner never ceased to say to his neighbors:
Manzo 2014 The University of Trento
“I made you all millionaires, and I think you should give me a commission,” Mr. Marshall, 78, recounted with a glimmer in his eye28.
Figure 4, Evelyn and Everett Ortner at their Park Slope home in 1980. Photo credit: John Sotomayor, The New York Times – May 26, 2012.
3.4.2 Park Slope faces the 1970s
As the revitalization process continued, Park Slope started to attract families with higher-incomes, and as a result housing and retail space costs started to increase dramatically. Industrial buildings, which had been abandoned due to the loss of industrial and manufacturing jobs, began to be transformed into apartments due to the higher demand for residential space starting.
In 1960 the highway called Roberto Moses’ Prospect Expressway was completed. It divides Park Slope from its neighbor of Windsor Terrace, along the Prospect Avenue corridor. At that time the city was recovering from a fiscal crisis and Park Slope was not consistently prosperous. Fifth Avenue was characterized by vacant stores and even Seventh Avenue could count abandoned buildings. However, a new wave of professionals began
Chapter 3 GIVE ME A BREAK! I’M FROM BROOKLYN, WE’RE NOT FANCY
purchasing homes in Brooklyn Heights during the late 1950s. Gentrification spread into Cobble Hill by the late 1960s, and by 1970s had impacted the Park Slope section. The Park Slope Betterment Committee took pride in their representation of what they used to describe as “the most decently integrated neighborhood in the city”. In this way, during the 1960s and 70s, emigrant middle-class families from Manhattan stumbled into Park Slope in search of the affordable brownstone. Having lived in the brownstone neighborhoods of Manhattan, they were familiar with the brownstone style. Brooklyn Heights may have been their first choice, but a slightly longer subway ride offered a comparable bargain. Brownstones were selling for $30,000 to $100,000. Park Slope represented a risk to many of these families. Many called themselves “pioneer.”
Brooklyn took an economic beating in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s; factories closed; docks fell silent. And Park Slope was a “frontier territory”. Blue collar Black, Hispanic, Irish, and Italian families dominated the social life of the community.
Families nourished by the borough and nourishing it in return pulled up stakes and headed out to Long Island, northern New Jersey and other places across the country. Schools crumbled. The subways decayed. New York City as a whole (…) swooned and flirted with bankruptcy (Robbins and Palitz 2001:7).
In those recent, troubled decades, Brooklyn began to have less in common with Manhattan and more with the cities that in the U.S. had a long industrial prime, like Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo. However, unlike those sites exclusively homes of iron foundries or manufactures, Brooklyn was such a diverse borough that it could be conceived as many different places all at once. Across its eighty-one square miles, it had a wide variety of urban- scapes, from immigrant sections to fishing villages, from factories and warehouses to art museums, colleges, upscale stores and cultural halls. In terms of housing also, you could see long blocks of massive apartment
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buildings or loving restored silk-stocking row houses, precious Italianate mansions across Prospect Park or blue-collar settlements. It was not exactly a bedroom suburb of Manhattan, but a unique amalgam of geography and politics, urban form and national immigration policy. Brooklyn was part of what it is considered the “America Factory”, a place where immigrants learn to become Americans. At the beginning of the twentieth century when Southern Italians looked for green space and undeveloped land for truck gardens, they found it in Brooklyn’s leafier southern neighborhoods. The Irish arrived then, built schools and churches, and swelled the ranks of the civil service along with the sons and daughters of their immigrant peers. It was the time when you could hear on the streets and in church or temple people speaking the Yiddish, Sicilian, Swedish, Polish and German. After World War II Puerto Ricans, U.S. citizens since 1917, began taking up residence in the streets left behind by earlier immigrants who moved out to the new suburbs. And again, when the U.S. Congress reconsidered the immigration policies the doors were opened to Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America.
The tiny apartments that once contained dreams nurtured in Krakow, Cork and Calabria would now do the same for people from Guangzhou, Port-au-Prince and Santo Domingo. The largest immigrant groups in Brooklyn in the 1990s came from Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Guyana and the English-speaking islands of the Caribbean. Neighborhoods once home to the vast common run of struggling humanity as well as the petty gangsters, hoods and indigents are once again home to all of these – but the accents and skin tones have changes(Robbins and Palitz 2001:9). The early 1970s represented a watershed for the tenant movement in New York City. As Lawson and Johnson III explain, dramatic changes in the housing market and legislative climate presented the movement with new challenges and opportunities. “For tenants of stable working class and lower- middle class neighborhoods the threats were gentrification, manifested in evictions to make way for luxury redevelopment and ‘brownstoning’ and hospital expansion,” (1986: 209) like the Methodist Hospital in Park Slope.
Chapter 3 GIVE ME A BREAK! I’M FROM BROOKLYN, WE’RE NOT FANCY
Around the time of the city’s financial crisis of the early 1970s, the upgrading of older neighborhoods and the consequent displacement of the long-term residents had occurred in in such neighborhoods as Greenwich Village and Chelsea, parts of the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side and the sections surrounding Brooklyn Heights.
Gentrification there had developed two forms. The first was the upgrading of older but sound and potentially attractive housing. The second was the invasion by speculators, developers, and “urban pioneers,” of well-located neighborhoods housing the poor that were unthinkable because of their level of decay. Tenant strategies had saved large numbers of buildings and stabilized many blocks, but had not rescued from the ravages of abandonment and gentrification.
Moreover the structural change of New York, which shifted from an industrial to a corporate city, affected the ability of classes and races to successfully sell their labor (the loss of blue collar and semi-skilled white collar jobs) while at the same time sustained the growth of professional and managerial professions. In turn, as O’Hanlon (1982) argues, if during the 1960s the moderate income and blue collar districts of Park Slope had witnessed the ravages of capital disinvestment and housing abandonment, starting from the early 1980s they experienced the displacement of lower income families by upper income families.
Manzo 2014 The University of Trento Conclusions
By introducing the early development of Park Slope, we clearly see the further trend for this area of Brooklyn. The bottom of the slope, with its nearness to the bay and with the canal in place, was ideally suited to industry, and working class families. The farther up the slope you went, the better it was suited to high-class residences29. However, once again this internal housing
and spatial hierarchy was not so well organized in a coherent dichotomy. Ethnic areas in Park Slope had their internal class organization and they were more organized by blocks clusters of different income groups.
This brief historical overview provides a sense of what the neighborhood was prior to gentrification: a place where people came to work – around its waterfront edge – and lived. White-collar professionals lived in the Gold Coast across Prospect Park, nestled with less wealthy middle-class residents who worked in public service, academia and the arts. Running along the southern part, a poorer area of brownstones and tenements accommodated Italian and Irish descent and other immigrants. At the bottom of this layered neighborhood-scape, a growing African American and Puerto Rican population found there in modest apartments and rooming houses. On its tree lined blocks, brownstones stoops and street corners, at school meeting halls or parishes, in local restaurants and bars, throughout the unions or political activities, as well as its social clubs or Mob gangs, social life in Park Slope came together.
PLATE I, Geographic Information of the Study Area M a p p i n g P a r k S l o p e w i t h i n t h e B r o o k l y n B o r o u g h i n t h e N e w Y o r k C i t y a r e a . H i s t o r i c m a p o f P a r k S l o p e ( 1 9 0 7 ) . S o u r c e : A t l a s o f t h e b o r o u g h o f B r o o k l y n , b y B r o m l e y , G . W . e t a l . ( 1 9 0 7 - 1 9 0 8 ) . C a l v e r t V a u x ’ s 1 8 6 6 - 6 7 p l a n f o r P r o s p e c t P a r k . S o u r c e : E i g h t h A n n u a l R e p o r t o f t h e B o a r d o f C o m m i s s i o n e r s o f P r o s p e c t P a r k , J a n u a r y 1 8 6 8 . L o c a t i n g P a r k S l o p e , i n s o u t h w e s t e r n B r o o k l y n d i s t r i c t 6 , r o u g h l y b o u n d e d b y P r o s p e c t P a r k W e s t t o t h e e a s t , F o u r t h A v e n u e t o t h e w e s t , F l a t b u s h A v e n u e t o t h e n o r t h , a n d F i f t e e n t h S t r e e t t o t h e s o u t h .
PLATE II, The Landmarked Historic District of Park Slope. A visual essay (author’s archive)
F r a n c i s H . K i m b a l l ’ s M o n t a u k C l u b ( 1 8 8 9 – 9 1 ) , E i g h t A v e n u e a t L i n c o l n P l a c e . T h e e x o t i c a l l y d e c o r a t e d b u i l d i n g h o u s e d t h e d e f i n i n g i n s t i t u t i o n o f e l i t e P a r k S l o p e g e n t l e m e n . T h i s i s t h e f r o n t e n t r y o n E i g h t h A v e n u e . I n k a n d w a t e r c o l o r ( P a r k S l o p e S k e t c h o n b l o g s p o t . c o m ) . B r i c k , g r a n i t e , a n d t e r r a - c o t t a R o m a n e s q u e R e v i v a l , p a i d f o r b y C l e v e l a n d B a k i n g P o w d e r . C u p i d c a r y a t i d s h o l d u p t h e s h i n g l e d p e d i m e n t , w i t h b u l k y I o n i c c o l u m n s s u p p o r t i n g a f r i e z e o f s c a l l o p s h e l l s . A t 2 7 4 B e r k e l e y P l a c e , b e t w e e n E i g h t h A v e n u e a n d P l a z a S t r e e t W e s t . A n o r n a t e b r o w n s t o n e t o w n h o u s e g r a c e d b y a f l o w e r i n g R o s e o f S h a r o n b u s h o n p i c t u r e s q u e 5 7 M o n t g o m e r y P l a c e . I n k a n d w a t e r c o l o r ( P a r k S l o p e S k e t c h ) . R o c k - f a c e r e d s a n d s t o n e a n d R o m a n b r i c k a t 1 1 9 E i g h t h A v e n u e . O r i g i n a l l y T h o m a s A d a m s , J r . H o u s e ( 1 8 8 8 ) . C a r r o l l S t r e e t t o w a r d s 7 t h A v e n u e . M a r k e r - r e n d e r e d v e r s i o n o f o r i g i n a l s k e t c h ( P a r k S l o p e S k e t c h ) . T e m p l e B e t h E l o h i m , 1 9 0 8 - 1 0 , a t t h e n o r t h e a s t c o r n e r o f E i g h t A v e n u e a n d G a r f i e l d P l a c e . I t i s o n e o f t h e m o s t b e a u t i f u l C l a s s i c a l s y n a g o g u e s i n N e w Y o r k C i t y .
Chapter 3 GIVE ME A BREAK! I’M FROM BROOKLYN, WE’RE NOT FANCY A c m e H a l l , 3 2 8 - 3 3 0 S e v e n t h A v e n u e , J o h n G . G l o v e r , 1 8 8 9 - 9 1 . C r e d i t : M e r l i s a n d L e e A . R o s e n z w e i g “ B r o o k l y n ’ s P a r k S l o p e . A P h o t o g r a p h i c R e t r o s p e c t i v e ” ( 2 0 1 0 ) . A c m e H a l l i n 2 0 1 2 . 5 1 6 t o 5 2 0 N i n t h S t r e e t a t P r o s p e c t P a r k W e s t . 5 0 P r o s p e c t P a r k W e s t . W a t e r c o l o r r e n d e r e d v e r s i o n ( P a r k S l o p e S k e t c h ) . M i d n i g h t f u l l m o o n a b o v e a 4 - s t o r y t e n e m e n t b u i l d i n g o n E i g h t h A v e n u e . W a t e r c o l o r r e n d e r e d v e r s i o n ( P a r k S l o p e S k e t c h ) . Figure 18 516 to 520 9th Street Axel Hedman, c. 1903 Photo: Christopher D. Brazee, 2012
450
!
Figure 38
Acme Hall, 328-330 7th Avenue
John G. Glover, 1889-91
Credit: reprinted in Brian Merlis and Lee A. Rosenzweig, Brooklyn’s Park Slope – A
Photographic Retrospective (Brooklyn: Israelowitz Publishing, 2010)
Figure 39 Acme Hall
Photo: Christopher D. Brazee, 2012
465
Figure 38
Acme Hall, 328-330 7th Avenue
John G. Glover, 1889-91
Credit: reprinted in Brian Merlis and Lee A. Rosenzweig, Brooklyn’s Park Slope – A
Photographic Retrospective (Brooklyn: Israelowitz Publishing, 2010)
Figure 39 Acme Hall
Photo: Christopher D. Brazee, 2012
Manzo 2014 The University of Trento 90 S O U T H S L O P E : A n s o n i a C l o c k F a c t o r y , 4 2 0 T w e l f t h S t r e e t , S a m u e l C u r t i s s J r . , 1 8 8 0 - 8 1 . C r e d i t : M o s e s K i n g , “ K i n g ’ s V i e w s o f N e w Y o r k 1 8 9 6 - 1 9 1 5 a n d B r o o k l y n 1 9 0 5 ” ( 1 9 7 7 ) . T h e b e a u t i f u l l y r e n o v a t e d A n s o n i a C o u r t c o - o p s a p a r t m e n t s i n 2 0 1 1 , h o u s e d i n t h e f o r m e r A n s o n i a C l o c k F a c t o r y . T h e c o m m e r c i a l s t r i p o n S e v e n t h A v e n u e , b e t w e e n T e n t h t o E l e v e n t h S t r e e t s . 4 4 0 S e v e n t h A v e n u e . 4 5 7 T w e l f t h S t r e e t . A r c h i t e c t n o t d e t e r m i n e d , p r i o r t o 1 8 6 9 . ! ! Figure 32 Ansonia Clock Factory, 420 12th Street
Samuel Curtiss, Jr., 1880-81
Credit: reprinted in Moses King, King’s Views of New York 1896-1915 and Brooklyn 1905 (New York: Arno Press, 1977)
Figure 33 Ansonia Clock Factory, 420 12th Street
Photo: Christopher D. Brazee, 2012
461
Figure 32
Ansonia Clock Factory, 420 12th Street
Samuel Curtiss, Jr., 1880-81
Credit: reprinted in Moses King, King’s Views of New York 1896-1915 and Brooklyn 1905 (New York: Arno Press, 1977)
Figure 33
Ansonia Clock Factory, 420 12th Street
Photo: Christopher D. Brazee, 2012
461 Figure 22
370 to 382 7th Avenue
Charles J. Jones, c. 1887 Photo: Christopher D. Brazee, 2012
453
Figures 24 and 25 440 and 437 7th Avenue
Robert Dixon, c. 1889; Walter M. Coots, c. 1894 Photos: Christopher D. Brazee, 2012
Figure 6 457 12th Street
Architect not determined, prior to 1869 Photo: Christopher D. Brazee, 2012