With the help of a preservation group, the Brooklyn Heights Association is promoting a plan to preserve several high-rise office buildings just outside the Brooklyn Heights Historic District.

Calling it the “Borough Hall Skyscraper Historic District,” BHA President Nancy Bowe touted the proposal at her group’s annual meeting last month.

The compact district would “butt up against” the Brooklyn Heights Historic District, according to the proposal’s coordinator, BHA governor Alex Herrera, who also works for the New York Landmarks Conservancy. Its boundaries would be Pierrepont, Livingston, Clinton and Court streets. The purpose of the effort, he said, is to preserve some of the existing high-rises for fear they could be torn down to make way for taller buildings or larger complexes under the Downtown Brooklyn Rezoning Plan approved last summer.

“These are very distinguished commercial buildings built by the best architects of the day,” said Herrera, technical services director of the Landmarks Conservancy. Herrera said the movement came about after St. Francis College began demolition of the McGarry Library last year at 180 Remsen St.

“Some of them have been abused and knocked around, but they could be restored and really bought back to their best,” he said, and called the proposed district a “real history lesson” on the days when “the best architects in New York City were working on the commercial buildings.”

“The worry is that the [city] Landmarks Preservation Commission is just so overwhelmed with things that it just may take some time,” Herrera said. That’s why we’re getting 186 Remsen St. before it’s demolished,” said Herrera of a building he described as a wedding-cake style commercial building that became residential and is now vacant and for sale.

“It’s going to be bought, and it’s going to be demolished,” he said.

Among the other buildings the BHA finds architecturally significant are 177, 181 and 185 Montague St., and 16, 32 and 44 Court St.

Although no application for the skyscraper district has yet been submitted, Diane Jackier, a spokeswoman for the Landmarks Preservation Commission, said the process requires full community involvement.

“The commission will look at it and review it, and if its something we’re interested in going forward with, [the commission] reaches out to all the owners to contact each one,” said Jackier.

Meanwhile, Meredith Hamilton, another BHA member, has also been working to make up for lost time — decades of it — in the greater Downtown Brooklyn area, fighting to save other buildings of architectural value from demolition in the city’s third largest business district.

After a unanimous vote in December by the Community Board 2 landmarks committee to landmark 505 Fulton St., a Romanesque Revival building built in 1890 by Henry Offerman as a warehouse and department store, and 450-474 Fulton St., a 1924 neo-Classical limestone building at the corner of Hoyt Street, Hamilton awaits the ruling of the Landmarks Preservation Commission on the historic value of the two buildings near the Fulton Mall. The full board approved the landmarking in January.

Though public testimony was presented in November, Jackier said they “held the record open in order for the community board to review them.”

Which is better than the potential alternative: demolition.

With the passage of the Downtown Brooklyn Plan last July, many landowners whose buildings fall within the 60-block area could stand to profit by selling or demolishing their property to redevelop rather than go to the expensive lengths a landmark would require.

Hamilton agrees that the idea of an extended landmark district for the commercial area is a valuable one.

“Certainly the buildings at the edge of the district are just as important as the buildings at the center of it,” she said. “They’re very much of the same flavor; it’s of a certain era and it’s quite wonderful.”

And Jackier said the LPC has been saw many applications for new landmark boundaries.

“I can’t speak to a trend, but I do know that some existing historic districts have asked to expand their boundaries and I would certainly credit it to the success of landmarking and how it has increased the value of homes and increased the stability of neighborhoods,” she said.

In Hamilton’s mind, landmark status is a win-win.

“I think the landlords are sitting on these gorgeous, beautiful buildings, and it’s really a goldmine,” she said.

“What you worry about is that somebody comes along and knocks down a building before it is landmarked or compromises it for an extension, and it cannot be fixed.”

Some of her preservationist counterparts, like Cathy Wasylenko, would agree. Known as a stalwart about landmark issues among CB2 members, she thinks the whole rezoning plan was the wrong idea.

“There should be across-the-board landmarking of the city,” Wasylenko told The Brooklyn Papers. “They never should have voted to rezone and de-map in the first place; it’s like putting the cart before the horse, really.”

But Tony Ibelli, who chairs the CB2 landmarks committee, said the downtown rezoning isn’t the problem.

“Most everybody is for landmarking, but [the presenters] didn’t contact the owners of the buildings,” said Ibelli, who said Michael Weiss, executive director of the Metrotech Business Improvement District, showed up at the committee meeting and testified against landmarking on behalf of owners who feared being tagged with expensive renovations for their incidental historical importance.

“Nobody’s really against it,” he said, “but we can’t take things at face value. What about the owners? Are we going to be putting them at a disadvantage?”

Michael Burke, director of the Downtown Brooklyn Council, said that while he knew the apprehensions of the landowners, he thought it was possible to strike a balance among the interests of preservationists, property owners and the public.

“They have many concerns when you talk about landmarking their properties,” Burke said. “Some depend on who they are and what they’re planning on doing with the property. Others have serious problems with it.”

Hamilton agreed, saying that while she’d like to see many of the upper levels of the older buildings along Fulton Mall renovated to use for housing, she knows “the retail is so successful on the ground floor, that in many cases they’ve just neglected the upper floors. They’ve shut off extra stairs and use the extra space as another storefront.”

 

©2005 Community Newspaper Group