When investors from across the country descend on tiny Liberty Corner, N.J., next month for the Fedders Corporation’s annual stockholders meeting, much will be said about weather and its effect on the air conditioning manufacturer’s bottom line.

The exceptionally long winter and last year’s mild summer each played a hand in what the company’s chief financial officer bluntly described this week as three quarters of declining profits.

But what did not play a role, Fedders CFO Robert Laurent told the Brooklyn Papers, is its tenuous and somewhat coincidental association to a style of drably built condominiums and row-house apartment buildings that many people in Brooklyn say are marring the landscape.

Perhaps most vocal among the complainants decrying the development of “Fedders houses,” as they have come to be known, are residents of Bay Ridge, whose neighborhood awaits city approval of a rezoning measure that would bar such housing developments.

So ugly and bland are those buildings, say some, that their most striking architectural trait may well be the air conditioner sleeve itself.

“It’s not even on our radar,” Laurent told The Papers, adding that, unlike Fiscal Year 2004, the preceding year was one of record sales totaling $421.7 million. “But I would hope the houses are as well built and as high quality as the air conditioners they’re named after.”

The colloquialism, while originating by most accounts in Bay Ridge several years ago, has spread to all corners of the city in recent months, thanks to preservation efforts like the 249-block down-zoning proposal for the southwest Brooklyn neighborhood that, if passed later this month, could reduce by half the potential number of row house-style condos built there.

Eager to fit in, the term has been uttered by no less an authority than Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who said it at an Oct. 30 speaking engagement in Dyker Heights.

Chris Coffey, a mayoral spokesman, said Bloomberg first learned of the term while exploring a run for public office in 2000. That year, the down-zoning proposal in Bay Ridge was still in its earliest stages and being studied by Community Board 10. Since then, however, Bloomberg has used the term “Fedders houses” on numerous occasions and, said Coffey, uses it when referring to zoning measures in other neighborhoods and boroughs.

“New York City has great dialogue and the mayor has to speak all of its dialects,” said Coffey, who also cited “McMansion,” a term used heavily on Staten Island to describe the large-scale, cookie-cutter houses that dot the borough. “But it’s increased, and the more he goes out, the more he hears the term,” Coffey said of the Fedders reference.

By all accounts, the term was coined by Bay Ridge resident Victoria Hofmo, a longtime community activist and a member of Councilman Vincent Gentile’s neighborhood preservation committee. A fixture at local zoning and land use meetings, Hofmo believes the term first came to her in 1998, while she was fighting to landmark a block of homes on 95th Street between Marine Avenue and Shore Road. While she was successful in gaining city landmarks designation for one of the buildings, a 158-year-old Greek revival home, two thirds of the block was eventually converted into condominiums and installed with those ubiquitous through-the-wall Fedders air conditioner sleeves.

Years later, Hofmo said, the phrase was used by then-Community Board 10 Chairman Stephen Harrison, in the early stages of the Bay Ridge rezoning initiative. When she asked where he had heard the term, Harrison told Hofmo that he had borrowed it from her and before long he was giving her credit publicly.

“I started using it a lot then and after awhile I noticed a lot of people were saying it,” said Hofmo. “In Bay Ridge, people just know what it means.”

Not so in Liberty Corner, where the Fedders Corporation first began selling manual fans 109 years ago. Since branching out to include air conditioners, the company has expanded across the nation and now boasts manufacturing facilities in Illinois, North Carolina, New Mexico, New Jersey and Texas.

In 2002, Fedders established a factory in India, four new factories in China and another in the Philippines.

Frigidair is the company’s closest competitor, said Laurent.

But while Fedders continues to grow, the air conditioners have remained largely unchanged, he said. Laurent said that while the window units have become smaller and smaller, and their style “more appealing,” the wall-mounted units, such as those seen on the Bay Ridge condominiums, have stayed the same size. And whether referring to the “Eubank H,” the “Sun V12” or the “Eubank W12,” each model has the company’s name imprinted along the outside.

“I guess it’s a well known name,” said Laurent. “And we’re proud of the fact that everyone knows it, but I hope in this case people aren’t using it in a derogative way.”

©2005 Community Newspaper Group