It is a house the whole neighborhood can enjoy!
Brooklyn Heights residents are delighted that they won’t have to look at the eyesore of a building at the corner of Clark Street and Monroe Place for much longer, as the city just approved the owners’ plans to restore the partially-demolished 150-year-old property back to its five-story pre-Civil War glory.
“I think who’s happy is everyone who lives nearby who’s had to look at this wreck of a building now for eight years,” said Peter Bray, executive director of civic group the Brooklyn Heights Association.
The city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission approved the restoration plans for the Greek-revival at the edge of the neighborhood historic district last Tuesday, as first reported by real estate blog New York Yimby.
The house has been in such a shoddy state for so long, the Department of Buildings in 2008 ordered the owners at the time to demolish the top three floors of the building — including the distinctive mansard roof — leaving a squat two stories of uninhabitable home left. And the agency was prepared to level the rest of the building before the commission approved the restoration, according to an architect on the job.
The current owners bought the property in 2010, according to city records.
The restoration plans are almost identical to the original 1852 home. The roof, the stoop on Monroe Street, and the two-story bay windows on Clark Street will all return.
But it will need a few alterations so the builders can make it structurally sound again, said the architect, which means shifting some windows a foot or so and moving an entrance on Clark Street a little to allow for a modern steel frame that will support three news floors.
“Not only is half the building gone, but it suffered years of neglect before that so what’s left is in pretty bad shape,” said Tom Van Den Bout, a restoration architect at NV design architecture. “There’s so much work just reinforcing the little bit that is left, then creating a structural system that both reinforces what is there and allows for a restoration back to what it was.”
The builders can’t take the entire structure down and rebuild it from scratch, as current zoning would not allow for the same building. The new buildings will also include a modern elevator and interiors in what will be a multi-family home, Van Den Bout said.
Construction will begin in September, the architect said.
