From the outside, the former headquarters of the 87th Precinct looks like another abandoned squatters’ hideaway. Its doors are sufficiently tagged with graffiti, glass windows are broken with jagged shards, and pieces of brick and stone lay at the foot of the fenced-base.
Yet Richard Mazur, whose community development group North Brooklyn Development Corporation (NDCB) acquired the 43 Herbert Street building this past June, could not be happier. He aims to turn the building into condos, at affordable prices for middle-class families looking to buy a home for the first time in a neighborhood that has increasingly become unaffordable.
“We want to give young families the chance of living the America dream of homeownership, which is beyond the means of anybody living in the middle class in New York,” Mazur said.
Tucked behind an exit ramp off the BQE and the leafy one-way streets in Williamsburg’s old Italian quarter, the turnoff the century late-Victorian brick building served as the headquarters for the 87th Precinct before being used as the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Major Narcotics Investigations Bureau as recently as 1999. The building has been abandoned for much of the decade until NBDC submitted a request for proposal for it, receiving site control in 2006.
Inside, the rooms are wide and spacious, with high ceilings and wrought iron window frames with balconies. Mazur hopes to turn the carriage house, an enormous room on the ground floor with 14-foot ceilings, into a three-bedroom apartment, with a two-bedroom unit above.
“There will be ground floor studios, duplexes that will lead on down to the recreation room in the basement, so the studios will have extra space,” Mazur said.
When Mazur says affordable, he means it. With the standard rates for one-bedroom apartments in Williamsburg east of McCarren Park selling for $500,000 to $600,000, the NBDC is offering their one-bedroom units for prices starting as low as $158,000. The units are expected to be available in October 2009, after extensive renovations.
“This is a gut rehab,” Mazur said. “You’ll be amazed at what the architect has designed for the creative reuse of what was once an administrative police space into a quality living space for regular people.”
While the first floor is relatively clean, the second and third floors still show signs of use by vagrant tenants. Several ratty mattresses have been abandoned in the different rooms on the second floor, including one cot next to a disturbing collage of naked magazine models and “Thriller”-era Michael Jackson photographs that adorn one corner of the wall. In another room that overlooks the BQE on the Humboldt Avenue side of the building, a squatter left a large suitcase full of kitchen utensils and cookware.
The third floor has been taken over by pigeons and the rooms are covered in specks of guano, as if the birds were leaving their own graffiti in a conversation with tags on the building’s front entrance and two murals inside.
“Pigeon guano is hazardous material,” Mazur said. “It’s actually more expensive to have it removed than asbestos.”
In addition to helping tenants who have been displaced from their homes due to escalating rents, the NBDC is on its way to providing housing for families who want to stay in Brooklyn without being at the whims of the real estate market.
Downstairs in the precinct’s former lobby, the building’s largest room, a sheet of paper hung outlining the schedule for a television pilot that recently filmed scenes on the first floor. At 5:30 p.m. on the date of the shooting, two actors were engaged in a kissing scene along with “wriggling on mattresses, under the sheets.”
“Aww, we missed that. We could have been there. I have site control,” said Mazur.
