A Report on the Forum

Expanding the Boundaries: Preserving the 'sense of place' the world knows as Park Slope

The Civic Council’s March 5 forum about the expansion of the Park Slope Historic District felt like a launch party: here goes folks, we’re really going to do this.

Never mind that PSCC’s 18-month-old Historic District Committee had already put in hundreds of hours of work, taken thousands of photos, built a new set of web pages, published articles in the Civic News, and met with city officials, landmarking experts and veterans of the long struggle to create Park Slope’s existing district. Never mind, too, that an earlier Civic Council committee had asked the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) to consider expanding the district way back in 2000.

LPC Executive Director Kate Daly told the forum audience that these earlier efforts were nice and necessary but wouldn’t count for much of anything until the LPC was convinced of substantial community support for an expanded district. The public forum, she said, signaled that the Civic Council “has begun gathering steam” among the homeowners and shopkeepers who might eventually find themselves living and working in landmarked buildings.

Someone in the audience of around 100 people at Old First Church had asked Daly if Park Slope might be moved toward the head of the line because it has been nine years since the Civic Council’s initial request for consideration. In response, Daly held up one of the postcards the Historic District Committee has begun distributing around Park Slope, soliciting signatures in support of expansion.

“We didn’t get any of these in 2000,” she said. “We didn’t hear a neighborhood clamoring for historic district protection. There are neighborhoods all over the city who are clamoring, and they’re all in line ahead of you.” (Here's where you can pick up postcards.)

The problem in 2000, say long-time PSCC trustees, was opposition to historic district expansion among several of their colleagues. Any such opposition appears to be much more muted this time around: an October 2007 resolution empowering the Historic District Committee passed with just two no votes and two abstentions.

This time around, committee members made sure they were ready to promote at least a modest clamor before they went officially public on March 5: the new web pages that went live the same day as the forum include numerous suggestions for ways in which neighborhood residents can show their support.

Also, crucially, the web site does not gloss over the seriousness of historic district designation. It devotes a great deal of space to making the case for expansion with arguments and documentation, all designed to convince the owners of homes, stores and building sites that the benefits of designation outweigh any restrictions on what they can to do with their property. The failure to make this case derailed the fledgling campaign nine years ago, and the gerrymandered lines of the current district are often attributed to opposition 40 years ago from some 7th Avenue store owners and the then-Methodist Hospital.

Many of those same arguments and issues were addressed by the other forum panelists: PSCC Secretary David Alquist, a member of the Historic District Expansion Committee, Francis Morrone, an architectural historian and author of the recently-released Park Slope Neighborhood and Architectural History Guide, Simeon Bankoff, executive director of the Historic Districts Council, and LPC architect Tenzing Chadotsang.



Alquist introduced the audience to the efforts undertaken by the committee in the past year-plus, and offered tantalizing samples of the many hundreds of photos they have taken showing each of the 6,000 or so buildings in Park Slope, a full 4,500 of which lie unprotected outside the Historic District. (These photos have been posted on the website with the challenge, “Find your home.”)

The committee has recently begun captioning many of the photos with historic tidbits found in searches of the Brooklyn Eagle from the 1880s to the 1920s. The committee also includes frequent Eagle clippings in the blog, “Save the Slope,” which follows their peregrinations up and down Park Slope’s streets.

What the photos show, said Alquist, “is a largely intact, largely unprotected, late-19th century residential and commercial neighborhood in the heart of New York City.” Not entirely intact, however: Alquist showed several examples of jarring construction and alteration that has occurred outside the historic district’s protective cocoon.

Morrone borrowed many of the committee’s photos to demonstrate the arbitrariness of the current district’s lines, showing numerous examples of historically significant buildings well outside landmark boundaries. Among his favorites were a row of 1885 houses on 4th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues designed by the Parfitt Brothers, famous for one of Brooklyn's most beautiful churches, St. Augustine’s.

“It is stunning to think that there is an entire row of Parfitt Brothers houses outside the district,” said Morrone. “If they were anywhere else, they would be their own historic district.”

Another series of photos showed a fancy, Queen Anne-style house inside the historic district and then a row of 23 less-opulent, unprotected Queen Annes along Carroll Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. “They may have a more modest guise,” Morrone said of the homes built in 1889 for a working class clientele, “but they are still very carefully designed, remarkably intact, and of great architectural quality.”

Morrone argued that even buildings that in themselves do not seem especially remarkable – he illustrated his point with a photograph of one of the four-story apartment buildings that can be found all around Park Slope – are crucial to the neighborhood’s overall context, as “background buildings of high quality that really make a neighborhood what it is.”

“When you talk about a great neighborhood, you talk about buildings that are very different from one another but nonetheless came together in a really sensible and pleasing way and nowhere in New York is that truer than in Park Slope – in Park Slope as a whole, not just the narrow strip that has been designated a historic district but the whole thing.”

Bankoff echoed Morrone’s defense of – and love for – Park Slope in its entirety, and said that “landmark status preserves the physical character, the qualities that brand a neighborhood, that give it a sense of place.”

He argued that a strong sense of place is a key factor making Park Slope an exceptional community. People, he said, go all over the world and say some neighborhood “reminds them of Park Slope, the same way they’ll say some place reminds them of London.”

This sense of place can be lost through the massive demolition and development that has destroyed many other New York City neighborhoods, but, Bankoff contended, “It also is diminished when stoops are removed, cornices are torn down, wall-through air conditioners are shoved through decorative embrasures.”

Bankoff argued that while the limits historic designation places on such alterations might seem onerous to some homeowners, everyone benefits in the long run. “Designation does not mean that no alterations can be made or that a neighborhood cannot change over time. It means that alterations must be made carefully and deliberately.”

The result, he said, is the maintenance of a neighborhood’s physical and social character and, ultimately, value. “You’re preserving a sense of place for everyone who has lived there and who will live there in the future. Your children will be able to come back years from now and point out the places they lived and played. I grew up in Manhattan Beach and there’s no place for me to go home to. It’s all gone.

“Designation also draws investment to a neighborhood because people know that its qualities will be maintained, that it won’t be subject to unfettered, speculative development.”

He maintained, moreover, that designation does not stop new buildings from going up, but “guarantees the community a say in what they look like.” He cited the Poly Prep addition on 1st Street as an example of how input from the school’s neighbors, community groups and the LPC led to a far better building than the school had originally planned. He contrasted that experience to the Commerce (now TD) Bank on Fifth Avenue, which massive neighborhood protests only managed to keep from “being even worse.”




“If Commerce Bank had been within the historic district,” he argued, “the neighborhood would have had additional tools, and there would have been a much better outcome.”

Chadotsang supported Bankoff’s arguments that designation does not place undue restraints on building owners. He said that only alterations that affect the visible exterior of buildings require LPC approval, and that the vast majority of these are handled routinely and expeditiously. Generally, only major alterations or new construction come up before the full commission. (Much more information about the permitting process can be found on the LPC website.)

Chadotsang and Daly both pointed out, in response to questions, that commercial strips have thrived inside historic districts elsewhere in the city, including Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, Court Street in Cobble Hill, and many streets in SoHo and Greenwich Village. Several of the panelists argued further that designation would help preserve our mom-and-pop shops because national retailers prefer much larger spaces than our narrow storefronts provide.

None of this is to say that there won’t be opposition to historic district expansion – there always is, said Daly. The LPC must hold public hearings before any new lines are drawn. They will not be looking for unanimity but a bulk of support, said Daly, and it is now up to the Civic Council to get the community behind its efforts.

That’s just a part of the work that needs to be done. A historic district designation report includes information about all the buildings within its boundaries, and the understaffed LPC is far more likely to approve a designation request when this work has been done ahead of time. The new web pages include lots of suggestions for how homeowners can help out (and have a good deal of fun) by researching their houses’ genealogies themselves. The Civic Council also hopes to raise funds to hire a historian to do some of the work.

Among the most daunting tasks facing the Historic District Committee is deciding where to start. Daly made it clear at the forum that the LPC lacks the resources to consider all 4500 buildings that lie outside Park Slope’s current district, no matter how worthy. The committee will have no choice but to carve the neighborhood up into chunks and try to win designation several hundred buildings at a time. Inevitably there will be conflicts and controversies.

It will all be worth it, according to the Rev. Daniel Meeter, pastor of Old First. He welcomed the forum to his church by saying the time had come to expand the historic district to include not just homes built for the rich but those built for the workers. An expanded district, he said, will recognize the value of the whole community, of all the people, from rich to poor, who helped make this neighborhood what it is.

That is the effort the Park Slope Civic Council has now launched: to preserve the “sense of place” that the world knows as Park Slope.
-Ezra Goldstein

House genealogy forms, FAQs, an online petition, sample letters of support and much, much more can be found at the Historic District Website.