Walking Is Transportation

IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME

Last night, an 1872 French Second Empire mini-mansion across the street from our house caught fire, the inevitable conclusion to a decades-long process of disinterest and disinvestment.

42 Westervelt Avenue in St. George was never as grand as the French Second Empire building pictured right, but its proportions suggest it was probably pretty impressive in its day.

Here's an incomplete record of its recent physical deterioration.

Like many larger residential properties in St. George, 42 Westervelt Avenue was chopped up into apartments some time before World War II. Under the right management, with proper maintenance and appropriate improvements, it could have continued to provide solid housing for six families.

But once the building fell into the hands of its current absentee owner, its fate was sealed. He promptly filled the building, and others he owned adjacent to this property, with friends and relatives and for a long time it was rundown but quiet and "respectable."

But that was only a temporary reprieve from this handsome building's continuing downward slide.

When these friends and relatives left, one by one, they were replaced by crack addicts and their friends. In short order, the building became a flop house whose occupants you see on the front stoop in the photo, above, dated 2008.

And so it continued through 2009, when the photo at left was taken, and well into 2010.

Until last night.

I took the photo on the left, below, through glass and a mesh screen, producing an eerie visual that perfectly represents last night's craziness,with hordes of firefighters responding to a four-alarm blaze that not only savaged 'The Crack House.' It also severely damaged the beautifully restored post-Civil War-era rowhouse to the right, separated by only a narrow alley.

I took the photo below, right, from my front porch this morning. I want to try and get the Landmarks Commission involved here, to make sure that whatever happens next, happens in a preservation context.

Just to get this on the record: Two fire marshals were here this morning and described the building as severely damaged but 'structurally sound'---their words. Just in case we need to repeat them for the benefit of those who'd rather raze it and replace it with 20 townhouses, built front to back. Landmarks protection has to mean more than that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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BUILD IT AND THEY WON'T COME TILL THE PRICES COME DOWN

DEVELOPER DREAMS DEFLATED?


THE POINTE, Bay Street at Victory Boulevard, Tompkinsville

THE (USUALLY) EMPTY PROMISE OF HIGH-VISIBILITY PROJECTS

Neighborhoods are not "brought back" by construction cranes, Walgreens 'Opening Soon!' posters or the sudden infusion of buckets of leveraged money masquerading as commitment to the community.

At least in the outer boroughs, with a very few exceptions, down-at-the-heels neighborhoods are rescued and revived not by glitzy projects but building by building, block by block, over years, even decades, by the people who live in them, love them, and spend huge chunks of their lives making them desirable again.


THE VIEW, Richmond Terrace at Nicholas Street, St. George

PEOPLE ARE THE VITAL FORCE, NOT LEVERAGED DOLLARS,
THAT TURN STREETS ON A MAP INTO A COMMUNITY

Making neighborhoods desirable again includes lobbying for legal protection from tear-downs as-of-right through historic districts designation. And the creation of institutions that spur community cohesion and confidence, like the St. George Greenmarket and the Every Thing Goes Book Café and Neighborhood Stage in Tompkinsville. These--and not standard-issue apartment blocks--are what bring and keep a community together.

Ironically, these are also the sorts of changes that make neighborhoods attractive to developers, who move in, make big plans with borrowed money and, with their allies, make grandiose claims that they're 'bringing back' the neighborhood.

When the market suffers a downturn, the developers and their minions flee. Community residents, on the other hand, decide to repaint the porch floor or pour another cup of coffee and try to remember where they intended to plant the bulbs that just arrived in the mail. That's what turns the bare bones of a neighborhood on a map into a desirable community: the effort, year after year, to make things a little bit cleaner, prettier, safer, quieter, greener.

Developers don't have that kind of time.

West side of Montgomery Avenue, Tompkinsville. Still waiting for the hipsters to forsake Williamsburg.

THE DEVELOPER SELL

Developers in iffy neighborhoods always sell their projects as broadly transformative. Knock down something deteriorated, replace it with something contemporary and new, and you and the neighborhood live happily ever after.

In the 1970s, St. George was sold that by now rather time-worn bill of goods about the Castleton Park Mitchell-Lama middle-income project --165 and 185 St. Marks Place--a project that, its proponents implied, would halt the flight of middle-class residents and the neighborhood's accelerating physical deterioration. Thus were two achingly banal off-the-shelf residential towers installed on an overlook that is arguably one of the finest waterfront locations on the east coast.

What one can say about Castleton Park is that it is clean, well maintained and not in any sense a problem for any but its most immediate neighbors, who complain about unremitting noise from delivery vans, sanitation trucks and transportation service vehicles that sit, with noisy engines idling, for long periods in the delivery driveway nearest Hamilton Avenue.

What can also be said is that the development provides decent, safe, attractive housing for working people of modest means at rents they can afford. And it has stabilized a location whose once-elegant waterview housing had been derelict for years. But transformative in any more than a site-specific way? No way.

The W.J. Grimshaw postcard image below reveals the very different Castleton Park that once stood on the site, back when the neighborhood was considered part of New Brighton.