Checking In With America's First Suburb

by Brendan O’Connor

198 Columbia Heights, #2
• $5,600 per month
• Two bedroom, two bathroom
• 1,150 square feet
• Nearest subway: 2 and 3 trains at Clark Street

On Wednesday, an empty two-bedroom apartment in a twenty-five-foot-wide townhouse in Brooklyn Heights, with views of the promenade, the East River, and Downtown Manhattan, was filled with nothing but sunlight. The previous tenants had been “a little bit difficult,” Linda VanderWoude, a broker with Halstead Property, told me, and now that they had cleared out, it was a relief to be able to show the recently painted apartment to prospective renters. “There’s a limited number of buildings on Columbia Heights with this direct view,” VanderWoude said. “It’s all about presentation.”

Brooklyn Height’s claim to fame is as America’s first suburb, and, these days, it is still Wall Street’s most convenient. “There’s such immense wealth in Brooklyn Heights,” VanderWoude, who has lived in the neighborhood since 1985, said. “This area attracts a lot of Wall Streeters, a lot of tech people. It takes just one subway stop to get over.” But it was not always so: After the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Heights had fallen into such disrepute that by the nineteen forties, Robert Moses planned to run the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway through the middle of the neighborhood. “The Brooklyn Heights Association of homeowners, hanging onto the old elegance in the neighborhood’s core, fought for an ingenious compromise,” according to the New York Times. “The expressway was built in two tiers along the cliff facing the water, and its pedestrian esplanade, known as the promenade, opened in 1950 above it.” This, it would turn out, was a seminal moment for the burgeoning preservationist movement in New York City, and led in kind to an idea of “brownstone Brooklyn” that set the pattern for — and motivates the gears of — gentrification in the borough still today.

The landlord at 198 Columbia Heights, VanderWoude told me, owns several other properties in Brooklyn Heights — “I think” — making him the largest property owner in the immediate area. This person also owns 196 Columbia Heights, 150 Columbia Heights, and 141 Columbia Heights. While discussing the many units owned by this landlord, VanderWoude brought up a nearby unit, the famously vacant brownstone at 194 Columbia Heights owned by a local psychologist. “I keep trying to get my friends to go sit on his couch,” she said. According to Department of Finance Records, 194 Columbia Heights was purchased in 1969 by one Austin Moore. “He’ll never sell it,” VanderWoude said, even though “in its current state, he could probably do about eleven, twelve million for it.” Next door, 192 Columbia Heights was listed in the fall for sixteen million dollars; the house was re-listed at fifteen million in April. “It’s unusual to have something so valuable be vacant,” VanderWoude griped.*

141 Columbia Heights, #5B
• $4,800 per month
• Two bedroom, one bathroom
• 800 square feet
• Nearest subway: 2 and 3 trains at Clark Street

“What we’re doing here in this building, where possible, is combining — there’s a demand for big apartments, and you just don’t find that a lot in the Heights,” VanderWoude said. This apartment — which was already laid out as a two-bedroom, no conversion necessary — has been on the market for over two months, but VanderWoude said that was because it was listed too early. “Now that it’s vacant, and the new photos came in, and they turned out terrific, this’ll rent now. It was just a problem,” she said. The previous tenant changed jobs and was moving, and he didn’t want to lose his security deposit, so he insisted that the apartment be put on the market. But prospective tenants struggled to see themselves in a space someone was still living in, apparently, and the apartment didn’t rent. “When someone forces your hand — in this case, the customer did — I told him, it’s going to hurt you, and, instead of listening to somebody who actually does this for a living, he didn’t, and it did.”

VanderWoude pointed out that through one window, between a narrow sliver of buildings, one can see part of the Brooklyn Bridge. Through another, one can see 150 Columbia Heights, also known as the Squibb Mansion — the Squibb Corporation was a pharmaceutical company founded in Brooklyn in the mid-nineteenth century that later merged with Bristol-Myers to become Bristol-Myers Squibb. One apartment in the Squibb Mansion, on the top floor, with private access to the roof, has just been vacated. It hasn’t been listed yet, because there is still Crayon on the walls from the previous tenants’ children.

We walked across the street to see it, and to see Manhattan and the rest of Brooklyn Heights from the roof. VanderWoude reflected on how the neighborhood has changed in her thirty years there. In the seventies and eighties, “You had the financial decline in New York City, all the troubles in the city — and you know, it comes across the river, obviously. And then people started moving in, buying the brownstones again, turning them into single-family or rentals,” she said. “It was always a very quiet neighborhood, but now you get a lot of tourists with a lot of books. I think Brooklyn just overall has just become a place to come and live and visit. Things like the Brooklyn Bridge Park have only added to it.” She pointed out a building where Norman Mailer lived, and the many buildings that are owned by the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

There isn’t much new construction in Brooklyn Heights, and what there is is highly contested: A community group called Save the View Now is suing the Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation and the developer of a hotel and condominium building at 60, 90, and 130 Furman Street, called “the Pierhouse” — which Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan called “The Worst Building in the Gilded City,” as the development is essentially located on top of the Brooklyn Bridge Park — for allegedly violating an agreement made with the Brooklyn Heights Association not to block views of the bridge. The Brooklyn Eagle reported that, at a hearing on Tuesday, an attorney for the defendants “showed photos illustrating that Pierhouse allows more of a view of the Brooklyn Bridge from the Promenade horizontally, if not vertically, than did the warehouse building that was there before.” The judge extended a temporary restraining order on further construction and promised to make a ruling in the case within forty-five days.

360 Furman Street, aka One Brooklyn Bridge Park, #823
• $3,400 per month
• Studio
• 815 square feet
• 4 and 5 trains at Borough Hall

Down Furman Street, at the other end of the Brooklyn Bridge Park, there is an enormous building that looms between the East River and the promenade. It looks like a new construction, but is actually a converted Jehovah’s Witness printing plant. The three-story penthouse was relisted in April at thirty-two million dollars — Brooklyn’s most expensive condo — after the owners decided they didn’t need all that space. “A few months ago, Stuart Leaf was sitting in his Brooklyn Heights apartment when he got a call from his wife asking when he’d be home,” the Wall Street Journal reported in April. “It turned out ‘we’d both been home for three hours,’ he said — their roughly eleven-thousand-square-foot condo is so large that neither one realized the other was there.”

While 360 Furman Street is a condominium building, the apartment I saw was for rent, not sale. Penelope Stipanovich, a real estate agent with Sotheby’s, told me that the owner is putting it up for rent before giving it to his son. The last recorded sale of the condo was filed in February 2013, for just under seven hundred and forty thousand dollars. Stipanovich has had some difficulty renting the apartment at #823, because, despite its size — eight hundred and fifteen square feet, with twelve-foot ceilings — it is technically a studio. After having professional photos taken, though, and a recent open house, she does not expect it will be on the market much longer.

Residents at 360 Furman Street — also known as One Brooklyn Bridge Park — have fought, alongside others, against a plan to build two more condo buildings next door, suing last summer to prevent construction that would include thirty percent affordable housing. “The bleeding-heart liberals, of which many of my great friends are, say we need affordable housing,” Judi Francis, president of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Defense Fund and a resident of Cobble Hill, told the New York Times. “Affordable housing is a noble and fine thing. But a park that has to pay for itself is not supposed to pay for the ills of the city.” Construction of the park only began in 2008, after a two-decade long bureaucratic struggle to come up with the money to pay for it ended in a public-private compromise, wherein revenue from residential and commercial developments along the park’s perimeter would be used to pay for the park’s development. Paying for — or, at least, ameliorating — the ills of the city is, in fact, exactly what the park is supposed to do.

The park itself is a public good that private development is paying for, and if that private development can pay for some other public goods at the same time, why shouldn’t it? Still, Brooklyn Heights itself is more expensive and exclusive than ever before: According to market analysis by aptsandlofts.com, between 2003 and 2013, the average co-op sale price in Brooklyn Heights increased by a hundred and twenty-six percent; the average townhouse sale price increased by a hundred and fifty-two percent; and the average condo sale price increased by two hundred and eight percent.

The section of the park visible from 360 Furman Street #823 is not yet complete, however. The apartment’s windows are tall and broad, but the view is narrow, facing north and framed by two arms of the building reaching out towards Midtown Manhattan. Below the apartment is a barren, concrete expanse, where Smorgasburg sets up an outpost on the weekends; eventually, this area too will turn green as the park expands. Also visible is the BQE and, above it, the promenade. The building, which attracts a lot of “young professionals,” is remarkable for its full-service amenities, Stipanovich said, which include a virtual golf chamber and yoga and meditation rooms. New York’s original suburb endures.

*Due to a transcription error, this passage initially stated that the owner of 194 Columbia Heights also owned 198, 150, and 141 Columbia Heights. We regret the error.

Photo of 360 Furman St. / One Brooklyn Bridge Park by CCM