Weather-beaten but winning: Red Hook’s 185 and 189 Conover St.

Eye On Real Estate

August 20, 2014 By Lore Croghan Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Red Hook eye candy: 185 and 189 Conover St. Eagle photos by Lore Croghan

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A little bit of decay — or in some cases, a lot — can be absolutely eye-catching.

Brooklyn’s got its fair share of buildings whose decrepitude is part of their charm.

The historic buildings at the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s hospital annex, weather-beaten and astonishingly beautiful, are stellar examples.

Love Among the Ruins? For the real estate-obsessed, yes indeed. ( A digression: Which do you think of first when you read that title, the Robert Browning poem or the Katharine Hepburn-Laurence Olivier movie?)

Once these properties capture our attention, of course we want to know all about them.

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We Love You Just The Way You Are.

The wood façades are so weather-beaten they’re almost black. The red gate connecting the two low-rise buildings is crazed with pockmarks and has foliage bursting forth above it.

The place looks so cool without even trying.

The buildings at 185 and 189 Conover St. in Red Hook are part of a big property on the corner of Dikeman Street made up of nine tax lots, city Finance Department records show. The whole thing belongs to Red Hook Building Company LLC, which is related to a shipping-container repair business based in Newark called A.G. Ship Maintenance Corp., the property records indicate.

Christopher Guido, an executive at Portwide Cargo Securing Co., which is a division of A.G. Ship Maintenance Corp., signed deed documents on behalf of the LLC when ownership of the nine lots was transferred in 2005.

The shipping-container repair company had acquired the lots in the 1960s and 1970s, Finance Department records indicate.

Guido didn’t respond to our request for comment by deadline.

An interesting fact we found online: During World War I and in the 1920s, 185 Conover housed Trinity Mission, a Lutheran facility.