Brooklyn Heights has always been a special place – and a special case. As “America’s first suburb� it had its interests tied to Manhattan across the river, and it has remained to a degree an adjunct of Manhattan more than an integral part of Brooklyn. Now, as the Brooklyn Heights Association celebrates its 100th anniversary, the Heights sees a new Brooklyn springing up beyond its historically demarcated confines.

How to adjust comfortably to these changed surroundings is a challenge facing the Heights and its association. The BHA has been reaching both inward and outward with mixed effect. Most positively it has from the outset been a force for the creation of Brooklyn Bridge Park, even though it has resisted pressure for what almost inevitably will have to be a park entrance from Montague Street. Even those who most feared public intrusion will themselves want to enjoy a more convenient access to the park. On the Heights’ northern border, the BHA has had a rather sorry history opposing the residential transformation of DUMBO, and, where it should have welcomed the imaginative proposal for Atlantic Yards farther inland, it has instead been party to the delaying tactics that have not stopped the project but cheated it of some of its unique potential as it moves forward.

When it comes to the Heights’ own inner precincts, the BHA has been both active and effective in getting street trees planted and maintained. They add greatly to the neighborhood’s quiet charm and help keep the streets cooler in summer. On the matter of architectural preservation the BHA has, if anything, pressed overly hard in trying to recapture the past. Its annual awards stress the quaint imitation of past exteriors even where the interior use and configuration are quite different, and in some cases imitation “carriage houses� have been built instead of buildings truer to the contemporary life within them. We are still waiting for reproductions of century-old street lamps to replace more modern ones on several streets. A kind of insulating taxidermy is being practiced that robs the Heights of the vibrancy felt in a growing number of other Brooklyn neighborhoods.

In what is known as a mature neighborhood, high real estate prices militate against commercial variety, very evident along Montague Street, as well as Clark and Henry, where rent demands keep storefronts empty rather than letting them go to small-time operators who might provide useful service. Last Thursday’s fire may have cost the central Heights its last Laundromat, for instance. Economic realities being what they are, the BHA may not have much power in this sphere, and yet it poses a serious challenge to the desirability and livability of the Heights in the years ahead.

An Unkind Cut

The glories of shopping don’t usually find their way into this column, but it seems that, as another evidence of Brooklyn’s renaissance, the March 8 New Yorker ran a piece by Patricia Marx titled “Borough Haul.� It was devoted to all the places to buy wonderful things in neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Park Slope, Red Hook, Boerum Hill and elsewhere. However, then came the final paragraph that included these lines:

“Yes, Brooklyn Heights, you were the first district in the city to be protected by New York City’s Landmarks Law, and, yes, you were home to Norman Mailer, Marilyn Monroe, Walt Whitman, and ‘The Cosby Show’’s Huxtable family, but, honestly, you feel more like Beacon Hill, in Boston, than like a part of New York City, and, what’s more, your shopping stinks.�

Ah, cruel truth!

— Henrik Krogius, Consulting Editor
Brooklyn Heights Press & Cobble Hill News

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