By Sarah Ryley
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
PROSPECT LEFFERTS GARDENS — Hugging the eastern end of Prospect Park is Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, a quiet neighborhood that has gotten little attention during Brooklyn’s boom years, aside from the occasional New York Times real estate article on a family priced out of Park Slope, satisfied they found a brownstone for under a million within walking distance from the park.

The development pressures experienced by Brooklyn neighborhoods like Carroll Gardens and Williamsburg are relatively foreign here. Two “mom and pop� businesses opened on Lincoln Road within the past few years, as opposed to being pushed out by a bank or drug store, and there haven’t been any stories about overnight work crews or cracked walls from neighboring construction.

Only recently was Lefferts-Gardens christened with its first recent quintessential development fight, when a developer purchased a 1920s brick row house opposite Prospect Park with plans to build an eight-story apartment building, spurring a landmarking movement. Neighbors banded together and unsuccessfully attempted to have 185 Ocean Ave. and 12 other row houses protected by city landmark status. That house has since been demolished, and the neighboring brick house, 189 Ocean Ave., is listed as a “development site� with Sotheby’s International Real Estate for $2.3 million.

Fortunately for some residents, the 11 more architecturally significant limestone row houses, designed by Borough Hall architect Axel Hedman, have been spared. Bob Marvin, who publishes the neighborhood newsletter, said residents are now working proactively (before, not after, a developer buys the property) for an expanded historic district, which would include those homes and others left out when the original lines were drawn in 1979.

Aside from some who balked at the size of the planned apartment building, the height issue that has been a clarion call for so many activists across Brooklyn has been absent in Lefferts Gardens, perhaps because there have been relatively few new projects. However, residents who were asked approved of a 23-story building planned on Lincoln Road, which would tower over the mostly six-story apartments in the vicinity.

“I think having a large, residential and commercial project is pretty exciting,� said resident Mark Dicus. “It’s not displacing anybody. [The site has been] basically an abandoned building for as long as anybody can remember. This will add more services and more people to the community.� The highest portion of the building would be set back from the street, he pointed out.

Developer Henry Herbst of Park Tower Associates said he’s even considering having a neighborhood meeting to discuss what type of retail would be most wanted on the ground floor, something Carroll Gardens residents could only dream of. Herbst said the building, with 88 condominiums and an additional floor for community facilities, would be completed by 2010, filling an unsightly gap near the Lincoln Road entrance to the subway station.

Marvin remarked that Enduro’s, a bar and restaurant, and K-dog and Dunebuggy, a café, have made the block a destination, which is something that couldn’t be said 10 years ago.

Other than those two buildings, there are a handful of new projects on the outer boundaries of the neighborhood. Some on the eastern end are marketed to the Hasidic community overflowing from Crown Heights. Others Marvin described as “Fedders buildings,� slang for architecture considered so bland the most striking features are the Fedders-brand air conditioners hanging from the windows.

Like Red Hook, Prospect-Lefferts Gardens could be just past the high water mark of gentrification, remaining for the most part stable over the past few decades while other neighborhoods seem to change overnight.

But Marvin pointed out that Lefferts-Gardens never became a slum like Brooklyn’s other brownstone enclaves, leaving little to gentrify. A single-family covenant kept middle-class homeowners in the heart of the neighborhood known as Lefferts Manor, while other grand brownstones were chopped up into tiny, low-rent apartments during the “bad years,� becoming rundown. He recalls, 33 years ago, moving into a middle-class community, relatively integrated for the era, and not much has changed since.

During the most recent house tour, long-time residents proudly recounted Lefferts-Gardens being home to some of the city’s first interracial couples, including Alice Walker and Mel Leventhal, and later, the city’s first openly gay couples.

The real change has been in the rental properties, Brown Harris Stevens senior vice president Bill Sheppard, a 20-year resident, has said. Young, mostly white, singles and families have started moving in, attracted to the inexpensive, sprawling rooms and convenient location.

But those rental buildings, which are often part co-op, have kept a substantial number of the long-time, mostly black, homeowners. On 163 Ocean Ave.’s blog, relatively civil discussions sometimes erupted over integration issues, with the new renters wondering why more isn’t being done about problems like loitering, and the older residents pointing out that their hard work has made the place markedly more livable.

One “old timer� aptly noted that the newcomers are not in a higher socioeconomic class than the old timers. “The rent is so high … they barely have a bed in their house.� After a few years of rent increases, the renters tend to move out, said the old timer, while the building’s homeowners are in it for the long haul.

© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2008
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