Supermarket, Restoration or Both?
By Amy Crawford
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
BROOKLYN NAVY YARD — Local children say Admirals’ Row is haunted. The 10 Navy officers’ mansions on Flushing Avenue at Navy Street sit vacant, behind an iron fence and a tangle of barbed wire. Squirrels climb through the ivy that obscures much of the once-grand facades, and birds fly in and out through broken windows. The houses’ front lawns are littered with beer bottles, and their attics are caving in from the weight of fallen tree braches and decades of neglect.
The Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation has been planning for years to buy the land and replace the houses with a suburban-style grocery store and parking lot. The National Guard, which owns the site, is now reviewing the Navy Yard’s proposal and is expected to make a decision this spring. Residents of the three large surrounding housing projects applaud the idea of a supermarket, pointing out that the neighborhood could use a cheap place to buy fresh groceries.
Many local residents, however, can still see the beauty in historic Admiral’s Row, and the 19th century houses, unused for the past three decades, have inspired a fervent campaign to save them from impending destruction.
“The officers who lived there often died for their country,” said Howard Pitsch, former chairman of the Fort Greene Association. “Why should we step on their graves?”
Superficially, the debate pits more well-off residents of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, who support preserving the houses, against the 12,000 residents of nearby public housing, who want a place to buy fresh food as well as the jobs that a supermarket could provide. But the controversy is not so simple, and many preservationists believe that both sides can have what they want.
Now, a group of architecture and city planning professors and students at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute are working on a project to come up with alternative plans, which incorporate a grocery store and a restoration of the mansions along with “green” elements like a roof with flowers planted on it, low-energy lighting and solar panels. City planning and architecture students have come up with a number of ideas that they plan to present to community groups and, ultimately, the Navy Yard itself.
“We’re trying to please, I think, everyone, as much as possible,” said Diane Smith, a student in Professor Zehra Kuz’ architectural design class. Her design involves restoring the houses and reusing them for businesses like a bakery, a bookstore, a daycare center and cafes, with a green roof uniting the entire site.
Bridging the community’s divides is an important objective for the students. As housing prices have risen in Fort Greene, as in much of Brooklyn, the Ingersoll, Farragut and Whitman public housing projects have been left behind. While south of Myrtle Avenue the neighborhood prospers, the area north of it is plagued by up to 50 percent unemployment.
“We found that the Navy Yard’s proposal is quite heartless and doesn’t really do anything for the rifts in the neighborhood,” said Kuz, who assigned the project to her students. “We are keeping the Admirals’ Row houses in our designs because we think it’s a good reference in terms of scale and history. But we also incorporated a big shop, like the Navy Yard wanted.”
Pratt Professor Brent Porter, a 34-year resident of the neighborhood, is also chairman of the Clinton Hill Society’s Landmarks Committee, and he lives in a landmark of his own — an 1874 brownstone.
“We don’t need a huge Wal-Mart-type center,” Porter said. While acknowledging the community’s need for a grocery store, “harmony and history,” he said, “is the key thing.” For an example of successful adaptive reuse, he points to the Red Hook Fairway.
At last month’s meeting of the Fort Greene Association, Porter presented a plan that would incorporate the houses into a larger shopping complex, with space for stores, industry, offices and parking. “It’s a fantastic opportunity to have our cake and eat it too,” he said.
Navy Yard Says `No’
Andrew Kimball, president and CEO of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, doubts that. A study commissioned by the National Guard and released in January declared most of the houses to be sound and historically significant, estimating that it would cost $18 million to preserve them, but Kimball disputes that figure.
He said that several architects and contractors whom he had asked to inspect the site projected a cost of $30 to $50 million to restore the buildings.
“It’s just not economically viable, period,” Kimball said. “It would basically involve rebuilding them from the ground up. These things are soaked and rotted.” After the Navy Yard purchases the site, it will seek the community’s input on a design, but he is ruling out adaptive reuse of the houses.
Like most of the area’s elected officials, City Councilmember Letitia James also sees the cost as prohibitive. Though she once supported adaptive reuse of the houses, she said that the price tag forced her to change her position.
James also recounted a recent visit to P.S. 287, across the street from Admirals’ Row, when students read essays they had prepared for her.
“They said, ‘Councilmember, this is what our community needs: a place to buy groceries, and jobs,’” James said. “I cried. Enough to change my position. Those children do not have a stake in the issue, because they did not even know there was a controversy.”
James’ district includes the Farragut, Ingersoll and Whitman Houses as well as Fort Greene. She feels acutely the demands of her diverse constituents and has worked with historical preservationists on other issues. This time, however, she is going against them.
“For too long the residents of public housing felt their needs were ignored,” she said. “We need to bridge the gap between the residents of Fort Greene on one side of Myrtle Avenue and the residents on the other.”
Ed Brown, the president of the Ingersoll Tenants’ Association, said that since the Associated supermarket on Myrtle Avenue was torn down last year to make way for a new condominium development, the neighborhood is desperate for a grocery store. Though he is not opposed to preserving the houses in some way, Brown’s primary concern is his community’s need for a place to buy fresh food.
“When there’s an opportunity to build something that would benefit the residents of public housing, there’s always opposition,” said Brown, who has lived in Ingersoll Houses for most of his 44 years.
“I understand the residents’ need for a grocery store,” said Howard Pitsch, who supports the Pratt architects’ adaptive reuse ideas. Pitsch, who lives in an 1853 clapboard house in Fort Greene that he said he restored to its historical appearance from “a tarpaper shack” in the 1980s, thinks that the Navy Yard is overestimating the cost of renovating the houses.
“I’ve lived in Fort Greene for so long and I’ve seen so many of these old houses come back,” he said. “Some of them were in worse shape than Admirals’ Row, just shells. Admirals’ Row is more than shells. If we can preserve Fort Greene as a historic enclave, why not include Admirals’ Row? The historic value of these houses will be an asset to the neighborhood and the city.”
It would have been a shame, Pitsch pointed out, if the African-American Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan had “been skimmed over for new office towers.”
Though the houses are derelict, they do from time to time attract a tourist. Peter Fogh, a Manhattan resident, spent this past Sunday afternoon on a historical walking tour through this section of Brooklyn.
“A lot of these old neighborhoods, you have to be very careful of,” remarked Fogh, expressing his dismay when told of the grocery store plan. “New York City is always looking to the future, but once it’s gone you’re never going to see it again. Brooklyn’s midtown is already getting messed up.”
Fogh gazed at the crumbling houses. “But the problem is always money,” he sighed.
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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