Wednesday, April 18, 2012
News Park Slope Becomes City's Largest Historic District
Posted by Henry Stewart on Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 3:54 PM
Not everybody's happy, though. "The good is that no one will paint their house pink or put up an ugly silver fence in front of it," one property owner in the new district told the website. "But the drawback is that if you want to put in a new window you will have to abide by all the historical landmarking rules.” The website also reports some landlords are trying to push tenants out of rent-controlled brownstones so they can convert the buildings into luxury housing.
Personally, I love the look of these historically preserved streets, but I also worry that it's possible to overromanticize our history. Surely the owners of the farms and houses where these row houses stand now bemoaned the destruction of their communities for densely packed brownstone homes. What if they had had powerful landmark committees?
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