Back on 19th Street

Another day, another development.  Last month I was sad to notice that a group of properties at 198 - 204 19th Street, including two remaining back houses, were slated for demolition.  This week NY YIMBY* reports on permits filed for their replacement:

The five-story building will pack 22 units into nearly 15,000 square feet of net residential space, for an average unit size of just 680 square feet – surely rentals (three on the ground floor, six on floors two and three, five on the fourth floor, and two at the penthouse level)... 
The 19th Street project is set to include 12 parking spaces (one more than required by zoning) in an open area at ground level, though the contextual zoning will require that the parking area be tucked behind the building.
... The strange 75-foot-wide property (which had four structures containing seven housing units, for which a demolition permit was filed in September) has not yet been officially sold to the developer...

Photo taken in 2012.  The house at left was demolished earlier this year.


This corner of Brooklyn - Park Slope, South Slope, Greenwood Heights, northern Sunset Park - is rich with early wooden buildings, predating the tidy sweep of brick and brownstone blocks to the north & east.  The houses here tell a history not of the comfortably middle or upper-class, but, for the most part, of lower middle & working-class residents, of tradesmen & artisans, of blue-collar workers in an anarchically booming nineteenth-century city. In another boom, this quiet history disappears, lot by lot by lot.

*We at One More Folded Sunset prefer Brooklyn's IMBY.