Another Huge Patch of Bed-Stuy to Be Landmarked

Images courtesy of the Landmarks Preservation Commission

BED-STUY, BROOKLYN — A new historic district in Bed-Stuy, in the making for some eight years now, came most of the way to fruition Tuesday when it was approved by the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC).

The roughly 800-building Bedford Historic District, as it would be named, still needs a final OK from the City Planning Commission and the City Council. However, those votes are more of a formality, insiders say, and will be a breeze compared to the long and painstaking planning process leading up to Tuesday’s LPC decision.

For nearly three years, city staffers have been walking door-to-door in Bed-Stuy, speaking to residents and documenting every aspect of every facade.

Claudette Brady, co-founder of the Bedford Stuyvesant Society of Historic Preservation and an early proponent of the Bedford Historic District, said she cried when Tuesday’s decision came down.

“It’s huge,” she said. ”It was just like, ’Oh my god.’ If this [process] was a kid, it would be in second grade.”

Once the landmarked district gets final approval, hundreds of homeowners living within the vaguely Texas-shaped patch of Bed-Stuy (map above, second thumbnail) will be required to seek city approval before altering a building’s exterior in any way.

And if a building within the zone needs tearing down, the one that goes up in its place ”has to be contextual and has to relate to the existing environment,” Brady said.

“We’re protecting the fabric of the neighborhood,” she said.

Some residents have expressed fear along the way that preservation may just be another word for gentrification.

From a 2013 piece in the New York Times:

“Neighbors who oppose or challenge the historic district said that it would have the effect of raising property values and rents and that it would impose so many regulatory burdens that the very people who had held the blocks together through awfully lean years — poorer, older African-American and Caribbean-American owners and occupants — would be the first to go.”

Proponents of preserving historic Bed-Stuy, though, argue that gentrification is inevitable in any case. At least with the area landmarked, they say, an out-of-town developer can’t just waltz in, tear down a brownstone and erect a tower of condos in its place.

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Bed-Stuy already has a pretty massive landmarked district a little further east: the Stuyvesant Heights Historic District, created in 1971 and expanded in 2013.

Like the new district, the old one encompasses roughly 800 homes.

Architecturally speaking, though, Brady explained that the Bedford Historic District is a different beast.

“They were built at two different times,” she said of the districts. “In Bedford, you’re seeing a lot of neo-Grec and Italian buildings, a lot of brownstones. In the Stuyvesant district, you see some of the same, but you also see limestone and antique [detailing]. It was the [White Cities Movement], and it was really something new. So if you walk from here to there, you see what happened from the early 1800s to the early 1900s — you see the transition.”

If the preservation nerd in you still wants more, here’s a pretty solid Patch backgrounder: ”Landmarking Bed-Stuy: A Historical Context.”