I Like Nice Things, Or The Quietest Neighbor (Excepting A Cemetery, That Is) Is A Vacant Lot

First chowder, now condos (.pdf):

All Joe Chan wanted to do was bring a “Manhattan-style” condo tower to a run-down block in Boerum Hill.

And then all hell broke loose.

More than two-dozen people gathered recently in front of a vacant weed-infested lot owned by Chan. The purpose: to stop Chan’s 11-story tower after he likened its aesthetics to that of the evil island on Brooklyn’s western front.

“Manhattan-style,” he had called it.

Them’s fightin’ words in Boerum Hill.

“We don’t want what he has proposed,” explained protest organizer Deborah Kaufmann, who lives next door to Chan’s empty lot, formerly an auto garage. She believes his 11-story “tower” will spoil she calls the neighborhood’s “brownstone” look — though she readily
admits that her four-story home, 100 yards from the 14-story Gowanus Street Houses on Hoyt Street, is a regular old house and not one of the storied 19th century models.

“Manhattan is a borough full of very tall buildings and the canyons they create. Brooklyn is a borough of brownstones and similarly sized buildings,” explained Lydia Denworth, president of the council. “Manhattan has been built one way and Brooklyn another. We like the way Brooklyn’s been built and we want to keep it that way.”

Ironically, Chan believes he’s doing the Baltic Street homeowners a favor by turning the broken-concrete lot into a glossy new tower. To him, Manhattan equals wealth and wealth equals “nice” — and who doesn’t want that?

“I don’t know why [the neighbors] don’t want a nice building, they’d rather have an empty lot with rats,” Chan told The Brooklyn Papers, adding that he had never faced such opposition in Queens or Manhattan.

The idea that Manhattan would oppose that which is “Manhattan style” seems odd, but no matter.

Then there’s this from a Manhattan-style apologist:

“I don’t agree, but towers aren’t perceived as good neighbors anymore,” said Robert Scarano, a prolific architect whose seven-story South Slope tower has been caught in limbo since the stricter zoning became law last year.

Scarano isn’t siding with his critics, but merely showing that he’s another Manhattan-style architect who is willing to listen.

To a point.

“I’d like to hear the community opposition,” he told The Brooklyn Papers, “if [someone] tried to build the Williamsburgh Bank Building tower today.”

He’s got a point there, you know. The Williamsburgh Bank Building is pretty ridiculous . . .