The website brooklyn.com announces the home improvement show This Old House® is coming to New York City with “The New York City Project”, a brownstone rennovation featuring Aladdin Plumbing Corp. providing on-camera and on-site master plumber experience.
A 1904 late-Victorian-era Renaissance Revival house in Prospect Heights was the site of Spring 2009’s This Old House series airing on PBS stations beginning around January 24th, 2009.
This is the first time in the 30-year history of This Old House that they’ve come to New York City.
After scouting a dozen locations in Brooklyn, the producers finally settled on the run-down four-story SRO former boarding house owned by Karen Shen and Kevin Costello.
The house has a lot of fantastic details including the highly stylized carved woodwork and stamped brass hardware details that were very popular in the houses built in Prospect Heights and adjacent Park Slope in the 1890’s — 1920’s. The wood and brass work were probably mass-produced and catalog-ordered. The industrial revolution made mass production of these sorts of details easily affordable to middle-class homeowners.
You can see some great photos of the woodwork details and the completed interiors on the owner’s blog.
The Prospect Heights neighborhood was developed very rapidly following the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, which made it possible to reliably commute between Manhattan and Brooklyn, and live a little farther out in Brooklyn. It takes its name from nearby 585-acre Prospect Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. Attractions within walking distance are the Brooklyn Museum of Art (founded 1895), the Brooklyn Academy of Music (founded 1861, and moved to its current location in 1908), the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (founded in 1910), and the Central Library of the Brooklyn Public Library system. The famous Park Slope neighborhood lies just to the west, across Flatbush Avenue, and the contested Atlantic Yards project site is to the north.
The home was renovated into a 3-family home with an owners’ duplex in the middle two floors and single-floor rental properties on the garden floor (1 bedroom) and the top floor (2 bedrooms).
The General Contractor was Michael R. Streaman/MRS Construction (718 832 5958), plumbing was by Brooklyn favorite Aladdin Plumbing, and electrical work was done by Super Charged Electric of Staten Island.
Content on this page reproduced courtesy brooklyn.com.