OR nearly a year, they owned a full
city block in Brooklyn: 135,000 square feet in seven buildings on
three tax lots from Franklin Avenue to the elevated Franklin Avenue
Shuttle, and from Dean to Bergen Streets. It's an awkwardly
beautiful landscape of steel and brick, concrete and cobblestone; a
one-story garage is topped by a large, lovely rusted hopper, and
other buildings line up at different heights, like jagged teeth in a
hobo's mouth. Even the el is poetic, a rough river melody rolling
through masonry pastures.
|
Advertisement
|
|
Still, Susan Boyle and Benton Brown did not aspire to such vast
holdings. Ms. Boyle, who is 31 and has a degree in environmental
studies and economics, and Mr. Brown, also 31 and a sculptor with
degrees in fine arts and political science, had an idea about
renovating an abandoned building into a live-work space, using green
technologies and their own sweat equity. A small building, that is,
with maybe a little extra space for one tenant. Their renovation has
wound up being considerably larger, though not 135,000 square
feet.
Mr. Brown had already domesticated a loft near the Brooklyn Navy
Yard, and as the son of an architect was pretty sanguine about
construction. Ms. Boyle was working for Transportation Alternatives,
a citizens' group working for better public transit, and was eager
to investigate green building practices and sustainable energy
sources.
But after a year of chasing properties throughout Brooklyn — one
step behind the developers, or a bid too low in the case of a
carriage house they loved and lost — they found themselves facing an
elegant, though pigeon-infested, former ice house that, at 14,000
square feet, was somewhat bigger than their idea of home sweet home.
And, as comely as it was, its owner, the principal of a moving and
storage company, would not detach it in sale from the melange of
19th- and 20th-century structures that crowded about it and
stretched away from the el.
The owner was a nice guy, though, and a trusting one. He allowed
them to list for sale all the properties except their ice house and
its companion, a 46,000-square-foot brick building on Bergen Street,
as they went into contract in 2001. Within 11 months, the other
properties were sold to Artopolis, a nonprofit arts organization,
and the Community Preservation Corporation, a private mortgage
lender of low- to middle-income housing, for nearly the same amount
— about $2.3 million — as they had paid for the full city block.
(Artopolis will develop its new property into 67 artists' co-ops,
which will list for about $25 a square foot when they are finished
next year, said David Judelson, a director of Artopolis.)
This new compound makes a happy addition to Crow Hill, in the
northern end of Crown Heights. For seven years, the area has been
shaking off decades of neglect, said Sarah Taylor, president of the
Crow Hill Association, which has lobbied successfully for new
sewers, water lines and roads, new storefronts, trees and, soon,
decorative, old-style street lamps. "It's gorgeous, what they've
done," she said of Mr. Brown and Ms. Boyle and their renovation.
Their first working winter — 2002-2003 — in the new space was
brutal: drifts of snow sifted through a massive tarp draped
hopefully over the hole where the roof used to be — and where an
aerie-like addition would soon sprout. The crew burned scrap wood in
metal buckets, heating a brick every hour or so and passing it
around. Ms. Boyle bought them all blue insulated Dickies overalls,
so they worked like giant Smurfs amid the drifts. They'd hired three
friends and three of their moving company's employees and formed a
contracting company, Big Sue (bigsuellc@earthlink .net), named for
Ms. Boyle. Mr. Brown is from Nashville, and in the habit of
attaching a "Big" modifier to things he's fond of, Ms. Boyle said.
(The preamble to that winter was eventful, too: they were married on
Sept. 15, 2001, amid civic turmoil, and while wrangling permits,
variances and cash.)