House Partisan

Tastes change. I know it, you know it, Bob Dole knows it. (What? Never mind.) Anyway, although we all know tastes change, I was still a little startled by the obit for Evelyn Orton, “booster of Brooklyn brownstones.” Well, who isn’t a booster of Brooklyn brownstones these days? It’s one of the most prestigious forms of housing I can think of.

But in 1963, that apparently wasn’t the case. The obit said:

Victorian homes had fallen into disfavor and many middle-class New Yorkers were moving to the suburbs by 1963, when Mrs. Ortner and her husband bought a four-story 1886 brownstone on Berkeley Place in Park Slope.

Mrs. Ortner, an interior designer before she became a preservationist, was so enchanted by that house, with its original mahogany woodwork and papier-mâché and linseed-oil wallpaper, that she began a campaign to save thousands of other brownstones from neglect or the wrecking ball.

Many of the graceful 19th-century single-family homes in Park Slope were owned by absentee landlords and had been cut up into rooming houses. In other parts of New York, old homes were being lost to federally sponsored urban renewal projects.

Among other steps she and her husband took:

In part because of their own difficulty in getting a mortgage for their $32,500 house, the Ortners were prominent in the anti-redlining campaigns beginning in the mid-1960’s, when many banks were reluctant to finance mortgages in declining neighborhoods like Park Slope, Cobble Hill and even Brooklyn Heights…

“Declining neighborhoods like Park Slope”! Tastes change….