On the garden floor is a well-appointed dining room with
paneling and a built-in sideboard. The kitchen, in the rear
overlooking the garden, was little changed when they first
saw it, with a built-in dish cupboard and a row of deep
soapstone laundry sinks. As most Brooklyn row houses
of its era have, out back was a shed with a dubious foundation
and a tiny room with a toilet but no sink. “It was
really literally a dirty hole,” Elaine says.
They put in new wiring and plumbing, painted, and
gently updated the kitchen. The wallpaper in the parlor
had turned brown and had to be removed, and “all the
appliances were in the dining room” while the work
went on, Elaine recalls. The three soapstone tubs were
repurposed as steps in the garden.
One day while stripping paint, Elaine accidentally got
paint remover in her eye - and the plumber had turned
off the water. Luckily, there was an eye doctor close by, a
remnant from when the stretch was known as “doctor’s
row.” She ran down the street with a neighbor’s help, and
the doctor was able to save Elaine’s vision.
They decorated with antiques. “Obviously we represent
an earlier generation of brownstoner,” explains Bob.
“But people furnished with antiques” - not mid-century
modern - “partly because they were less expensive than
other options. Prices were low, and we didn’t have to
worry about fakes.”
Says Elaine: “We wanted to be true of the spirit of the
house.”
The plan was the house should look like it had been
owned by the same family for generations “and we kind
of stopped in the 1930s,” Bob says.
What did their parents think of the new place? They
both laugh.
“They thought it was terrible,” says Bob. “Our first apartment,
remember what my mother called it? ‘That filthy
basement slum.’” When the couple bought the Victorian
loveseat now in their parlor during a vacation in Vermont,
“my mother said, ‘it’s so old fashioned,’” he remembers.
At the time, it was conventional to aspire to move to
a new house in the suburbs, and lending encouraged
whites to do exactly that. Prices of townhouses in
Brooklyn were low but it was difficult to get a mortgage.
Lenders were few and most of Brooklyn was redlined.
The couple had to put down forty percent, and the resulting
monthly mortgage payments were about the same as
their rent on a floor-through apartment in a brownstone
in south Park Slope.
47
Left, the 1850s loveseat was an early purchase. Above, the
library holds books on preservation, history, photography,
and many other topics.