75 Henry Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 75 Henry Street by Carter Horsley

This attractive, 32-story tower at 75 Henry Street between Pineapple and Orange streets in Brooklyn Heights is part of the Cadman Plaza complex that was planned by Robert Moses in the late 1950s and was not completed until 1973.  

It has 352 condominium apartments. 

It was developed by S. Pierre Bonan, a developer who specialized in Title I projects and worked with the architectural firrn of Harrison & Abramovitz and later Morris Lapidus. 

The final design for this tower was by Glass & Glass and Whittlesey & Conklin. 

In January, 2018, shareholders of the co-op building, 191 to 112, against a $130 million bid from Anbau to develop a 40-story residential building on a site of a row of one-story retail buildings along Pineapple Walk.

Bottom Line

A highly visible, high-rise, urban renewal development that took a long time gestating near the Brooklyn Bridge in Brooklyn Heights with a large, landscaped and elevated plaza.

Description

The yellow-brick tower is divided by three white piers on its main façade that has two balcony bays. 

The tower is set in a large, landscaped plaza that is 17 steps above the sidewalk and the project's retail base.

Amenities

The building has extensive landscaping, a full-time doorman and a garage.

Apartments

Townhouse 41 is a two-bedroom unit with an entry foyer that leads to an 11-foot-wide dining room next to an open, 11-foot-long kitchen and a 17-foot-wide living room with a 17-foot-square garden on the first floor, with the bedrooms on the upper level and a 17-foot-wide office/recreation room and a 19-foot-long laundry in the basement. 

Apartment 27EF is a four-bedroom unit with a 30-foot-wide living room with a 20-foot-wide balcony and a 12-foot-long open kitchen with a breakfast bar and an 11-foot-wide den. 

Apartment 27BC is a three-bedroom unit with an entry foyer that leads past a 13-foot-long open kitchen to a 15-foot-long dining room with a 10-foot-wide balcony and an 15-foot-long living room.  The master bedroom has a 14-foot-long balcony. 

Apartment 21K is a three-bedroom unit with an entry foyer that leads to a 28-foot-long living room with a 10-foot-wide balcony, an 11-foot-wide dining area and an open 11-foot-square kitchen. 

Apartment 32A is a one-bedroom unit with a 10-foot-wide entry foyer that leads past an 11-foot-wide open kitchen with a breakfast bar to an 18-foot-long living/dining room with a 10-foot-wide balcony. 

Apartment 28F is a one-bedroom unit with a 10-foot-long entry foyer next to a 9-foot-long enclosed kitchen and a 20-foot-long living room with a balcony.

History

In their great book, "New York 1960, Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial," Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins and David Fishman provide the following commentary about the Cadman Plaza development "which dragged on from 1959 to 1973": 

"When the removal of the elevated tracks along Fulton Street fully revealed the existing heritage of nineteenth-century buildings, the immediate reaction was to tear down and rebuilt.  On the east side of Fulton Street, this process led to the creation of the mall-like park that became S. Parkes Cadman Plaza....On the west side, the blocks between Monroe Place and Clark Street, extending back to Henry Street, were cleared to form the Cadman Plaza Urban Renewal Area.  This development was mired in controversy from the very beginning, when it was proposed by the Mayor's Committee on Slum Clearance.  The original developer, S. Pierre Bonan,...proposed a luxury rental development with small apartments.  In response to the increasing desirability of Brooklyn Heights as a place for family living, the project was then reconfigured to provide larger, fully tax-paying co-operative apartments. 

"After the slum clearance committee gave way to the Housing and Redevelopment Board in 1960, Bonan continued to press for the project, which at last was designated in 1963 as a mixed-income enclave.  Bonan agreed to develop a combination of 250 units of Mitchell-Lama subsidized middle-income apartments and 140 tax-paying cooperatives.  Then, as the project dragged on, the growing interest in landmark and community preservation resulted in pressure to save some of the buildings on the site.  In 1964, the editors of Housing and Planning News wrote of the stalemate the project had been brought to: 'The stories of some of the city's renewal projects could have been composed only by very inferior dramatists; they trail on and on before a final resolution, long after all serious interest has evaporated.  This is the unhappy fate of Cadman Plaza, which has been prominent on the agenda of those administering Title I for more years than anyone cares to remember.'  In addition to arguments over the value of the older buildings to be saved, the development was stymied by increasing pressure to provide housing for the less advantaged, as well as calls for a new public school and more play space for children.  By this time, Bonan had replaced Harrison & Abramovitz with Morris Lapidus, whose design for the building did little to make it more appealing: it consisted of two boxy towers bookending eighteen townhouse units, called Whitman Close in honor of the poet whose house had once occupied a part of the site; little sense of traditional exterior spatial enclosure was provided.  When Lapidus's buildings were finally completed in 1967, Progressive Architecture was less than kind, describing the as 'monuments in a vacuous space' and declaring that the ground-level open space was 'wasted, because it bears no direct relationship to people who live, not on it, but above it.' 

"Cadman Plaza also included a southern parcel.  Here, a second developer, Max Mishken, working with Glass & Glass and Whittlesey & Conklin, had initially proposed Brooklyn Heights Towers - later to be called Cadman Towers - along with street-facing townhouses; the interior of the block would be taken up by covered garage space.  Although the program required a high-density residential compound including shops, a movie theater and a school, the architects took their responsibility to the surrounding context seriously.  Raised above fifty duplex townhouses, commercial space and enclosed parking facilities were two twenty-two-stories towers set within an elevated landscaped plaza.  The saw-toothed composition of the complex, executed in poured concrete and striated block, enhanced corner views for both the townhouses and the apartments while suggesting traditional bay windows.  Although the landscaped plaza did serve the apartment and townhouse dwellers, the project's commercial and public amenities failed to engage the community and went largely underutilized.  Despite the comparative architectural success of Cadman Towers, by the time of its completion in 1973, the entire undertaking had come to be seen as inappropriate in a neighborhood that was increasingly mindful of its nineteenth-century scale and character." 

A July 18, 2012 article by Suzanne Spellen at the Brooklyn Heights Association website provided the following commentary: 

"The story: If it had been left up to Robert Moses, the housing component of Cadman Plaza would look very different than what we have now. His original plan was for a 400-foot-long, 20-story apartment building that would have stretched across the length of the plaza, filled mostly with luxury studio, and one bedroom apartments. Imagine if you will, a building much larger than the Supreme Court building, only in 1960s-Upper-East-Side white brick, plopped where the present day Cadman Plaza housing is. It almost makes you want to go out and hug one of the present towers. 

"The phrase of the day in the late 1950s, early 60s, was 'slum clearance,', but in order to rebuild with federal funds, an area had to be declared blighted, and hopelessly beyond rebuilding. Moses wanted those funds, and in his opinion, the neighborhood that sat near the Brooklyn Bridge was all of that and more. This was some of Brooklyn’s oldest working class housing, with businesses and shops that catered to the neighborhood and much of it could have done with an influx of renovation funding, but was hardly a hopeless slum. It was also a neighborhood steeped in Brooklyn’s history. 

"Moses was also still miffed that he had been stood up to by those upstart Heights people in the BQE project, and was determined to get the Cadman Plaza project through. The demolition would proceed. Fortunately for the rest of us, those Heights activists organized the Community Conservation and Improvement Committee, or CCIC, ('Kick') which proposed an alternative which had an emphasis on family sized apartments, so that the new buildings in the Heights would become home to stable families who would be committed to putting down roots, not living in 'dormitories for transients,' which was how they described Moses’ studio apartments. 

"There were many other details to this long and often complicated story, and in the end Moses got out of the urban renewal business in the early 60s. The city approved the new plans in 1961. The new buildings would be a mixture of tall apartment towers and smaller two story townhouses, all Mitchell-Lama middle income co-op housing. The architect for the townhouses and the nearby Cadman Towers was William Conklin of L. William Glass and Whittlesey and Conklin. The Whitman Close Townhouses added a human scale, and alluded to the brownstone neighborhood across the street, softening the blow of the gigantic towers rising over the neighborhood. 

"75 Henry St. is used as a catch-all address here by Property Shark, which is the address of the tall tower building. Some of the townhouses built near 75 Henry Street actually stand where the Rome Brothers Print Shop stood in 1855, when it was Fulton and Cranberry Streets, where Walt Whitman set the type for the first printing of his 'Leaves of Grass.' There is a plaque there now, and bricks from the building are said to be set into a planter in the plaza near the subway entrance. 

"The townhouses are an odd mix of public and private space, with the entrances and backyards right on public walkways always crowded with commuters and tourists, especially for the houses that face Cadman Plaza West. The houses themselves seem very small, and there are only around 16 of them. Next to 75 Henry Street, the 33-story tower with 370 units, this is a drop in the bucket, when it comes to providing housing, but these are very desirable units, which have sold for over a million dollars, on the rare occasion they come up for sale. Today they are an integral part of the Heights, a reminder that you win some, lose some, and often compromise for the greater good."