Color War
By GREGORY BEYER for The New York Times, July 8, 2007
State Senator John Sabini, whose district includes Jackson Heights, has held public office for 15 years. One of his achievements came in 1993, when, as a city councilman, he helped persuade the Landmarks Preservation Commission to designate the Jackson Heights Historic District...
...When a historic district is born — the city’s 88th, Sunnyside Gardens, was approved on June 26 — its neighborhood frequently becomes two neighborhoods. The street signs within the district are terra-cotta rather than the standard green, but the distinctions go far deeper than signs, involving money, aesthetics, image, even class.
The Jackson Heights Historic District is an example...
...A 2003 study by the city’s Independent Budget Office found that market values of properties in historic districts are higher and appreciate at a slightly greater rate than those outside historic districts. For example, the study, which covered the years 1975 to 2002, found that the inflation-adjusted prices of properties within historic districts rose by an average of 5.3 percent a year, while those outside historic districts rose by an average of 4.2 percent.
And the difference involves more than money. To walk the few blocks from Little India and other undesignated sections of Jackson Heights to the historic district is to travel from humble, sometimes teeming streets to genteel serenity. The district, which comprises 538 structures on 36 of Jackson Heights’s 200 blocks, sometimes feels like a different neighborhood altogether.
Within the district, the two- and three-story brick buildings in the Tudor and Georgian styles, most of which were built from 1910 to the 1950s, are uniformly bordered by green lawns and black wrought-iron gates, concealing the spacious interior gardens within. Influenced by Europe’s Garden City movement, which aimed to avoid crowded tenement conditions, the district’s developers built the nation’s first cooperative garden apartments, as well as single-family homes in the English Garden style...
...Daniel Karatzas, the author of the book “Jackson Heights: A Garden in the City” and an agent at Beaudoin Realty Group, has found that apartment buyers from outside the neighborhood not only call him but even know the names and details of the Queen Elizabeth, the Fillmore, the Belvedere and other individual buildings in the district...
State Senator John Sabini, whose district includes Jackson Heights, has held public office for 15 years. One of his achievements came in 1993, when, as a city councilman, he helped persuade the Landmarks Preservation Commission to designate the Jackson Heights Historic District...
...When a historic district is born — the city’s 88th, Sunnyside Gardens, was approved on June 26 — its neighborhood frequently becomes two neighborhoods. The street signs within the district are terra-cotta rather than the standard green, but the distinctions go far deeper than signs, involving money, aesthetics, image, even class.
The Jackson Heights Historic District is an example...
...A 2003 study by the city’s Independent Budget Office found that market values of properties in historic districts are higher and appreciate at a slightly greater rate than those outside historic districts. For example, the study, which covered the years 1975 to 2002, found that the inflation-adjusted prices of properties within historic districts rose by an average of 5.3 percent a year, while those outside historic districts rose by an average of 4.2 percent.
And the difference involves more than money. To walk the few blocks from Little India and other undesignated sections of Jackson Heights to the historic district is to travel from humble, sometimes teeming streets to genteel serenity. The district, which comprises 538 structures on 36 of Jackson Heights’s 200 blocks, sometimes feels like a different neighborhood altogether.
Within the district, the two- and three-story brick buildings in the Tudor and Georgian styles, most of which were built from 1910 to the 1950s, are uniformly bordered by green lawns and black wrought-iron gates, concealing the spacious interior gardens within. Influenced by Europe’s Garden City movement, which aimed to avoid crowded tenement conditions, the district’s developers built the nation’s first cooperative garden apartments, as well as single-family homes in the English Garden style...
...Daniel Karatzas, the author of the book “Jackson Heights: A Garden in the City” and an agent at Beaudoin Realty Group, has found that apartment buyers from outside the neighborhood not only call him but even know the names and details of the Queen Elizabeth, the Fillmore, the Belvedere and other individual buildings in the district...
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