Miriam Gilbert stamps her feet confidently on her new front porch and then gazes down at her new narrow stoop. “It feels strong; it feels solid,” she says.
Gilbert has just brought the stoop and porch with their fanciful woodwork back to her 140-year-old row house in the Fort Greene Historic District, in Brooklyn; they were missing for at least 30 years.
They not only restore texture and depth to the facade, she says, but can also teach passersby the wonders of fine craftsmanship: a small slant to the floor allows the porch to drain, 11 tiny wooden triangles hold up each step, handrails are grooved to fit against fluted columns.
Her renovation story is not atypical: for 20 years, homeowners around the country have been replacing stoops and porches lost to post-World War II streamlining. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission alone has approved hundreds of requests for porch and stoop revivals in all five boroughs.
Gilbert is unusual among renovators, however, for her tenacity. In college she longed to become an architect but ended up training for psychiatric nursing instead. She thinks her work with chronically ill people has given her enormous reserves of patience and optimism. “She never gives up,” said her son, Khalil Hayes, 18, a college student.
So far, she has nurtured her house project for eight years; she is particularly proud of the foot-tall stack of documents she accumulated while applying for permits from the landmarks commission and for $65,000 in low-interest loans and grants from the New York Landmarks Conservancy’s Historic Properties Fund. Although her block has always been well kept, it contains no other meticulously restored wood-frame houses with jewel-like porches and stoops.
Gilbert bought the four-story Greek Revival building 11 years ago, after moving from nearby Park Slope. Her husband had died the year before, and Park Slope was “getting quiche-ified and I couldn’t stand it anymore,” she said.
She felt drawn to the Fort Greene house despite its skin of cranberry-colored paint and crumbling asphalt shingles-and its second-floor doors leading nowhere, which had been left high and dry by the owner, who had sliced off the stoop.
She noticed, instead, the winding staircase inside, the views of a thousand-square-foot back garden and quarters for a baby sitter on the lower floors
She renovated the interior lightly, laying tile on kitchen counters and scraping floorboards herself, but could not afford to tackle the facade. She kept the useless second-floor doors secured with a wooden bar rammed through the handles, and she turned the original vestibule into a tool shed.
By 1986, Khalil was old enough to feel embarrassed when friends teased him about his house’s sorry condition or asked, “Why is there a door up there?”
Once Gilbert resolved that the facade needed at least some steps and a cleaning, she made dozens of phone calls for advice, which led her to the Landmarks Conservancy. Since 1983, its Historic Properties Fund has lent $3 million and granted $100,000 for local building restorations.
The fund’s consulting architect, Judith Saltzman of Li/Saltzman Architects in New York, found markings of a former porch on the clapboard beneath the asphalt shingles. She added a porch to the plan and based all the details on those markings, known in the trade as ghosts, and on surviving ornaments on other mid-19th-century buildings in the area.
The conservancy lent Gilbert $55,000 and gave her grants of $10,000. To keep within budget, she scraped the second-floor doors and first-floor windows herself.
“I’ve never worked so hard,” she said.
Construction took place in spurts over four years, as paperwork and weather permitted. The contractor, John Stahl of Stahl Restorations in Hoboken, N.J., said that in spite of all the delays his client “was always very complimentary and accommodating, never complaining about the mess or what wasn’t done.”
Khalil and his sister, Kimberley Hayes, felt frustrated by the waits between construction phases and elated as Stahl’s handiwork took shape. Khalil remembers the first time he climbed the steps and burst through the original entry.
“I felt like, `Oh, boy, this is not for real!”‘ he recalls.
Gilbert says she took a steady pleasure in watching the porch and stoop grow and felt one small epiphany, when the stairs were installed. “There was quite a wonderful sense of completeness,” she said.
Gilbert’s project seems to have lifted the mood of the entire neighborhood. Passersby watched Stahl at work, some of them for hours at a time, and peppered him with questions and design critiques about column bases and drainage grooves.
When Khalil and Kimberley spent their first hours of lounging on the stoop or porch, strangers asked if celebrities were living in the house or whether the owners were planning to open it as a house museum. “Friends whose stoops I used to sit on now come and use mine,” said Kimberly Hayes, now 22 and a college student. “Everybody hangs out. And we’ve become part of this tourist thing, too. It’s this famous little house now.”
