After posting Fonda and Bob Apfel’s musings about that house on Montgomery Place, I found this 1998 article from the New York Times about Mr. Apfel’s house, which also has history and a good story. I believe I found a typo the Times’ article: they refer to Everett Ortner when I think they mean Evelyn Ortner, the neighborhood brownstone preservationist who died recently.

When Robert C. Apfel and his family moved into 313 Garfield Place
last June, they started work on the interior. They plan to begin work
on the facade shortly. ”Right now, we probably have the ugliest house
in Brooklyn,” Mr. Apfel said of the wide, gabled residence designed by
a turn-of-the-century architect, C. P. H. Gilbert. Mr. Gilbert designed
many famous Fifth Avenue mansions, including the Warburg Mansion at 92d
Street, now the Jewish Museum.

The house, just west of Prospect
Park West, was resurfaced in terra-cotta-colored stucco (which now
looks orange) sometime, Mr. Apfel believes, in the late 1940’s. ”It’s
pretty ghastly,” his wife, Jai Imbrey, said. They hope to restore the
original red sandstone facade, which had been pitted by the elements.

But
neighbors on the block, which is full of historic brownstones, are not
so sure the house is so ugly. Nor, they said, do they want to go
through another summer like the last, which they described as marred by
noise, fumes, dust and double-parked cars from workers at the house.
”I want to know what kind of chemicals will be released with the red
dust,” said Michele Finley, a neighbor. ”How much will blow in our
windows and choke our gardens?”

The Landmarks Preservation
Commission plans to issue a work permit by next week. ”It’s all
restorative,” the commission’s chief of staff, Terri Rosen Deutsch,
said of the work. ”What they’re doing is great.” The architect,
Edward I. Mills and Associates, said the work would take about six
months.

Mr. Apfel said the family bought the house because of
its elevator, its width (”26 feet, not that unforgiving space” of
most narrower brownstones) and the striking woodwork in the entrance
hall (”almost a Tudor feeling”).

Now, his wife said, they are
”getting maniacal” about Mr. Gilbert, the original architect. They
organized a recent tour of other Gilbert houses on nearby Carroll
Street and Montgomery Place.

Ms. Imbrey said she thought her
neighbors were ”jumping for joy” over the planned renovations. But
she seems to have misread at least some of them. ”I would just let a
sleeping dog lie,” said Everett Ortner, the chairman of the Brownstone
Revival Coalition, a 30-year-old preservationist group. ”Maybe it’s
better to go back to places that really need help, like those on Fifth
and Sixth Avenues,” in Brooklyn, ”the places that have been covered
in plastic siding.”

–ERIN ST. JOHN KELL