Meet Big Black: Clarett's New Carroll Gardens "Mausoleum"

Carroll Gardeners met their new neighbor—known as 340 Court Street and coming to you courtesy of developers The Clarett Group and architects Rogers Marvel—and guess what? They didn't like it.

The Rogers Marvel design (Rob Rogers himself was on hand, as well as Clarett's David Hollander) runs 70-feet high and comes right up to the sidewalk on Court. That is, it's 70 feet without the "mechanicals"; we'll get to those later. It has two setbacks of 5 feet, one occurring around the 50-foot mark (where the current zoning law requires builders to have a setback), the other happening at 60 feet. The overall design will feature six brownstone-like townhouses on the Sackett Street side, four on the Union Street side. Parts of the bigger building appeared in the rendering to kind of flow over the roofs of some of the townhouses, like cement lava. The underground parking, which will serve 72 vehicles, will have its entrance and exit on the Sackett Street side, just a few feet from Court. The main entrance of the place, which will feature apartments as big as four-bedrooms, will be on Union.

The townhouses on Sackett looked all right to me, fairly in harmony with the street; the ones on Union not so much. But they will likely not be the issue with the neighborhood organizations. No, that honor will go to the big, boxy, black thing that will sit on Court like a giant outdoor barbeque pit. (Sorry about the quality of the picture; it's a shot of a film projection.) One speaker in the audience called it a "mausoleum." Others signified the color of the building was depressing. Rogers said the substance used was a kind of "fabricated cement board" meant to simulate stone (whatever that means), and commented that it was a "lively material." Since Rogers Marvel did seem to have made a thorough study on the neighborhood (based on their film presentation), it did seem an odd choice of color and material. I don't know of any other buildings on Court Street of that color or gloomy appearance.

The height, of course, bothered many. Clarett signified (as you knew they would) that they could have built much higher, but didn't out of consideration for the area. They also made a comment (that made no sense to me) that they chose to have the building come up to the lip of the sidewalk so that it wouldn't appear monolithic. To my eyes, they've achieved the opposite effect.

I almost feel sorry for developers and architects at these sort of public gatherings, because they're up there completely exposed and the audience usually lets them have it with both barrels. But then they start spewing deceitful bilge and that sympathy evaporates. Take those "mechanicals," which can include a variety of roof objects, such as air-conditioning units, elevator towers and bulkheads. These are allowed by law. But development-watchers known bulkheads can be monstrously big and awfully ugly. An audience member asked how tall the bulkheads would be. Rogers actually replied "No taller than they need to be." My God!! How's that for a response to set a crowd against you? Pressed with a few more questions, he admitted some with be 10 feet and others 14 feet. So that's effectively an 84-foot-tall building, not a 70-foot one.

It's funny. Rogers began his film presentation with a survey at Rogers Marvel's other projects around Brooklyn. Many of the previous works involved the incorporation of old structures with new building, including undertakings at Pratt and on State Street. Some were quite impressive and attractive. The Court Street building was by far the worst of the creations on view.