The old industrial cities along the Hudson River in upstate New York have become magnets in recent years for creative former Brooklynites seeking cheaper, larger spaces in which to work and live. Among them is Suzanne Spellen, a lay historian who writes eight times a week about Brooklyn architecture but who found she could no longer afford to live in the borough.
Writing under the pen name Montrose Morris, a favorite 19th-century Brooklyn architect, Ms. Spellen, 58, blogs for Brownstoner.com about the personalities and dramas that lie behind the century-old facades of the borough’s brownstones and storefronts. Yet her own real estate story is a counterpoint to the prospector-like frenzy that has swept the borough in recent years; a tale, like many of the colorful histories she narrates, more bust than boom.
Ms. Spellen’s own Brooklyn story unfolded mostly at two addresses, 321A Jefferson Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, an 1875 brownstone she began renting for $500 a month in 1983, and 1310 Pacific Street in Crown Heights, an 1899 three-family rowhouse that she bought in 2000 for $290,000. Both are in neighborhoods where house prices have skyrocketed.
Her house in Crown Heights needed a lot of work, but after she lost her job at a luxury home furnishings company in 2007, Ms. Spellen was unable to make basic repairs. Forced to choose between paying for heating oil or her mortgage, she chose heating oil because she had tenants. Owing about $600,000 after a refinance, she went into foreclosure, and the house was sold in a short sale. She walked away with nothing.
“You have no idea how bad you feel when your tenant’s windows are falling out and the best you can do is go up there and tape it up,” she said.
It was an unexpected turn of events for a woman from the tiny upstate town of Gilbertsville who was accepted to Yale in 1973, guided by an English teacher mother who told her that as African-Americans, “we have to be better to be equal,” she recalled.
Though she had majored in African-American studies, she decided to become an opera singer after college and started taking day jobs in the fashion industry to support her singing lessons. She moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant house with her mother, reveling in the untouched period detail they found, from the etched glass pocket doors to the claw foot tub.
She never married: “I’m very picky,” she said, laughing. But her love for central Brooklyn, its history and its cast of characters was growing, and contagious.
In about 2007, she became a regular in the comment section of the Brownstoner blog, under the handle Crown Heights Proud. She talked up the merits of her neighborhood and its architecture at a time when people called it a ghetto and attacked her for doing so.
A commenter finally suggested the blog give her a regular column, and soon, she was writing daily about the history of interesting buildings and making $20 per post at the start. Her commitment slowly rose to today’s output of nine posts a week — typically a 700-word or so building profile each day, three historical columns, sometimes approaching 2,000 words each, and a piece about Queens history.
Professional historians have taken notice. “There is a very lovely narrative nature to her writing, even when it seems to be about one corner or building,” said Julie Golia, director of public history at Brooklyn Historical Society, who called herself a regular reader. “She’s made an enormous contribution to getting the broader history of Brooklyn out to a wider audience.”
At the time of Ms. Spellen’s foreclosure, she was earning about $1,200 a month from Brownstoner. Still paid by the post, she earns more now, though she declined to say how much.
Jonathan Butler, the founder of Brownstoner and also a founder of the hip Brooklyn Flea market and its artisanal food counterpart, Smorgasburg, said in an email that Ms. Spellen chose to write far longer posts than he expected. “I have always been clear that I’d be happy with a paragraph or two,” he said.
Ms. Spellen said she was grateful for the work, then and now, as it has let her pursue a passion and helped lead to other freelance work and relationships with others in the historic preservation community. “Jon saved my life by offering me a blogging job,” she said. “Money and I never were friends,” she said. “I think we are allergic.”
In the spring of 2012, with her foreclosure looming, she and a friend began searching around upstate for homes they both liked and could afford. Her friend purchased a $44,000 Renaissance Revival home in Troy, whose well-preserved, 19th-century downtown is undergoing a renaissance, and Ms. Spellen moved in as a renter.
“I absolutely love Troy,” she told The Record of Troy in December. “The city is coming back, and I’m happy to be a part of it.”
About twice a month, she visits Brooklyn and gives walking tours of neighborhoods she can no longer afford to live in. (“The irony is not lost on me,” she said.) In Troy, she spends much of each day at her desk researching and writing. Last week, she wrote about an 1850s home in Wallabout, Brooklyn, now covered in siding where Walt Whitman wrote “Leaves of Grass,” and a neo-Classical church in Bedford-Stuyvesant that was built in 1910 as a music hall.
“Nostrand Avenue at Gates Avenue used to be one of Bedford’s busier corners in the early 20th century,” her post about the music hall begins. She describes the corner in her typical detail: its bank that would be taken down in scandal, its cold storage facility where the wealthy stored furs, its event and lecture hall popular with fraternal organizations.
When she announced her departure for Troy in a 2012 column, a New York Observer writer called her “a Brooklyn hero” and praised her work for its beauty. Her editor at Brownstoner, Cate Corcoran, called her columns “really the heart and soul of what Brownstoner is about.”
Ms. Spellen is finding a way to make the move work, in part by using about one post a month to introduce the charms of Troy’s architecture to Brooklyn readers.
“New York was just crushing me spiritually and emotionally, and I instinctively knew I just needed to start somewhere else,” she said of her 2012 move. “By this time, Brooklyn was the hottest place in the universe, and it was depressing to be in the hottest place in the universe and practically homeless.”
via:http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/nyregion/blogger-keeps-focus-on-brooklyn-architecture-but-now-mostly-from-upstate.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0
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