123 On the PARK

After many, many years of sitting fallow, the once rugged Caledonian Hospital is set to return from the dead like a great Scottish Lion. That is to say, rather than having to become ill or heavy with child to take up room at the Great Inn of Caledonia you can now rent a studio, one, two or even three bedroom apartment for (probably) anywhere from 2 to 3 thousand Simoleons, who knows maybe more. And while literally thousands of Brooklynites breathed their first sweet breath in the building now dubbed 123 on the Park, it was never a beautiful building. But it what it does have in spades is an abundance of front lawn. That lawn, divided from the Castle by a two-way moat named Parkside Avenue, is known to locals as the Park of Prospect, and in the following video from the newly operational website 123onthepark.com, you can see that it is the SOLE reason at this point to consider buying a condo therein. Take a look:

Nary a word about the building, the laundry room, the price, the size, no floor plans or ceiling plans, nor even closet sizes nor whether there's on-site parking. Just pictures of the front lawn in all its warm weather glory. Makes you wonder if they're renting apartments or campsites.

But I did capture the rendering, poorly, one night a couple months ago, so we do know that the end product will look something thusly, though probably less blurry and reflecty:

Unless the development has been led by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, wrapping the building in, say, Saran wrap, it will likely NOT have a shiny transparent plastic veneer as above. It IS however an 80/20 building in the sense that 80% of the residents will be skinny tall white women (pictured) and the remaining 20% will be set aside for "other." Overweight humans need not apply, but there will be a certain set-aside for fat pets.

There's still room for more building (I haven't investigated what's happening with that - last I heard there was trouble getting permission to build a new second structure), but no politician or power-broker ever expressed any interest in engaging the buyer Chetrit in any way. Where the mere mention of an out-of-context dormer might cause ear-shattering gasps on the Slope side of the park, you could hear the sucking sound as you exit the air lock into outer space as the world basically said "really? they're going to do what with that? are you serious? who? why? okay, whatever" and moved on to talking about the latest culinary "find" along Vanderbilt or Dekalb or Franklin or somewhere in Bed-Stuy. Despite it being one of the most major projects along the second greatest urban park* in the world in decades, 123 has flown pretty much under the radar. This to me a sign of what has long been Flatbush's backwater status, that the building would go from hospital to poorly run medical arts center to abandoned property to luxury apartment building without so much as a whimper from pols or outcry from block associations or community boards or anyone getting up in arms about the trash and graffiti over the last many years. I mean am I overstating it? It's really, really odd.  In a certain way, this building has been a stand-in narrative of what was and is and will be of Brooklyn herself. From its old-world beginnings as an outgrowth of the post-turn-of-last century's gentry's concern for the health of their poor countrymen (the Scots), to its new post-turn-of-this century's concern for the health of the new gentry (the Hips), Caledonian has lived a century of change.

In fairness, this is about as good a turn of events as one could hope in the current environment of, ho hum, laissez faire blah and blah. Roughly 100 years ago folks of means were scrounging together coin to create a hospital for mostly indigent immigrants (check out this wild page from The Caledonian) to build the hospital below, the first structure of which was basically a converted house and eventually the building to be luxury condos as we know her today:

Early in my Brooklyn years a friend was rushed to the E.R. here. Ah, the memories!



*guess which is first...you might be wrong!