Remodeling in Brooklyn Heights, the city's first historic district

What this page covers

This page is for owners of rowhouses and townhouses in Brooklyn Heights, and owners of apartments in its co-op and condominium buildings, planning kitchen, bathroom or whole-interior work. Building permits come from the NYC Department of Buildings (DOB). Lot figures are for DCP's Brooklyn Heights neighborhood tabulation area (NTA, BK0201), a statistical area built from six census tracts, not an official boundary. Structural alterations, additions and new construction are outside the work this page describes.

LPC districts

Almost every home is in a historic district

Brooklyn Heights carries the earliest designation date of the 141 districts in LPC's dataset. The 1965 designation report describes the Heights as an elevated plateau of brick and brownstone houses, and it names the kinds of renovation it wanted to stop: adding a full new story, removing front steps and rearranging windows so they no longer match their neighbors.

For a kitchen or bath, that means the interior is rarely the issue; what shows outside is. A new exhaust vent through a front or rear wall, a replaced window, a door to the garden or a rooftop condenser should be listed separately and checked on LPC's Discover NYC Landmarks map before anything is designed. LPC also lists interior work that needs a DOB permit among the work that needs its permit.

What the lot data shows

A house and a co-op apartment are different jobs

By lot count, almost two in five are one- and two-family houses; by homes, most people live in apartments, and about two-thirds of units are on lots with 20 or more units. So a Brooklyn Heights kitchen is either a house project, where the owner decides and LPC and DOB review, or an apartment project, where a co-op or condo board usually reviews the plan under its alteration agreement first.

In a house, the legal unit count matters too: HPD requires annual registration for a building with three or more units, or for a one- or two-family house where neither the owner nor the owner's family lives. Check the Certificate of Occupancy before planning.

Downtown Brooklyn zoning at the edge, and flood maps

PLUTO maps 75 of the NTA's lots with homes in the Special Downtown Brooklyn District. Its Zoning Resolution chapter deals with use, building bulk, street walls and parking, which shape buildings rather than kitchens; whether it touches a particular plan is a question for a design professional. Flood exposure is low: 7 lots with homes (0.6%) are flagged on FEMA's 2015 preliminary map. Year-built values before 1940 cover 94% of lots with homes; DCP says the field is accurate only to the decade.

Brooklyn Heights brief: what to write down

1. The LPC map result for the address, and which district it is in.
2. House or apartment; for an apartment, the alteration agreement and the managing agent's requirements.
3. The legal unit count and floor-by-floor use on the Certificate of Occupancy.
4. Items that show outside, listed separately: vents, windows, doors, rooftop equipment.
5. Who lives in the building during the work, and which shutoffs affect them.

Room-by-room planning is on bathroom remodeling in Brooklyn, Brooklyn kitchen remodeling and home renovation in Brooklyn. Renovating an older home covers conditions behind old walls.