Remodeling a rowhouse in Park Slope, Brooklyn

What this page covers

This page is for owners of one- and two-family rowhouses in Park Slope, and owners who live in a three- or four-family brownstone, planning kitchen, bathroom or whole-interior work. Park Slope is a Brooklyn neighborhood, so building permits come from the NYC Department of Buildings (DOB). Lot figures are for DCP's Park Slope neighborhood tabulation area (NTA, BK0602), a statistical area built from census tracts, not an official boundary. Structural alterations, additions and new construction are outside the work this page describes.

LPC districts

Three designations under one name

LPC's 2016 press release counts 2,853 protected buildings in Park Slope across the three. In PLUTO, 2,548 of the NTA's 6,464 tax lots with homes (39.4%) carry one of the three names, and another 21 Extension lots fall in the neighboring Windsor Terrace-South Slope NTA. LPC's open dataset lists the 1973 district but not the two extensions as separate rows, so an address search on LPC's Discover NYC Landmarks map is the check, not a district list.

The 2012 and 2016 reports include building profiles, and the 2012 report is organized street by street. Find the entry for your house before planning anything that shows outside: a kitchen or bath vent through the front or rear wall, a replaced window, a new door to the yard. The Brooklyn page sets out which interior work LPC says it reviews.

What the lot data shows

One, two or three-plus families: why the count matters

Walk-up lots hold about 45% of the NTA's homes, and elevator-building lots about 13%. Inside the 1973 district, 53.5% of lots with homes are one- or two-family and 40.1% are walk-ups. So a Park Slope "brownstone" may be a single-family house, a two-family house that was once one, or a three- or four-family building.

That count changes more than the floor plan. The city's housing agency, HPD, treats a building with three or more residential units as a multiple dwelling that must register every year. A one- or two-family house registers only if neither the owner nor the owner's family lives there. Other rules can also depend on the unit count and the Certificate of Occupancy. Before pricing work, check the legal unit count on the CO, if there is one, and ask a design professional which rules follow from it.

PLUTO flags no lot with homes in the NTA on either FEMA flood map. Year-built values before 1940 cover 95% of lots with homes; DCP says the field is accurate only to the decade.

Rowhouse brief: what to write down

1. The LPC map result for the address, and which of the three designations it falls in.
2. The designation-report entry for the house, if there is one, saved with the brief.
3. The legal unit count and floor-by-floor use on the Certificate of Occupancy, including any store or office.
4. Which units are occupied during the work, and by whom. A tenant upstairs changes shutoff and noise planning.
5. Front-facade items and rear-facade items listed separately from interior finishes: vents, windows, doors to the yard, condensers.
6. Shared walls with each neighbor, and any plan that would open or fix to them. Ask a qualified professional first.

Room-by-room planning is on Brooklyn kitchen remodeling, bathroom remodeling in Brooklyn and home renovation in Brooklyn. The two-family home project brief covers planning with a second household in the building, and renovating an older home covers conditions behind old walls.