« REJECTED | Main | Ratner to build City Tech tower »
September 22, 2006
Activist Evelyn Ortner dies at 82
The Brooklyn Papers
By Christie Rizk
Evelyn Ortner, whose four decades of preserving Brooklyn’s unique character started with a single brownstone on Berkeley Place in Park Slope and ended with her opposition to Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project, died Tuesday. She was 82.
An early advocate for restoring Brooklyn’s crumbling brownstone neighborhoods, Ortner — along with her husband Everett, himself a noted preservationist — reversed Park Slope’s steady decline in the 1960s and ’70s, by demanding that city and state officials protect a historical and architectural significance that others had overlooked.
“They were both pioneers and legends,” said Peg Breen, the president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, which recently presented the couple with an award. “They were ahead of their time and they had great guts.”
After buying a brownstone on Berkeley Place in 1963, the Ortners began talking friends into moving into the neighborhood. They were soon fighting “urban renewal” projects that had slated most of Park Slope’s brownstones for demolition and convinced banks to start giving mortgages to prospective homeowners.
“They were the heart and soul of that movement,” said Maryann Feeney of the Park Slope Civic Council, who worked with the Ortners.
...
“She felt that Atlantic Yards was against most things she stood for,” says DDDB spokesman Daniel Goldstein.“To have someone like that support what we were doing further emboldened us and showed us that what we were doing was right.”
Posted by lumi at September 22, 2006 6:49 AM