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Eight Feet Jolted a $180M Real Estate Deal
A landowner named Hezekiah Beers Pierrepont started selling plots of his Brooklyn land in the 1820s restricted by eight-foot setbacks still in effect today, rankling modern developers.
Pierrepont’s marketing of Brooklyn Heights as one of America’s first suburbs is conventional wisdom, found everywhere from scholarly opinion pieces to the historical markers lining the streets of today’s landmark district. Jerold Kayden, a professor of urban planning at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and a lawyer, popularized the phrase “privately owned public space” to describe areas like the extra eight-foot sidewalk that could be produced either by zoning laws or restrictive covenants. Robert Castillo, whose firm BLD Land Surveyors prepared a survey of the St. Francis site for Alexico’s title insurer, said in a phone interview, “the city has no idea about these private covenants.”
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