The red-brick Cobble Hill Towers restoration in the 1970s involved the rehabilitation of nine inter-connected 1876 National Landmark buildings into 187 dwelling units at a total cost of $5,000,000. It is the largest project developed under New York City's neighborhood preservation program. It received the Urban Design Award for Preservation and Renovation and a $200,000 preservation grant under the 1966 Historic Preservation Act. The group of nine buildings is often referred to as "The Granddaddy of Historic Preservation." Six of the nine buildings were abandoned, and four of these had extensive fire damage. The buildings were all in tax arrears and were due to be foreclosed. The remaining three were occupied by artists, dancers, teachers as well as descendents of the original inhabitants.
They are one of the earliest low-rent housing projects in New York City. A sociological experiment supported by Walt Whitman and sponsored by Alfred Tredway White, a 19th-century Brooklyn merchant and philanthropist. The buildings, which now overlook the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and lower Manhattan, were built in 1876 and 1877 spearheading the tenement-house reform. They were designed for working people of modest income, with central courtyards for recreation that let air and light into the apartments, a revolutionary idea for low-income housing.
The renovation of all nine buildings included the restoration of the cast iron, slate and interesting brick work. The Cobble Hill Towers is used as an example of a quite complicated historic preservation and its adaptive reuse.
Behind the Cobble Hill Towers between Baltic and Warren Streets is another project sponsored by White: the Warren Place Workingmen's Cottages. This is a group of 26 two-story brick cottages grouped around an inner courtyard with a garden, called Warren Place. They were built for the "workingman". The cottages are now privately owned. After visiting the slums of London, he returned and proclaimed that " No city suffers so much and so unnecessarily from the evils of overcrowding as does New York today." He engaged the firm of William Field & Son to build the Cottages, to give the workingmen of the city "the chance to live decently, and to bring up their children to be decent men and women."
Alfred Tredway White (1846 - 1921) was born into a wealthy Brooklyn family. He was known as "the great heart and mastermind of Brooklyn's better self". He led the movement to improve living conditions for the urban poor in New York. White took up the cause of housing reform after teaching in the settlement school sponsored by the First Unitarian Church of Brooklyn and superintending the church's settlement work in 1869. Appalled by living conditions in the tenements and inspired by the church's mission, White planned healthy housing for low-income working families based on British models. White constructed the Tower Buildings in the same area in 1878 and 1879, and in 1890 on nearby waterfront property he built the nine Riverside Buildings. White's projects turned a modest profit, validating his dictum "philanthropy plus 5 percent" and encouraging other landlords to enter the market for low-income housing. White's financial success and public advocacy of his cause also influenced passage of the New York state tenement reform legislation. White's other reform endeavors included support for the Tuskegee Institute, Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, the Children's Aid Society, and endowment of a chair at Harvard University.
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