NEWS: Evelyn Ortner 1924 – 2006
Evelyn was a champion of historic preservation and a great person. She will be missed.
From the NY Times:
September 22, 2006
Evelyn Ortner, 82, a Booster of Brooklyn Brownstones, Dies
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
Evelyn Ortner, who with her husband, Everett, was among the first, the most vocal and the most effective champions of the brownstone revival that spread from Brooklyn to the rest of the country, died on Tuesday at her home in Park Slope. She was 82.
The cause has not been determined. She had a mastectomy two weeks ago, but had seemed to be doing well until her death, her husband said.
Victorian homes had fallen into disfavor and many middle-class New Yorkers were moving to the suburbs by 1963, when Mrs. Ortner and her husband bought a four-story 1886 brownstone on Berkeley Place in Park Slope.
Mrs. Ortner, an interior designer before she became a preservationist, was so enchanted by that house, with its original mahogany woodwork and papier-mâché and linseed-oil wallpaper, that she began a campaign to save thousands of other brownstones from neglect or the wrecking ball.
Many of the graceful 19th-century single-family homes in Park Slope were owned by absentee landlords and had been cut up into rooming houses. In other parts of New York, old homes were being lost to federally sponsored urban renewal projects.
The Ortners decided to make brownstones — and Brooklyn — appealing to many people who had never considered anything but apartment life in Manhattan. To attract other preservationists, the Ortners and a small group of likeminded Brooklynites began conducting some historic-house tours to present dilapidated houses as opportunities. Mrs. Ortner publicized the tours by dressing in antique clothing and posing for newspaper photographers.
She and her husband convinced Brooklyn Union Gas that it would be good business to buy another old house, then occupied by pigeons, and turn it into a showcase. That house, at 211 Berkeley Place, became the first of a series of Cinderella Projects undertaken by the company, now called Keyspan, and the Ortners were eventually featured in full-page Brooklyn Union ads.
In 1968, the Ortners helped found the Brownstone Revival Committee, now known as the Brownstone Revival Coalition, a citywide preservation organization.
“It was the beginning of the brownstone frenzy, the mania,” she said in an interview in 2003 conducted as part of the New York Preservation Archive Project.
In 1974, the brownstone coalition held a national “Back to the City’’ conference at the Waldorf-Astoria, which was followed by 13 other annual conferences in 13 cities, including St. Paul, Hartford, Washington and San Antonio, Mr. Ortner said.
Mrs. Ortner did much of the historical research that persuaded the New York City Landmarks Preservation Committee to designate the Park Slope historic district in 1973, her husband said.
“Because of her knowledge of interior design and her personal charm, she was able to convince large numbers of people that saving brownstones and saving neighborhoods were worthwhile causes,’’ said Ronda Wist, executive director of the New York City Landmarks Commission.
Mrs. Ortner’s enthusiasm was infectious. Clem Labine was a writer for Chemical Engineering magazine when he met her at a New Year’s Eve party in 1966. He was planning to move to the suburbs, and the Ortners persuaded him to buy a brownstone a block away from them. He went on to found magazines called Old House Journal, Traditional Building and Period Homes.
Evelyn Gelbman was born in Manhattan on July 4, 1924, the daughter of Joseph Gelbman, an electrical contractor, and his wife, Stella. She grew up in the north Bronx and earned a bachelor’s degree in Spanish from Hunter College. In 1953, she married Everett, an editor at Popular Science magazine for 33 years. Besides her husband, she is survived by her brother, Bernard Gelbman of Manhattan.
She studied interior design at Pratt Institute in the 1950’s and historic preservation at Columbia University in the 1970’s and until recently worked as an interior designer.
She championed the restoration of the stained glass windows at St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn, beginning in 1979. That project led to the creation of the Brooklyn Stained Glass Conservation Center, a nonprofit studio, of which she was the president. From 1979 to 1984, she was director of facilities and collections of the New York Chamber of Commerce.
In part because of their own difficulty in getting a mortgage for their $32,500 house, the Ortners were prominent in the anti-redlining campaigns beginning in the mid-1960’s, when many banks were reluctant to finance mortgages in declining neighborhoods like Park Slope, Cobble Hill and even Brooklyn Heights, where brownstones now routinely sell for millions of dollars.
She was never motivated by money. The only house that she and her husband ever owned was their own, where she was living at the time of her death.