PARK SLOPE — Residents who waged war against a mountain of trash that threatened to engulf a First Street house were recently honored with an award from the Park Slope Civic Council.
The Civic Council named five neighbors on First Street and Seventh Avenue as joint recipients of the 2015 Evelyn and Everett Ortner Preservation Award, the neighborhood group announced recently.
The Ortner awards highlight efforts to preserve Park Slope's historic charm through renovations or new construction. There's also a category to recognize "interventions" to protect the neighborhood's appearance; the First Street neighbors' actions fell under that heading.
The ad-hoc group banded together several years ago to tackle an eyesore house at 464 First St. where garbage and debris was piled high inside and out. Efforts to communicate with the home's owner — who suffered from untreated mental health problems, according to her son — weren't successful.
Neighbors made repeated complaints to various city agencies, but no one seemed willing or able to tackle the problem, said Julie Markes, one of the award recipients.
"It came to a dead end every time, from the Sanitation Department to the Fire Department, you would think an agency could help," Markes said. "They would send people over, they would take pictures and say tsk tsk. … But nothing came of it."
The situation worsened in the summer of 2013. The house's owner refused to let a social worker into her home and a police officer who responded to the incident fell through the decrepit building's floor.
The city intervened after that and declared the house unsafe to occupy, Markes said. Workers arrived to shore up the wobbly structure and cleared out the building, tossing much of the junk that had been inside the house into the backyard.
The mound of garbage rose almost to the building's second floor and soon attracted a family of five raccoons, rats and mosquitoes, Markes said. Surrounding neighbors felt like they were living next to a garbage dump.
"It was more than an eyesore — it was just a really bad situation," Markes said.
Neighbors pleaded with the city for help but were told city workers couldn't remove the trash pile because it wasn't safe to walk across the unstable basement floor that led to the backyard, Markes said.
After more than two years, neighbors finally found a solution. A resident of Second Street figured out that workers could safely reach the trash heap by walking through a breezeway that backed up to the garbage-clogged backyard.
In the fall of 2015, the mountain of debris was finally removed, Markes said.
"Now you look at it and it's an empty lot and it's like, 'Thank you, finally,'" Markes said.
The Ortner Award is named after Evelyn and Everett Ortner, a married couple who moved to Park Slope in the early 1960s and convinced others to follow their lead restoring dilapidated brownstones. They've been called "the couple who saved Park Slope."
Preserve Park Slope, a group that fought the expansion of New York Methodist Hospital and ultimately succeeded in getting the hospital to scale back its plans, also received an Ortner Award this year.
"Both interventions demonstrate how initiatives by members of the community can make a positive contribution to the appearance of Park Slope and other brownstone neighborhoods, " said awards administrator John Casson. "Hopefully, their actions will be emulated by others."
Before and after photos of the front of 464 First St., where neighbors tried for years to get help from city agencies in cleaning up the property.
