BROOKLYN HEIGHTS — A popular Brooklyn Heights house tour has ended after 31 years, organizers said, amid concerns from homeowners who saw photos posted on social media as an invasion of privacy.
The Brooklyn Heights Association has held its annual historic home tour for 31 years, but the group will not organize another in the near future, executive director Peter Bray said.
One of the biggest challenges of the tour was finding unique homes to showcase every year, Bray said.
After more than three decades, "It's difficult to keep going back to owners who have had their house on the tour in years past."
And for some residents, there was a reluctance to allow the public to go through their homes, he said.
At the association's annual meeting last week, treasurer Daniel Watts reportedly echoed those concerns and pointed to the inescapable posts on Twitter and Instagram as one of the causes.
"The House Tour is a victim of the modern world," he said, according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
In movie theaters and Broadway shows, warnings are issued to refrain from recording videos or images at the start of performances. Similarly, on the tour's event page from 2012, the association said, "taking photographs and cell phone use inside the houses is prohibited."
But making sure people actually follow those rules is a different matter.
"Trying to enforce rules to have people respect the privacy of people's homes is a big job," Bray told DNAinfo on Friday.
Organizing the tour every year also takes a tremendous amount of labor and volunteer efforts, he said.
During the tour, participants typically visit five homes in the neighborhood that are selected based on their architectural or historical significance.
"They really illustrated a wide range of residential interiors," Bray said. "These are homes in which the homeowners could demonstrate through the way they've kept up or renovated or restored it."
While Bray has not heard any specific complaints about social media posts, he said that since he's only been executive director for less than a year, "It wouldn't surprise me if an incident like that might have happened."
The demise of the house tours also mean a 40-percent loss in annual revenue for the Brooklyn Heights Association.
The group is currently in the early stages of planning another event to take over the tours and make up for the loss of income.
"It's a little too premature to talk about what we have in the planning process now," Bray said.
However, one thing is for sure — "It won't be a house tour."
