The initial money raised was insufficient, but by the time an additional $1.5 million was found — seven years later in 2021 — the scope of the project only got bigger and inflation had driven up the costs. Since then, millions more have been needed from elected officials to complete the work.
Even with more than $5 million in government money currently earmarked, the first phase of the restoration will not begin until next summer, according to the Parks Department, largely because of all the stages of review required for a landmarked building, which inevitably involve several different slow-moving city agencies.
Those who live in the historic district surrounding the house blame not only an inert bureaucracy for what has happened but also the mansion’s board of trustees, which includes no prominent constituent of the city’s giving circles and which has failed to cultivate wealthy donors.
The notion that “the board has been lax in passion is the farthest thing from the truth,” Lisa Koenigsberg, an architectural historian and the board’s chair told me. “We agonize just as much as the neighbors do. I understand the frustration and the sadness over the building,” she said. “There are these processes and procedures and needs and then these inevitable delays.” When I asked her about the lack of private funding, she said: “It wouldn’t make sense to look for nonpublic money. The building is the city’s responsibility.” This is a curious response in a place where public-private partnerships make most of our cultural life possible.
When the preservation movement took hold in New York in the early 1960s, the goal was to prevent beautiful buildings from being destroyed. In more recent years, the work has tilted from defense to offense, the effort to strike down plans for aesthetically dubious projects to come to life in the first place. On any given day, a neighborhood group is fighting a proposal for a building that is too tall, too ugly, too alienating, too out of character for a place with an intimate, cobblestone sense of itself. Often, that war is at odds with the city’s affordable housing ambitions; sometimes it further obscures the history that is suppressed for political inconvenience or simply allowed to fade from view.
Ten years ago, Camilla Huey mounted an exhibit at the mansion of elaborate corsets she made as a testament to the women close to Aaron Burr, who brought up his daughter Theodosia to “convince” the world that “women have souls.” As she put it, the house is the living embodiment of the complex equation of this country. “The rot and decay is evidence of profound contempt.”