hey that pink house is on nytimes :)

armchair_warrior

Park Slope
Pretty in Pink

By JAKE MOONEY
Published: November 12, 2006

The brownstone at 233 Garfield Place in Park Slope has the same carved wood door as the house next door, at No. 235, and the same stonework as the house at No. 237. What makes No. 233 unique, as everyone in the neighborhood well knows by now, is something rather less subtle: its color.

The house has been pink for decades — since before the Park Slope Historic District was created in 1973 — but turned a brighter shade a few months ago when its owner, Bernie Henry, gave it a new coat of paint.

“Now,” said Craig Hammerman, district manager of Community Board 6, “it’s a really bright magenta. It used to be a softer, pastel-type pink.”

Ever since Mr. Henry, who is 90, had the house repainted, it has been a magnet for reporters and attention-seekers. Neighbors rattle off the names of local television stations that have sent camera crews, and the house has even attracted its own tourists, as Anne Joseph, who lives on the next block, discovered when one of them stopped her partner on the street.

“He said: ‘We’re driving around; we’re from Staten Island; where is that pink house?’ ” Ms. Joseph recalled one morning recently.

As for why the house was painted pink in the first place, Mr. Henry, reached by phone, shed little light on the matter. “So what’s wrong with the house?” he said. “I’ve been through that already. Why are you asking me about it? Get somebody else’s house.”

In the professional opinion of Ken Herbert, a Manhattan resident who the other day was sitting on the stoop of a nearby brownstone and who owns a flooring and painting company that was renovating the neighboring building, the house is “bubblegum pink,” and is one of the strangest he has seen. But Mr. Herbert added: “I’ve seen some pretty bizarre things in Park Avenue apartments. Mostly in bathrooms.”