By Jeremy Lechtzin and Aliza Aufrichtig

When St. Francis College moved to its modern Brooklyn Heights campus in 1963, giving up an older South Brooklyn location, its yearbook heralded the new site with pomp and self-satisfaction: “Finally, an end to waiting: Completion of the job.”

These campus buildings centered around 180 Remsen Street, once a “bold step for the present” and a “bolder step toward the future,” now sit empty, left behind in 2022, when the college moved again and shuffled over one neighborhood east to Downtown Brooklyn.

The letters on the sign are gone, but their shadow lingers.

Amir Hamja/The New York Times

Brooklyn Heights is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in New York City so a sprawling campus is not the sort of property you want to hold onto just for the memories. It was only a matter of time before St. Francis sold its old digs.

Amir Hamja/The New York Times

The neighborhood is filled with brownstones and townhouses that don’t change much or quickly. In 1922, farther down Remsen Street, it used to look like this.

77 and 75 Remsen Street, 1922

New-York Historical Society

And now, on the same block — and on many of its blocks — it still looks like this.

Amir Hamja/The New York Times

Brooklyn Heights doesn’t look much like this. And it’s no coincidence.

56 Leonard Street in Manhattan: the “Jenga” building.

Stefano Ukmar for The New York Times

Reports emerged early last year that St. Francis was selling its former campus to the Alexico Group, the developer of Manhattan’s “Jenga” building.

Weeks later, the college announced a sale. But not to Alexico. They said Rockrose Development was the buyer.

Then, last June, Alexico sued St. Francis and Rockrose. Alexico’s complaint said that when the college shifted the $180 million deal to Rockrose after Alexico tried to delay the closing, both defendants breached contracts they had with the plaintiff. Alexico also offered an explanation for their delay: uncertainty over an eight-foot property-line setback requirement that restricted the site’s redevelopment and affected its value.

See how the sidewalk is extra wide in front of the old St. Francis building? You’re looking at the eight-foot setback. And it has to be there.

Specifically, it’s the part of the sidewalk to the right of the person in the brown coat. The sidewalk that is part of St. Francis’s property.

Amir Hamja/The New York Times

Bill Bosch at Pillsbury, a lawyer for Rockrose, told the court that Alexico knew about the eight-foot setback restriction even before signing the purchase agreement with St. Francis College.

Dan Perry of Milbank LLP, a lawyer for Alexico, would not comment. Representatives for St. Francis College didn’t respond to several email and phone call requests for comment.

Bob Knakal, the prominent commercial real estate broker, says for anyone looking to sell or buy a development site, “one of the first things you look at are covenants, easements or any other issues that could impact the contextual aspects of the development.”

The eight-foot strip is there because of a man named Hezekiah Beers Pierrepont.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

Step back 200 years to when Brooklyn Heights looked more like this, a bucolic village across the shores from New York City.

“Winter Scene in Brooklyn” by Francis Guy, circa 1819-1820 shows a view of Front Street on a snowy day.

Brooklyn Museum

Pierrepont, a wealthy Brooklyn Heights landowner, wanted to sell plots of his property to wealthy Manhattanites looking for a retreat from the big city. Pierrepont mapped out his land with today’s familiar street grid and filled it with 25-by-100-foot building lots. He named one of the streets after himself but gussied up the spelling from “Pierpont” to “Pierrepont” for added cachet, later doing the same thing with his own family surname.

An announcement of lots from the Pierrepont Estate, to be sold by auction in 1848. The street grid remains today.

Brooklyn Public Library

Pierrepont’s marketing of Brooklyn Heights as one of America’s first suburbs is conventional wisdom, found everywhere from scholarly opinion pieces to the historical markers lining the streets of today’s landmark district.

The signs, which can be found on street posts throughout Brooklyn Heights, celebrate Pierrepont, “a transplanted New Englander,” as important to the history of the neighborhood.

Amir Hamja/The New York Times

By the early 1820s, Pierrepont was taking out ads in Brooklyn newspapers advertising Brooklyn Heights as a “place of residence combining all the advantages of the country with most of the conveniences of the city.”

An advertisement from 1824 placed by Pierrepont in the Long-Island Star.

More important but less celebrated, Pierrepont then shifted his pitch to promise that the neighborhood character would be backed up by a legal guarantee. Only dwelling houses would be allowed — no rear-lot cooperages or blacksmith shops mixed in with residential uses. The homes had to be made of brick, with slate or metal roofs — no cheap, fire-prone, wood-frame, shingled-roof houses. They had to be actual (or aspiring) mansions — a minimum of 25 feet wide and two stories tall. All “to be set back 8 feet to form a straight line of fronts the whole length on each side of the streets.”

Zoning before zoning: an advertisement placed by Pierrepont in the Long-Island Star from 1829 spelled out land use restrictions.

His restrictive covenants would block a buyer who couldn’t afford a large house or top-line construction. And the restrictions would block houses from being built right up to the property line — he wouldn’t just tout the appearance of country living through widely spaced houses, he’d lock it into the lot requirements.

The language in a typical Pierrepont deed looked like this: the purchaser (and all future owners) “shall not now nor will at any time hereafter erect any building whatever within eight feet of the front of said land on Remsen Street.”

An 1851 deed from John and Sarah Prentice, to Augustine Boursand, who built original brownstones at 158-160-162 Remsen Street. John Prentice was an active speculator in Remsen Street property. He bought this plot from Hezekiah Pierrepont’s daughter Harriet in 1847 and flipped it to French teacher Boursand four years later.

(Pierrepont’s deeds also banned at the site any future “brewery, distillery, slaughterhouse, smith shop, forge” and other businesses that might make life unpleasant for neighbors of his buyers. This formulaic language banning so-called “noxious trades” and nuisances wasn’t uncommon in the 19th century.)

Iron factories, sugar bakeries and any soap, candle, starch, varnish, vitriol, glue, ink or turpentine factory were banned.

Pierrepont expanded on the period’s customary land use restrictions by also adding required types, materials, and sizes for buildings, and lot geometry minimums — concepts which are familiar from today’s zoning.

His restrictions were imposed privately, but in the format of a deed restrictive covenant that has the force of law — closely equivalent to modern, city-imposed restrictions contained in zoning regulations.

Gergely Baics, an associate professor of history and urban studies at Barnard College, has explored the link between these private restrictions and the development of 19th-century New York. He said that restrictive covenants more than anything else “generated an adequate amount of residential isolation to achieve [the era’s] level of desirability.”

Designed for a high level of desirability.

New York Public Library

Today, we call this exclusionary zoning.

But of course, many things are different today. Smith shops and candle factories are no longer the center of NIMBY battles. So why does the eight-foot setback restriction still exist?

When Pierrepont died in 1838, his children inherited wide swaths of the family’s Brooklyn Heights land. These heirs started a decades-long process of divvying up the estate and parceling it out to other local developers and speculators.

Henry Evelyn Pierrepont, son of Hezekiah, and his wife, Anna Maria. Henry led his fellow heirs in establishing restrictive covenants for all of their inherited property.

Jay Heritage Center

In 1852, the heirs enshrined Pierrepont’s lot-by-lot restrictions by agreeing to a list of setbacks and other site restrictions that would automatically apply as covenants for land transfers on all of the Brooklyn Heights streets in their portfolio. Some had eight-foot setbacks like on Remsen Street, others a little more or a little less.

These articles of agreement among Pierrepont heirs imposed restrictive covenants on all their remaining property from 1852, including restrictions on building “within eight feet of the front of any of said lots which are situated upon Montague Street or Remsen Street.”

Other Brooklyn Heights developers followed the Pierrepont family’s lead by establishing restrictive covenants on their land sales, too.

When you see this row of townhouses, all in a line set back from the street, the front courtyard is not just for aesthetics — it’s often required.

Stoops in Brooklyn Heights.

Amir Hamja/The New York Times

You can see the eight feet designated on maps from 1887.

An 1887 Sanborn fire insurance map which shows the eight-foot setback on Remsen Street as the shallow white space between the street and each pink or blue building outline.

New York Public Library Digital Collections

It’s still there on a land survey from 1916.

Survey from 1916 showing the 8 foot setback at No. 166 Remsen Street.

BLD Land Surveyors

You can still see that eight feet even on today’s map.

The buildings on Remsen Street’s south side are set back from the property line. The difference is the eight feet.

Google

And if you walk down Remsen street today, you can see the eight feet on this extra-wide sidewalk in front of the former St. Francis College buildings. The public part of the sidewalk is 14 feet wide and the eight-foot strip closest to the buildings is private property. It’s this strip that led to the lawsuit, possibly slowing redevelopment of the site.

Amir Hamja/The New York Times

Pierrepont and his heirs’ restrictions were largely intended to establish residential living. But then a curious thing happened. Not much more than a generation after the original developers had enforced their intended vision of neighborhood character, Brooklyn boomed.

View of the booming Brooklyn City Hall area circa 1852.

New York Public Library Digital Collections

For this block of Remsen Street, the growth was transformational. The Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883, further fueling Brooklyn’s upturn, which had already become the country’s third most populous city by 1880. Downtown Brooklyn’s retail, commercial and financial hub exploded, right at the doorstep of Remsen Street.

The elevated train barrels by Brooklyn’s old City Hall on this stereograph from 1907.

Library of Congress

The Borough Hall IRT station opened in 1908, Brooklyn’s first link on the new subway and just one block away from Remsen Street.

Image from the Joseph Covino New York City Postcards Collection via The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive of The Cooper Union.

Continuing pressure for commercial space here, combined with new popular residential locations farther out in what was now a borough of New York City, tipped the block to almost wholly commercial over the course of a few decades.

Many of this block’s brownstone houses saw their old stoops replaced with ground-floor storefronts. Sometimes, the brownstone fronts themselves were refaced in more contemporary stone. But all of these conversions continued to adhere to the eight-foot setback, as was still required by the deeds.

162, 164 and 166 Remsen Street, circa 1949. Former houses had been converted to offices.

Brooklyn Eagle Photographs, Brooklyn Public Library

When St. Francis moved to Remsen Street in the 1960s, they kept one of these buildings. And tore down some others.

Remsen Street around 1865, where the St. Francis buildings now stand.

Over their 60 years on the street, the campus evolved, ever keeping to the eight-foot line where required. And soon, likely, the campus will be redeveloped, but the extra eight-foot sidewalk will remain. How soon may be a question for the courts.

Amir Hamja/The New York Times

Jerold Kayden, a professor of urban planning at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and a lawyer, popularized the phrase “privately owned public space” to describe areas like the extra eight-foot sidewalk that could be produced either by zoning laws or restrictive covenants.

Unlike zoning which can be adopted or rescinded by a legislative body, private covenants are “very, very hard” to remove, he said.

And how do you even know if there’s a restriction?

The only surefire way to verify the use of covenants is to examine individual deeds through a title search. Performing a property survey won’t give a definitive answer. Robert Castillo, whose firm BLD Land Surveyors prepared a survey of the St. Francis site for Alexico’s title insurer, said in a phone interview, “the city has no idea about these private covenants.”

The empty campus.

Amir Hamja/The New York Times

Rockrose’s president, Justin Elghanayan, would not comment on whether the specific Remsen Street restrictions impacted its purchase of the St. Francis site. But he said restrictive covenants don’t deter him.

“I’ve seen other projects where you have deed restrictions,” Elghanayan said. “You have to respect it. It’s an agreement that was made in the past.”

So Rockrose is moving ahead with its proposed redevelopment of the site — eight-foot setback included.

A rendering for the potential redevelopment of the old St. Francis College campus.

Rockrose Development