Irony: Prospect Heights Historic District used to promote 550 Vanderbilt (beneficiary of blight finding)

There's something a little ironic about the tweet at right from Pacific Park Brooklyn, touting the new condo building 550 Vanderbilt. The photo captures not just the brownish brick and large windows of the lower floors of the tower, but also the brown street sign Vanderbilt Av.

A brown street sign indicates a historic district, and the small horizontal band delineates the Prospect Heights Historic District, which was designated in 2009 after several years of activism.

As the map below shows, Vanderbilt Avenue and Pacific Street, just across from 550 Vanderbilt, is the extreme upper right "finger" of the historic district, thus bookending the southeast block of the Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park project.

And that reminds us that the historic district designation came a few short years after the Atlantic Yards site, including many properties on that southeast block, was found to be blighted, to enable eminent domain.

It's not typical for blight--"substandard" and "insanitary" conditions which are supposed to take a neighborhood down--to coexist with adjacent blocks meriting historic district designation.