Calls from Brooklyn Heights usually come from one of three places: a brownstone floor-through with plaster older than the Brooklyn Bridge, a 1920s co-op with a service entrance and posted work hours, or a home office a block off Montague Street. Minimum visit is $130, and the price gets fixed from your photos before I load the van.
The city’s first landmark district, and what that means inside your apartment
Brooklyn Heights was designated New York’s first historic district in November 1965, which is why the blocks between the Promenade and Court Street still read the way they did a century ago: Federal, Greek Revival, and Italianate row houses, more than 600 of them already standing by 1860, plus the apartment houses that filled the gaps in the 1920s and ’30s. Landmark protection covers the outside of all of it. It does not cover the inside, which is where every job I take happens. What the buildings do change is how the job gets done:
- Plaster over wood lath, not drywall. Hardware that grips fine in a modern stud wall does nothing in lath that went up before the Civil War. I find the framing, or use anchors rated for solid plaster, before anything heavy goes up: heavy mirror hanging from $130, gallery wall up to 10 pieces from $140.
- Doors that stopped closing sometime last century. These frames have been settling since Lincoln was alive. A door that binds, drags, or won’t catch almost never needs replacing: planing and hinge work runs from $130, a new lockset from $130, and the original door stays where it is.
- Wood-frame houses up around Middagh and Willow. A handful of 1820s clapboard houses survived here from before wood-frame construction was banned in the neighborhood. Nothing in them is square or standard-sized, which is why odd corners and awkward alcoves get handled as light carpentry, quoted for the scope at my $130 minimum.
- Townhouses carved into floor-throughs, and prewar co-ops with a super. Either way there’s a stair to negotiate or a service entrance to book. Big flat-packs get carried up in boxes and built in the room: furniture assembly from $130 for a dresser, $180 for a PAX-size wardrobe.
- Landmark rules stop at the window glass. Interior jobs need no commission, no application, no waiting. The exception is hardware hanging outside the building, which is why I flag brackets and through-wall installs before a window A/C visit ($130 in, $130 out, and the seasonal rules are worth a read).
- Old radiators, old sashes, and the damp that follows them. Plaster cracks along the ceiling line, tub caulk goes black, paint lifts near a window that’s been leaking air since the Koch administration. Patch and paint from $140, tub re-caulking from $130.
Popular services in Brooklyn Heights
Furniture and walls lead the list. Flat-pack assembly is constant in the rental floor-throughs, and mounting is right behind it: TV mounting is from $130 on drywall and from $160 on brick or concrete, which is the number that comes up in parlor floors with exposed brick and in the party walls between two attached row houses. Send a photo of the wall and I’ll tell you which one you have before you book. Shelving is the other steady one, from $130 a floating shelf, because prewar closets in this neighborhood were built for people who owned four coats.
The rest is the list that piles up on a refrigerator door: a running toilet or a dripping faucet from $130, a light fixture or dimmer swap from $130, blinds and curtain rods from $130. Open-ended work like a closet build-out runs $75–95/hour instead of a flat rate, and everything published lives on the pricing page. Materials are extra. Cleanup isn’t: plaster dust does not stay on your floors.
How booking works
Send photos of the job, plus a line about what the wall is if you know it. One flat price comes back, from me, not from a scheduling desk, and the number in that text is the number on the invoice. The profile behind it holds 5.0 stars across 67 Google reviews.
I drive in and park where I can, so the three elevators at Clark Street are only your problem on delivery day. Evenings and Sundays are open, which fits a neighborhood where the courthouse crowd doesn’t get home before seven. If it’s urgent, check same-day availability. The rest of Brooklyn is on the same map, from Bay Ridge, where I live, up through Park Slope, and DUMBO, Cobble Hill, and Downtown Brooklyn all sit a few blocks off one end of the Heights or the other.
One text with photos is the entire intake process. Start here.
Letters to the desk, answered
My building is in the Brooklyn Heights Historic District. Do you need a landmarks permit to hang a TV?
No. The Landmarks Preservation Commission regulates the outside of a landmark building: facade, windows, stoop, anything the street can see. What happens inside your apartment is between you and your building. Mounting a TV, hanging shelves, swapping a light fixture, patching plaster: none of that goes anywhere near an LPC application. I don't take facade work, so landmarks review never turns into your problem on one of my visits.
The walls in my 1850s townhouse are plaster over wood lath. Will a mirror actually hold?
Yes, as long as I find the framing first. Old lath crumbles and carries almost nothing on its own, so I locate the studs behind it and anchor into those, or use hardware rated for solid plaster where the studs don't line up with your wall. That's the difference between a heavy mirror at $130 that stays put and one that comes down with a dinner-plate of plaster attached.
Can you put in my window A/C if the building is landmarked?
A seasonal unit dropped into an existing window opening is normal interior work: $130 to put it in, $130 to take it out in the fall. The part that needs checking is anything fixed to the outside of the building. Exterior brackets and through-the-wall units are exactly what landmark rules and co-op boards pay attention to, so ask your managing agent before you buy. If your setup needs approvals, I'll say so before you book, not after.
My co-op on Hicks Street has rules for outside workers. What do you need from me?
The rules, by text, before we pick a slot. The prewar buildings here mostly run on the same three things: the service entrance instead of the lobby, posted hours for noisy work, and a super who wants to know who's upstairs. Send those over and the visit gets planned around them rather than stalling at the desk.
Do you work in home offices and small offices near Montague Street?
Often. The blocks around Borough Hall and the courthouses are full of small law practices, therapists, and people who work from the parlor floor. They need the same things apartments do: TV and monitor mounting from $130, floating shelves from $130 each, a lockset from $130, blinds, a fixture that's been buzzing since last winter. I book those in the evening so nobody's client sits through a hammer drill.
How fast can you get to Brooklyn Heights, and do you work weekends?
My day starts in Bay Ridge, and the run up the BQE drops me at Cadman Plaza in about twenty minutes when traffic behaves. Text photos in the morning and same-day is often doable. I also work evenings until 10pm and on Sundays, which is when most of this neighborhood is actually home.