Those whom the Ortners wooed to Park Slope in the 1960s, when most Manhattanites thought it was little better than a slum, are worried: will the house’s new owner appreciate the Victorian-era parlor and dining room the Ortners worked so tirelessly to preserve, even as they helped transform Brooklyn into the land of kale and luxury condominiums?
Brooklyn as it is now is still astonishing to those early settlers who became the Ortners’ lifelong friends and dinner guests. For one thing, the move has made them all rich. When the Ortners bought the house in 1963, they paid $ 32,500. The asking price now: $ 4.8 million.
For the Ortners, however, 272 Berkeley, just off Grand Army Plaza, was never simply an investment. It was a historic landmark (designated in 1973, along with much of Park Slope), a headquarters for their Brooklyn preservation and cultural projects, a social center — and now, for their friends, the site of echoing memories.
“I passed many a delightful evening of camaraderie and general frivolity in the parlor floor of that house,” said Clem Labine, 77, who had planned to move to the suburbs before the Ortners took him for a life-changing tour of Park Slope. He met his wife at a party in the front room of the Ortners’ parlor floor, which still boasts the mahogany woodwork, floral plaster moldings and linseed-oil wallpaper installed when it was built in 1886 to attract the middle-class families who first bought Park Slope’s row houses.
Dinner parties at 272 Berkeley Place, to which Mrs. Ortner regularly invited a mix of old friends and interesting people she had just discovered, were a matter of longstanding ritual. There would be special lemonade, made from a secret recipe. Cocktails in the front room. Dinner in the dining room, among the antiques the Ortners had collected at auction and on their extensive travels, with plenty of wine.
Toward the end of dinner, recalled Dexter Guerrieri, a longtime friend and the president of Vandenberg, the Townhouse Experts, which is selling the house, there would always be a Brooklyn beer and a merry rendition of what they called “the Brooklyn song,” which Mrs. Ortner always said was taken from a failed 1920s Broadway musical. (Two sample lines: “The udder ‘O’ is thrown in from left field / ‘K’ and ‘L’ mean absolutely nuttin’.”)
“It’s a little melancholy and nostalgic, but one can just hope that it’ll be acquired by someone who’ll then live a whole other wonderful life there,” Mr. Labine said. “I just hope it’s somebody who appreciates the house.”
It will, if Mr. Guerrieri has anything to do with it. “That’s why they’re going to be buying it,” he said. “Because they love it.”
The house listing calls the parlor floor, which has the feel of a period room under glass, “museum-quality.” Other floors are rife with Victorian-era anachronisms like speaking tubes, push-button light switches, buttons for summoning servants and an iron furnace in the cellar (it still works). But the entire brownstone is something of a museum of the Ortners’ lives and their efforts to preserve and promote their borough.
A large portrait of the couple stands over an antique wood contraption that tells you if “Signor Broccoli” or “La Signora,” as the master and mistress of Berkeley Place jokingly called themselves, is out or at home; downstairs, the walls bulge with certificates and plaques honoring the Ortners’ contributions to a dizzying array of institutions.
Some, like the Brooklyn Academy of Music, were so overlooked that Mrs. Ortner held bake sales to help support them; others, like the Brownstone Revival Coalition, did not exist until the Ortners came along.
“This desk, the Brownstone Revival Coalition happened from,” Mr. Guerrieri said, surveying a nondescript office area. “And BAM happened from that desk.”
The “BAM desk” was the same one Mrs. Ortner was working at when she died in 2006, at 82. Mr. Ortner died last May, at 92.
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