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Habitats | Kensington, Brooklyn
WHEN strangers approach, there’s a fierce bark behind the closed door of the Blitz family’s 1899 American Foursquare house in Kensington, Brooklyn. But on close inspection, the dog, Magda, turns out to be just 10 inches tall, and pretty enough to be carried around in a socialite’s Louis Vuitton bag.
“She’s a Can Hardly,” said Dori Dietz Blitz. Meaning the family can hardly tell what kind of dog she is.
Ms. Dietz Blitz and her husband, Allen Blitz, have a daughter, Meg Blitz, 27, who lives at home. Her older sister, Kendra Blitz, 31, lives in Somerville, Mass.
Meg got Magda at Hamilton Dog House, an animal shelter and pet supply store in the neighborhood. Hamilton Dog House got a lot of publicity last summer when a two-headed turtle was stolen from its window. More recently it has served as a good source of referrals for Meg, who has a dog-walking and pet-sitting business.
In addition to Magda, the family has a cat. They used to have a rabbit, which chewed through the wooden railing of the second-floor balcony, so it could pass its afternoons sitting in a cool gutter. But one day it fell out and died. Meg often takes other animals home for temporary stays with the family. On a recent day, a small shepherd mix was visiting from Fort Greene because its owner was out of town.
And why not? The family has 10 rooms and two bathrooms on the top two floors, plus a full cellar, a large silver maple where a driveway should be, and a wraparound garden. They rent out a six-room one-bath apartment on the first floor. It’s a big old place.
Back in 1991, the house served as an antidote to the cramped one-bedroom apartment that the family occupied in neighboring Windsor Terrace. The bedroom was divided into two small spaces for the girls, then about 9 and 14 years old; their parents slept in a little alcove separated from the living area by a sliding door. They were ready to move.
“I had inherited enough money for a down payment, and we had started looking,” said Ms. Dietz Blitz, who is the dean of the upper school at Brooklyn Friends, a Quaker school.
There’s some debate as to who saw the Kensington house first. Ms. Dietz Blitz says she came across it in a classified ad.
But Mr. Blitz has a more romantic memory. He is the kind of guy who knows a lot about a lot of things, and he says that he used to walk past the house on the way to his job as an adviser to a developer of nonprofit housing. He was drawn to its old shingles, double porch and large lot, and suspected that the interior would still have much of the original woodwork.
“It was really run-down,” Ms. Dietz Blitz said. “The shingles were beginning to go. But it didn’t matter, because Allen loved it. And I loved it because I liked the idea of a garden.”
The owner was asking $275,000.
“I offered what we could afford,” which was $250,000, Mr. Blitz said. “Someone bid more, and that was that.”
At least it was until the deal fell through. When they returned to see the house again, another couple were there looking, so the Blitzses walked around loudly lamenting how much work it needed. Maybe they scared off the competition. In any event, the owner soon said he would accept their original $250,000 offer.
“So I offered him 235,” said Ms. Dietz Blitz, who is nothing if not tenacious.
Her ploy failed, but they bought the house anyway. The thought of stripping paint, rewiring and refinishing floors didn’t intimidate them. They each had a fair share of experience, and they were prepared to hire help as needed.
Mr. Blitz had worked for contractors and had a certificate in the building trades, and Ms. Dietz Blitz had trained as a mason years before, when they were living in Virginia.
That was in the early ’80s, and the Blitzses were members of the Communist Workers Party, helping to organize factory workers. To earn money, Ms. Dietz Blitz had joined a federal program that trained bricklayers. When she tried to return to the program after a maternity leave, she was told she had to answer a question: ”Do you now, or have you within the past five years, publicly advocated the violent overthrow of the federal government?”
She refused, and was denied readmittance to the program.
She went to court and in 1982 a law aimed at her, often called the Blitz amendment, barring anyone who advocates violent overthrow of the federal government from job training programs, was deemed unconstitutional. Ms. Dietz Blitz became a mason.
A decade later and working as a teacher in Brooklyn, she put her skills to use as she and her husband took on the old place.
Initially, they spent about $40,000 hiring people to do work they couldn’t do. Over the years, they guess they have put in another $140,000 not counting their own labor.
They did a good job of cleaning the place up, from the clean lines of the staircase to rooms painted in various shades of red and green. Quilts made by Ms. Dietz Blitz are on display throughout the house. The exterior has a fresh layer of cedar shingles, painted blue.
“It’s not like some of these ‘remuddled’ houses you see around here,” said Mr. Blitz, standing on the second-story porch and pointing to a once stately house that has been reduced to a formless blob with vinyl siding and porches enclosed by brick.
Like many others, the Blitzes have been hit by the sliding stock market. But they figure that if their retirement savings disappear for good, they can always count on their house to help them along.
With so many rooms, they could rent out the third floor, and live under the store as well as over it, so to speak.
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