Wyckoff House might not get its barn after all

From Courier-Life:

Efforts to reconstruct a 19th century barn adjacent to the Wyckoff Farmhouse Museum have been stalled by financial issues.

While $2.5 million had been set aside to pay a general contractor to rebuild the barn as a visitor’s center for the venerable homestead, the lowest bid made by contractors interested in snagging the project came in at $3.2 million, according to Meghan Lalor, a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation, who told this paper that the agency was “currently investigating options of redesigning the barn to trim the budget on this project.”

Additional funding, out of a total of $4.95 million allocated for the project, would be utilized for other aspects of the reconstruction, including HVAC, electric service and plumbing, Lalor said.

“It’s amazing, when the economy starts to improve, the cost of goods and services go up,” noted Byron Saunders, the museum’s executive director, during the February meeting of Community Board 17.

The Parks Department and the Historic House Trust, Saunders stressed, “are working” to advance the project. In addition, he said, local legislators “have made sure the funds are in place to make sure this project moves forward. We’re not waiting. The politicians have told me, this is a $6 million project, and we need to make sure there are $6 million worth of community events in this barn when it’s built.”

In the meantime, “the heavy timber frame Dutch style barn… is currently in storage in New Jersey,” Lalor said in an email.

See previously. Amazing that $6M was raised for this.

Photo from the Wyckoff House & Association

Lamenting the loss of a part of our past

From the Riverdale Press:

A major highlight of my daily morning drive down West 254th Street toward the Hudson River used to be the old red barn on the left, located just before the hill slopes down.

A quintessential emblem of Americana was available for anyone’s viewing, right here in the Northwest Bronx. To the detriment of our landscape and those who have regard and respect for architectural and historic preservation, Riverdale’s very own (and privately-owned) red barn was torn down this past fall.

I give thanks to Community Board 8’s Traffic and Transportation Committee for vastly improving the congestion on this busy Riverdale street this year (and I trust that those who loved the barn didn’t add to the cause by rubbernecking while appreciating it), but we still have much work to do in our city with regard to landmarks preservation.