Posted Thursday, July 21, 2016 12:30 pm

The winding streets and neo-Tudor buildings of the Fort Independence area may soon help it win national recognition as a historic district – an honor that would protect this northwest Bronx neighborhood from redevelopment and bring some tax breaks for homeowners.

The State Review Board of the New York Historic Preservation Office has voted unanimously this summer to recommend the district for listing on the state and national registers of historic places.

For Kristin Hart, president of the Fort Independence Park Neighborhood Association, and her 150 fellow members of the group, the vote was a culmination of nearly six years of hard work.

“We really had to pool our resources and commit ourselves to telling the story of this neighborhood, get the facts about it,” said Ms. Hart, who also worked with a historian, Anthony Robins, to gather the story of the neighborhood for the registry application process.

The sections recommended for historical listing are Giles Places, Cannon Place, Orloff Avenue and 238th Street in Van Cortlandt Village.

If finalized, listing as a historic district would give the area some added protection against developers who may seek to change the neighborhood’s landscape, and bring tax credits of up to 20 percent for home improvement projects, such as repairing the roof, for local residents.

Keeping developers out was the neighborhood association’s original motive for seeking historical district status, Ms. Hart said.

“If someone wanted to build something in or adjacent to this district … it would have to go through an extra layer of review because the state preservation office would … weigh in on whether it would negatively impact a historic district,” she said.

The area follows the design of Frederick Law Olmsted, an American landscape architect perhaps best known for co-designing New York’s Central Park. The neighborhood contains a mix of narrow, winding streets and neo-Tudor single-family homes. Highlights of the area include Shalom Aleichem Houses, one of the city’s first limited-equity co-ops, and Park Reservoir Houses, the first Mitchell-Lama building. It provides affordable housing for middle-income residents.

Karl Appuhn, who has lived in the area for eight years, said he had initial concerns about seeking historical status because of possible restrictions under those guidelines.

“I was a little bit skeptical at first because you hear things about other historic districts [where] people complain because they can’t paint their front door, the color that they wanted. But, it turned out that most of those things weren’t true,” Mr. Appuhn said.

For some people, such as Mr. Appuhn, Fort Independence is one of the last remaining areas with an authentic New York vibe.

“I feel that the Bronx and Queens are two parts of the city that are still kind of a little bit of what people think of when they think of New York. And, part of that is just a little bit of grittiness,” he said.

Built during the American Revolutionary War to control the entrance and exit into New York from the mainland, Fort Independence contains the only surviving street layout from the period before the parks department lost control of street planning and the Manhattan planning grid extended across the Bronx.

“[Olmsted] explicitly talked about waiting a certain quality of life and how narrow curvy streets facilitate that. He wanted to take advantage of the Bronx’s natural beauty,” Ms. Hart said. “I think that when people come here, they’re surprised that it’s the Bronx because people have such a negative perception of the Bronx.”

But most importantly, the “designation helps us tell the story of a neighborhood, which continues to touch us all, reminding us that Olmsted was a visionary,” she added. “Life is better on tiny winding streets.”