There’s one townhouse on Bergen Street in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn that doesn’t look like any of the others. Instead of traditional brownstone, a layer of cement, raked with tines into rhythmic grooves, covers the facade from the garden level to the roofline. The house belongs to the photographer Stefan Ruiz, and it’s getting a makeover.
“Basically, most of the places have been fixed up at least once or twice,” Ruiz told me when I visited last winter. “There are still a few people who have been here for fifty years or more. It’s gotten way
