On most days, Mr. Heuermann made the culturally cosmic leap from his home in Massapequa Park to his Manhattan office on Fifth Avenue, where he could wield an idiosyncratic power over people who might spend more money renovating their kitchens than it would cost to buy the farmhouse he lived in, now in such obvious disrepair. It’s a kind of power that characterizes life in New York, where the challenges of modernizing antebellum apartments take time, money, and typically the approval of a board of directors to ensure that plans to install, say, a steam room don’t lead to the building collapsing or the apartment below being flooded.
In his role as an advisor, Mr. Heuermann was often the person brought in to make these kinds of decisions. Through his long-standing relationship with a management company, AMS, he was well known within the insular universe of Brooklyn Heights co-ops, living in the apartments of investment bankers and lawyers, entertainment people, and real estate developers.
Like so many professions, architecture can be punishingly stratified, and Mr. Heuermann, who by all accounts was extremely knowledgeable about the city’s labyrinthine building codes, was not on the visionary end of the spectrum. But as a journeyman with bureaucratic authority, he could veto the plans of architects with Yale degrees and projects in Nantucket, which were taken on by clients unaccustomed to having their ideas sidelined.
Last week a friend called to say that someone had been apprehended in the Gilgo Beach murders and that, amazingly, we both knew him. Mr. Heuermann had been in her apartment—very annoying at this point and intensely creepy in retrospect—and had been rude and dismissive when her architect berated him for a miscalculation he’d made. I also lived in a building that Mr. Heuermann had used and eventually ended the relationship with, but it struck me that I could not recall any person accused of such baroque violence, beyond my initial, superficial observation that he was not Look like an architect.
A former board chairman, Kelly Parisi, who moved across the country several years ago, filled in the gaps about Mr. Heuermann’s time at the building when I contacted her. During her own renovation, she told me, workers discovered some rotting beams between her apartment and the apartment above, a problem Mr. Heuermann said should be rectified with drawings for the replacements he would make. This appeared to the team working on her project as a sort of cheap rush, as the new beams could be installed without the sketches, which would simply cost the building more money.
