ALERT: Designation Hearing for the Crown Heights North HD
The Landmarks Preservation Commission is holding a public hearing on the proposed designation of the Crown Heights North Historic District next Tuesday, September 19, 2006, beginning at 9:30 a.m. The hearing will take place at the Commission’s offices at 1 Centre Street, 9th Floor North in Manhattan. Any information you can provide about the district’s significance is relevant to our consideration. Below please find a brief statement of significance regarding the district. For more information and a map, http://www.nyc.gov/html/lpc/html/home/home.shtml
Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
Diane Jackier
Director of External Affairs
Landmarks Preservation Commission
Phone: (212) 669-7923
Fax: (212) 669-7797
[email protected]
Proposed Crown Heights North Historic District
The proposed Crown Heights North Historic District contains some of the finest examples of large and finely detailed rows of houses, free-standing mansions and institutions, designed by Brooklyn’s major architectural firms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The area currently known as Crown Heights North was originally a rural area located within the village of Bedford in the eastern reaches of the incorporated town of Brooklyn. Bedford Corners was the center of population in the village of Bedford and was one of the major early road juncture points in Brooklyn. Most of the land within the proposed district was part of a farm cultivated by one of the largest landowners in Kings County, the Lefferts family, and enslaved people of African descent. During the nineteenth century the area at the western edge of the proposed historic district included the small settlement of Bedford Corners. A few extant frame houses are associated with Bedford Corners including the free-standing house at 1375 Dean Street, c. 1850-55, which is a transitional Greek Revival/Italianate style structure. The house combines the severe square massing, a columned porch, simple cornice and rectangular attic windows of the Greek Revival with the Italianate wide entrance door and its complex moldings.
The Lefferts family began to sell its land holdings in the area in the 1850s, but it remained primarily rural until the last decades of the 19th century. A few rows of houses date from this period, including the frame row at 1208-1216 Dean Street. Beginning in the 1870s, St. Mark’s Avenue began to attract a number of Brooklyn’s wealthier citizens and was built up with sumptuous free-standing frame and masonry mansions frequently on large landscaped lots. One of the most imposing of these mansions is the c. 1868 Dean Sage Residence on the northeast corner of St. Mark’s and Brooklyn. Built for a wealthy Brooklyn lumber dealer the High Victorian style residence was designed by the prominent 19th century architect and critic Russell Sturgis.
The 1883 opening of the Brooklyn Bridge resulted in an extraordinary surge of residential development throughout Brooklyn with former farmland being developed into row houses. Large scale residential development in the Crown Heights area began in the early to mid 1880s and swept from the northwest to the southeast. Row house construction continued in the area for a 35 year period. The earliest masonry row houses are in the neo-Grec style including the four brownstones on the west side of Brooklyn Avenue at Dean Street designed in 1883 by Amzi Hill, a major figure in the design of neo-Grec style row houses in Brooklyn. These buildings feature incised carving, angular cornice brackets, heavy balustrades and bold newel posts. In the mid-to late 1880s neo-Grec gave way to the Romanesque Revival and Queen Anne styles, which exhibit a greater freedom in their massing and more varied and frequently whimsical use of form and ornament. Of particular note in the proposed historic district are the many extraordinary Romanesque and Queen Anne style row houses designed by the highly significant architect George Chappell. One of the finest Romanesque Revival style groupings is the pair of houses at 855-857 St. Mark’s Avenue between Brooklyn and Kinston Avenues designed in 1892 by Montrose Morris. Featuring lower floors clad in rock-faced limestone and upper floors of Roman brick with smooth-faced limestone trim the pair display unusual second floor loggias with columns enhanced by finely carved gougework designs on their upper thirds and Byzantine style capitals. Another example of the Romanesque Revival style can be found in the rows on Dean Street between Nostrand and New York Avenues designed by Albert E. White and considered one of the loveliest blocks in Brooklyn. One of the most extraordinary rows of Queen Anne style houses in Brooklyn is that of 1164-1182 Dean Street designed in 1890 by George Chappell in a mix of brick, limestone, imbricated wood shingles and Spanish tile and terra cotta with some of the houses featuring unusual Flemish inspired stepped gables.
In the 1890s the more balanced and subdued Renaissance Revival style gained in popularity in part due to the influence of the noted architectural firm, McKim, Mead & White and the widespread use of this style at 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. This style is typified by the row of houses at 1374-1384 Dean Street between Brooklyn and Kingston Avenue by the prolific Brooklyn architect Axel Hedman in 1909.
The earliest apartment houses in the proposed district are either luxury flats or tenements. The Imperial Apartments, a designated individual New York City landmark, were designed in 1892 by Montrose Morris on the corner of Grant’s Square, adjacent to it is Morris’s Romanesque Revival style Bedfordshire Apartments at 1200 Pacific Street.
The largely white, Protestant residents of late 19th century Crown Heights North also attracted a number of churches and other institutions. This includes some of Brooklyn’s most significant churches such as the New York Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church. One of Brooklyn’s largest and finest ecclesiastical structures which was built between 1890-92 by the major New York architectural firm of J. C. Cady & Co. The former Union League Club, located in the southeast corner of Bedford Avenue and Grant Square is a Romanesque Revival style structure completed in 1890 to the designs of P. J. Lauritzen.
During the early 20th century waves of upwardly mobile immigrants group have made Crown Heights North their home. The opening of the subway along Eastern Parkway in 1920 resulted in the demolition of many free-standing mansions and the construction of middle-class six story elevator apartment buildings designed in finely detailed Tudor Revival, Mediterranean and Art Deco styles by the architectural firms of Emery Roth, Cohn Brothers and Shampan & Shampan. Since 1950, Crown Heights North has been the home to a significant West Indian and African-American community. Today, over a century after the major residential development of Crown Heights North began the area of the proposed historic district continues to maintain its distinctiveness. Much of the 19th and early 20th century character of the area remains unchanged. Buildings of particularly unusual architectural quality still stand within the proposed historic district and reflect the innovative quality and excitement of late 19th and early 20th century American architecture.