Building of the Day: 1362 President Street
The BOTD is a no-frills look at interesting structures of all types and from all neighborhoods. There will be old, new, important, forgotten, public, private, good and bad. Whatever strikes our fancy. We hope you enjoy. Address: 1362 President Street, between Brooklyn and Kingston Avenues Name: Private House Neighborhood: Crown Heights South Year Built: 1921…
The BOTD is a no-frills look at interesting structures of all types and from all neighborhoods. There will be old, new, important, forgotten, public, private, good and bad. Whatever strikes our fancy. We hope you enjoy.
Address: 1362 President Street, between Brooklyn and Kingston Avenues
Name: Private House
Neighborhood: Crown Heights South
Year Built: 1921
Architectural Style: French Renaissance Revival
Architects: Cohn Brothers
Landmarked: No
Why chosen: I don’t know why this stretch of President Street became mansion row, but boy, did it. (I intend to find out.) Between 1900 and 1930, both sides of President, between Kingston and New York Avenues, two blocks, became home to an architectural smorgasbord of large, often ornate mansions sitting on large, landscaped lawns. Unlike the equally large houses in Flatbush, these are all from the 20th century, built at a time when prosperity was in the air, during the Flapper Age, before the Great Depression. This particular house, which is among the most ornate on these blocks, was designed by the Cohn Brothers, an architectural firm familiar up a few blocks north in Crown Heights North. There they designed several large, Tudoresque apartment buildings, built for the middle classes. They were clearly aiming for a higher market here. The new AIA Guide calls this house a florid and showy intruder on an otherwise rather sedate part of the block, a house bristling with French Renaissance detailing. Look at that porte-cochere! Gatsby would most certainly have approved.
The vast majority of the homes in Victorian Flatbush were built after 1900, before 1910. Granted this is a different architectural vocabulary (and equally delicious).
I agree that Gatsby would have approved of this porte cochere. It is splendid, but the house he lived in as described in the novel is a specific kind of Gold Coast sprawling mansion quite different than this more urban haute-bourgeoise villa.
I’m just nit-picking, carry on.
When I was a youngster in Crown Heights during the 1950s, the houses on these President-Street blocks had small black plaques on the front lawns, with family names painted in gold.
Very North-Shore “WASP”-y. (So Montrose’s Gatsby allusions are spot on. Daisy may very well have lived in such a house before she married Tom, although not in Brooklyn.)
Then African Americans moved into “The Row.”
Now, based on a reconaissance a few weeks ago, the residents seem overwhelmingly Orthodox Jewish people.
And the plaques are gone.
Who “owns” Brooklyn?
No one, as far as I can tell.
Nostalgic on Park Avenue
I love driving down these street in CHts (south)
Crazy!
***Bid half off peak comps***
Lovely. Not quite Gatsby, but certainly Gatsby’s accountant.
I grew up on Union St, right around the corner, and this 2 block stretch of President St was known as “Doctors’ Row”. As a kid we all knew that only the very rich lived in these houses.
That is one crazy looking house.
Many of the properties on these surrounding blocks have alleyways with garages. The garbage trucks go back there, and don’t pick up in front of the houses. Very civilized.