Building of the Day: 108-112 Willow Street

Brooklyn, one building at a time.

Name: Row houses
Address: 108-112 Willow Street, between Clark and Pierrepont Streets
Neighborhood: Brooklyn Heights
Year Built: 1880
Architectural Style: Queen Anne
Architect: William Halsey Wood
Other buildings by architect: Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, Carnegie Free Library of Braddock, PA
Landmarked: Yes, part of Brooklyn Heights HD

These are among my favorite houses in Brooklyn Heights. Part of the reason is because I love terra-cotta, and these houses are festooned with it, all used in delightful ways and forms.

The other reason, which is really the cake, while terra-cotta is the icing, is the massing of shapes and materials. All three of these houses are quite different, yet join together as a unified group, almost as one very large rambling, English style Arts and Crafts city home.

Number 112, at the left, is the largest at a wide 27×84. The other two are much smaller, 110 is 18×73, while 108 is 18×64. The middle house is the most traditional and straightforward, but the two on the end are gems, especially 108, with its top floor half turret with small windows, and adjacent balcony.

During the summer, the entire group is so covered by the trees in front, it’s impossible to get great photos, but for the residents, must provide cool breezes and additional privacy.

William Halsey Wood was one of those architects who may have achieved greatness, had tuberculosis not cut him down at the age of forty-one, in 1897. He was born in Newark in 1855, and studied architecture in England, an experience that greatly influenced his design.

Most of his career was spent in designing churches. He was devoutly High Church Episcopalian, and his commissions were for the same, ornate, almost Roman Catholic structures that still are very Anglican in design. He designed over 30 churches and parish houses in the New York area, plus a couple further afield, all but four of them for the Episcopal Church.

His residential buildings were usually high-end homes, three of them making the cut, with the likes of McKim, Mead and White and other turn of the century architects, in a book called Artistic Country Seats, by G.W. Sheldon, an 1886 homage to expensive homes.

(reprinted by Dover) He designed several homes in Park Slope, on Lincoln Place, alas gone, as well as these homes on Willow Street. These were built for Spencer Trask, and may have been for the extended Trask family. Wood also designed Trask’s summer home in Saratoga Springs, called Yaddo, now a well-known artist and writer’s retreat.

His best known building is one that was never built; he was one of four finalists chosen to design Manhattan’s St. John the Divine Cathedral. He was sure he would get the commission, but in the end, it went to Heins & LaFarge, a loss Wood was said to never have gotten over.

He was a very gifted architect, and is seen by architectural historians as a bridge between the revival periods of the late 1800’s and the modernists of the 20th century. Had he lived longer, who knows what he might have come up with?

[Photos by Suzanne Spellen]