Building of the Day: 463 Clinton Avenue

Brooklyn, one building at a time.

Name: former Morgan Bogart house
Address: 463 Clinton Avenue
Cross Streets: Greene and Gates Avenue
Neighborhood: Clinton Hill
Year Built: 1902
Architectural Style: Beaux-Arts
Architect: Mercein Thomas
Other Buildings by Architect: in Clinton Hill: 407-409 Washington Avenue, 400-404 Washington Avenue, Methodist Home for the Aged, Park Place, Crown Heights North.
Landmarked: Yes, part of Clinton Hill HD (1981)

The story: This beautiful limestone house puts the Beaux in Beaux-Arts. It’s considered to be the finest example of Beaux –Arts residential architecture in Brooklyn. Yep, beats out any contenders in Park Slope or the Heights. The house and its very different next door neighbor were designed by Brooklyn architect Mercein Thomas, who designed quite a few houses of very varying styles here in Clinton Hill and elsewhere in Brooklyn. The house is highly reminiscent of the mansions on the Upper East Side, near 5th Avenue. It’s a classic, with wide sweeping stairs, leading to an elegant entryway. The door is a replacement, but doesn’t mar the general grandeur of the house. This leads the eye upward to the second floor oriel, almost the width of the house, supported by an elaborate bracket system of Corinthian columns, and decorative carved cartouches.

The bowed oriel has three curved windows, all surrounded by pilasters, columns, dentil and egg and dart moulding, and topped by stained glass transoms. The oriel has a decorative balcony, and above that, twin windows with the same trim and stained glass. Elegant two story pilasters flank the windows, leading the eye up to the final piece of elegance: the handsome dentil detail of the cornice.

The house was built for Morgan L. Bogart, a Civil War veteran and Adjutant General of the Union Veteran League of the United States. He was also a proofreader at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Oddly enough, he never lived here. When the house was completed, his son, a doctor named J. Bion Bogart moved in, and lived here until 1926. Dr. Bogart was a surgeon at Methodist Hospital and at Kings County Hospital. The Bogart’s were active in the social and charitable scene in Brooklyn, and Dr. Bogart was noted in the papers as an eminent surgeon.

But even eminent surgeons can have accidents. The New York Times reported in 1912 that Dr. Bogart was suffering from a critical case of septic poisoning, contracted through a small cut on his finger the week before while performing surgery. The infection spread to his shoulder, neck and then chest muscles. Doctors, including his brother, Arthur H. Bogart, were uncertain of his recovery, but upon further investigation, he seems he pulled through. He is listed in medical entries in 1918, and in the census of 1930, a 70 year old man living now in Brooklyn Heights.

Mercein Thomas, the architect of this, and the adjoining corner house, is well known in this part of Brooklyn. His buildings include 407-409 Washington Avenue, as well as 400-404 Washington Avenue, a former BOTD. These, and his iconic Methodist Home for the Aged, on Park Place in Crown Heights North, are all brick and brownstone Queen Anne buildings. These two Beaux-Arts limestones show his mastery of this new and quite different style, proving the man really knew his stuff.GMAP