Brooklyn, one building at a time.

Name: Row houses
Address: 54-64 Prospect Place
Cross Streets: Fifth and Sixth Avenues
Neighborhood: Park Slope
Year Built: 1887
Architectural Style: Queen Anne
Architect: C.P.H. Gilbert
Other buildings by architect: In Park Slope, Adams House, corner of Carroll and 8th Ave, many houses on Montgomery Pl, Carroll St, Garfield, and more. Also David Chauncey House; Joralemon St, Bklyn Hts.
Landmarked: No, but part of proposed Park Slope HD Extension, hopefully designated soon.

The story: Many people are under the impression that most, if not all, of Park Slope was landmarked long ago, and that battle to protect our historic neighborhoods and architectural heritage has been won here. The truth is that a great deal of the neighborhood is not landmarked at all, especially below 7th Avenue, and it is here that some very interesting, as well as overlooked, architecture lies, with buildings designed by some of Brooklyn’s best.

Every great architect started somewhere, and for Charles Pierrepont Henry Gilbert, that place was not Brooklyn, it was a mining town in the wild and wooly West of Colorado and Arizona, in the late 1870’s and early ‘80’s. Didn’t expect that, right? Like a number of other really good architects of this period, we have a frustratingly thin folder of information about him, considering his importance, and his social standing.

C.P.H. Gilbert was blue blood to the core, the descendent of good English gentry. His ancestors came to this country in the 17th century, settled in New England, fought in the American Revolution, and did well, and his family now lived in New York City, where he was born in 1861. Like many a young man of his background, he was well educated in both America and Europe, although the particulars of where and when seem to be a bit vague.

He lived out West for a while, and then came back home to New York in 1883. He ended up in Brooklyn as Park Slope was emerging as one of Brooklyn’s new up and coming upper-middle, and upper class neighborhoods. By 1887, he was designing his first row houses in this neighborhood, a duo of houses on 9th St, between 5th and 6th. This group on Prospect Place may have been his second commission, also that same year. The houses were built for the Collins family, who were responsible for a lot of development in this part of Park Slope at this time.

He was eclectic, and interesting, his Queen Anne houses popping out from the conformity of the Italianates and Neo-Grec houses that surround them. A year later, he was building his Romanesque Revival masterpiece, the Adams house on Carroll and 8th Ave, and by 1890, was as busy as any architect could want to be, designing his wildly imaginative homes on Montgomery Place, Garfield and Carroll Streets, between 8th Avenue and Prospect Park West.

As any architectural buff will tell you, he then went to Manhattan and never looked back, going on to design huge chateaux for the robber barons and captains of industry of Manhattan’s Gilded Age. He lived on Riverside Drive. It is these buildings that his reputation now hinges upon, not the Brooklyn work. Which is really too bad, as I think he was much more interesting here. Manhattan is certainly impressive, but there, more was more, and budgets were unlimited. In Brooklyn, he had to really design.

This early group of houses is a great precursor to his later work closer to the park. Here we get wonderfully tall stoops, dog-legged for even more visual interest. Gilbert used arches like a master, drawing the eye down the row, following the arches as they rise and fall on different floors, for different reasons. We see his love of stained glass, choosing not just ordinary patterns, but rich nuggets of jewel-toned glass, with texture as well as light and color. He’d use that theme well in the Adams house. We’ve got loggias and recessed windows, oriels, bays and gables. All of these elements and many more would go into his later houses. This is a great group, with some of the houses in original shape, and some annoyingly altered in smallish ways that aren’t flattering to the house or the group as a whole. But that’s part of the reason why they need to be landmarked and protected as soon as possible. GMAP

Photo: Kate Leonova for Property Shark, 2006

Photo: Kate Leonova for Property Shark, 2006


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