Brooklyn, one building at a time.

Name: Row houses
Address: 645-647 St Marks Avenue
Cross Streets: Rogers and Nostrand Avenues
Neighborhood: Crown Heights North
Year Built: early 1890s
Architectural Style: Renaissance Revival
Architect: George P. Chappell
Other Buildings by Architect: In CHN – St. Bartholomew’s Episc. Church, Pacific St; Houses on Pacific, Dean, St. Marks, New York, Bergen, Prospect, and throughout CHN. Also in Park Slope, Bed Stuy, Stuyvesant Hts,
Landmarked: No, but would be in Phase 4 of CHN HD

The story: In 1888, Hester Louise Chappell was listed as the new owner of record on this piece of St. Marks Avenue. She was the wife of prominent Brooklyn architect George P. Chappell, a prolific designer of buildings who would make his mark most significantly in this same neighborhood. St. Marks Avenue was the center of the St. Marks District, an upscale neighborhood on par with the best of Clinton Hill, Stuyvesant Heights, and Park Slope, during the last decades of the 19th century, and what better place for Mrs. Chappell to own, than the center of a posh neighborhood that her husband had a large hand in developing? But the lots on this block were not for business. George Chappell was building his wife a new home.

Chappell was a highly imaginative and innovative architect, with row houses, free standing mansions, apartment buildings, churches and factories in his portfolio. As his career advanced, so too did his artistic vision. Starting out designing in the Romanesque Revival style, he progressed along with the times into his own unique take on Queen Anne, Arts & Crafts, and Renaissance Revival architecture. Some of his buildings are similar, but his body of work is as different as can be, and it’s all very good.

He designed buildings in all of the new upscale neighborhoods in brownstone Brooklyn, but he ruled in what is now Crown Heights, and for him was called Bedford and the St. Marks District. Practically every street in this neighborhood has at least one Chappell building, some, like Dean Street, St. Marks, and Prospect Place, are peppered with them, all up and down the different blocks.

So when it came to designing a home for his wife, Chappell picked St. Marks Avenue, between Nostrand and Rogers. This block did not have the huge mansions, it was always row houses, but they were really fine row houses, and he should know, he designed some of them. 645 and 647 are very different from the other houses on the block, but they are very similar to a group of houses that he did in 1891 on Dean Street, 1146-1150. All of these houses share the use of light colored brick, alternating smooth bands with larger bands of rusticated brick, creating texture on another wise pretty plain façade.

Unlike most of the houses on this block, these are English basement houses, with small stoops leading to the ground floor. The entrances are handsome in limestone, and along with all of the windows, are ornamented with white terra cotta and limestone details, very subdued and elegant rows of dentils, swags and acanthus leaf borders. Of course, the blue aluminum awnings were added well into the 20th century, but even they don’t overly detract from the elegance of these buildings. They are just superb.

Hester Louise Chappell didn’t get to live in her new house for all that long. She was stricken with cancer, and died in 1900. The funeral was here, in the home. George would remarry, but moved down the block to an apartment building with their daughter, close to, but never again, inside the house he had built for Harriet. Today, we are actively pursuing having this entire block included in the last phase of the Crown Heights North Historic District. It is an important block, architecturally and historically. George and Hester Louise Chappell are a part of that history. GMAP

Photo: Nicholas Strini for Property Shark, 2010

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