A look at Brooklyn, then and now.

What a difference a hundred years makes. Or not. In 1907, when the photo on the left was taken, this part of Crown Heights North was actually being called Crown Heights, when it wasn’t being referred to as Crow Hill. As we all now know, since this particular part of town has become very popular, Franklin Avenue lies a few blocks east of the Prospect Heights border at Washington Avenue, and has always been the main commercial street in this part of town.

Franklin Avenue has great commercial-residential buildings, the oldest built in the late 1880s; the newest, in the early 1930s. The older buildings, like this corner building, officially 642 Park Place, were designed with great curb appeal, and to show to best advantage the shops and businesses on the ground floor.

This one, along with the adjoining flats buildings going east on Park Place, looks like one large unit, the undulating Romanesque arches of the entrances and above the top floor windows leading the eye down the row. The building has an unusual crenellated roofline, rather unexpected, as one would expect the usual cornice, similar to the ones on the limestone flats further down.

And then you have that great round tower on the corner, which originally had a very ornate capped roof supported by columns. Too bad the conical roof is cut off in the period photo. It must have been a great observation spot, authorized or not. Turn of the century air cooling depended greatly on canvas window awnings, something I wish would come back into vogue, as they are great to look at, and actually keep the temperature down by at least 10 degrees in the hot sun of summer. The 1907 photo shows these striped awnings in their glory on the tower, and on the limestone flats nearby.

The ground floor in 1907 was home to a pharmacy, with large plate glass windows and a center entrance. Fast forward to today, and really, not all that much has changed. The chemist is now a Chinese food take out place, not as aesthetically pleasing as the pharmacy, but still a viable business. Earlier tenants as far back as the 1980s have been at least one another restaurant and a bakery. The brick red and pink paint job now on the buildings obscures some of the fine detail in the ornament, and of course, the tower’s original roof and the columns are long gone. But it’s remarkable how much in the entire photograph is still the same. One wonders what this corner will look like in the next twenty years, in this rapidly changing neighborhood. Hopefully, the same, only better. GMAP

1907 Photograph: Brooklynpix.com.
Photograph: Nicholas Strini for Property Shark, 2012.

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