1083-1089 Prospect Place, SSpellen 1

Brooklyn, one building at a time.

Name: Double duplex row houses
Address: 1083-1089 Prospect Place
Cross Streets: Kingston and Albany Avenues
Neighborhood: Crown Heights North
Year Built: 1908
Architectural Style: Renaissance Revival
Architect: George Chappell of Chappell & Bosworth
Other Buildings by Architect: Row houses, mansions, churches, flats buildings in Crown Heights North, Bedford, Stuyvesant Heights and Park Slope
Landmarked: Calendared as Crown Heights North HD, Phase III (2011), still waiting for designation

The story: The first decade of the 20th century saw a lot of building going on in our newer brownstone neighborhoods. But developers were finding that their buyers’ needs had changed. Households were changing, many young couples didn’t want, or couldn’t afford an entire house, and the days of live-in servants were coming to an end for all but the very wealthy. The demand for single family houses was no longer as strong as it had been twenty years before. Apartment buildings were finally gaining middle class respectability and desirability. Two family houses, where someone could live and have tenant income, or room for extended family members in their own space, were becoming a very attractive and viable option. And then the architectural firm of Mann & MacNeille came up with the Kinko houses.

The architects were designing for the Kings and Westchester Land Company, hence the name. They were charged to design attractive two family houses with the very desirable amenities of two complete duplex apartments with separate entrances and addresses. Each duplex had a set of private interior stairs in each apartment, and its own garden space. The bottom duplex had the back yard, and the upper duplex had a rooftop garden. The apartments were spacious, with a living room, dining room and kitchen on the lower level, and two or three bedrooms and a full bathroom above.

The houses were so popular they sold out before they were completed. Crown Heights North became the proving ground for these houses, which appear here and there in other neighborhoods. Crown Heights has the largest concentration of them in the blocks that make up Phase III of the Historic District, on and around Brooklyn Ave and St. Johns Place.

Although Mann & MacNeille coined the term “Kinko house,” and produced several different and distinctive styles, they were not the only ones to do these double duplexes. Other architects jumped on the bandwagon, and in fact, M&M may have gotten the idea from architect Louis Berger, who designed the neighborhood’s first double duplexes on Bergen Street in 1906. M&M’s first houses appeared a year later. They were joined by double duplexes in the neighborhood by William Debus, Henry B. Moore, and this particularly nice group by Chappell & Bosworth, built in 1908.

George Poole Chappell is a familiar name here, as he designed so many beautiful buildings, especially in Crown Heights North. He could do it all – row houses of various styles, flats buildings, churches, factories, and free-standing mansions. He designed most of them on his own, but towards the latter part of his career, he partnered with Charles Bosworth. The two worked well together, and these houses are the product of that collaboration.

They are designed in an elegant Renaissance Revival style, with rich red brick contrasted by limestone trim. Mann & MacNeille’s early Kinko houses were designed in a Tudor/Medieval Revival style, which is wonderfully charming. The Chappell & Bosworth houses are quietly elegant, with classical detailing, rich carved stone ornament, quoins and keystones. The double doorways are especially fine, with plate glass and wood doors, carved pediments and pilasters flanking all of the entrances. The houses are built in mirrored pairs: ABBA, with the A houses having the most ornate detailing.

The result is a very English looking upscale terrace row, worthy of any fine neighborhood. This particular block is architecturally rich anyway, with a wonderful mixture of eras and styles, especially along this northern side of the street. It’s also one of the two “Superblocks” with limited access and other special features. Chappell & Bosworth’s houses mix in well, providing a contrast between the long rows of two family limestones by Axel Hedman, the flats building, and the much earlier brick and frame houses on the Albany end of the block. I’ve always wanted a Kinko style house – one of these would do quite well, thank you.

(Photo: S.Spellen)

GMAP

Photo: S.Spellen
Photo: S.Spellen
Photo: S.Spellen
Photo: S.Spellen

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