Brooklyn Heights

Brooklyn, one building at a time.

Name: Row houses
Address: 20-26 Willow Street
Cross Streets: Cranberry and Middagh streets
Neighborhood: Brooklyn Heights
Year Built: 1846
Architectural Style: Greek Revival
Architect: Unknown
Landmarked: Yes, part of Brooklyn Heights HD (1965)

The story: The oldest parts of Brooklyn Heights, over near Middagh Street, are a fascinating patchwork of styles and history. Frame houses stand next to Greek Revival row houses, followed by later brownstone styles, late 19th century tenements, early 20th century apartment buildings, and finally, late 20th century apartment housing. I’ve always enjoyed walking around this part of the Heights, as you never know what you are going to come upon next.

This group of Greek Revival row houses was built in 1846, a time when Brooklyn Heights was feeling its oats as the a leafy suburb for the powerful merchants and financiers whose businesses lay below by the docks, or across the river in Manhattan. The houses are brick built on top of a brownstone basement story. Unlike later Italianate houses, the stoops on these houses rise only ten or so stairs from the street level, necessitating an excavated cellar level in order to get light and windows into the ground floor. (more…)

Brooklyn, one building at a time.

Name: Office Building
Address: 165 Remsen Street
Cross Streets: Court and Clinton Streets
Neighborhood: Brooklyn Heights
Year Built: 1924-25
Architectural Style: Neo-classical
Architect: Unknown
Landmarked: Yes, part of Brooklyn Skyscraper HD (2012)

The story: On the face of it, this is a nice three story office building on a side street in the new Brooklyn Skyscraper Historic District. But this little building’s history is much more complicated than its surface appearance. Its fortunes are tied to its backyard neighbor, and while quite picturesque with its banks of upper story windows, the stories behind these doors have yet to be revealed.

Before this building and its neighbors were constructed in the early to mid-20th century, Remsen Street was completely residential, filled with four and five story brownstone row houses, equal to those up the street, further into the Heights. 165 Remsen was home for many years to Dr. Frederich W. Wunderlich, a prominent physician, and his family. (more…)