Prospect Heights

Quite a few of Brooklyn’s most prolific and successful architects have a German background: the Berlenbach’s; father and son, Rudolph Daus, William Schickel, and the most prolific of all; Theobald Engelhardt. To this list, we can add another; Benjamin Dreisler. His work appears mostly in Flatbush and Long Island, and he was a busy man, designing hundreds of homes in those areas, while also contributing to the architectural landscape of Brownstone Brooklyn. He also was quite active in Brooklyn’s architectural enclaves, leading architectural organizations, and contributing to the general public’s knowledge of just what it was an architect did. This is his story.

Benjamin Dreisler came from Bavaria, and was born there in 1849. He came to the United States in 1881. We don’t really know what he was up to until 1895, when his name appeared as a builder, with an office in Flatbush, on Avenue C and Flatbush Avenue. By 1896, his name starts appearing as an architect in the Real Estate Record and Builder’s Guide, which tracked the building trades in the New York City metropolitan area.
A great deal of Dreisler’s work was in Flatbush. Between 1899 and 1911 he designed sixteen homes in Dean Alvord’s Prospect Park South. His homes also appear in other parts of what we call Victorian Flatbush. In Midwood South alone, he designed 20 frame cottages, all typical of his suburban style, middle class housing work. In a newspaper advertisement, he wrote that he had designed over 400 such cottages across Flatbush, Long Island and New Jersey, all modest and modern suburban homes, reasonable in cost. A group of ten homes in Kensington was described as being for “clerks and other skilled workmen.” (more…)