Building of the Day: 840-850 St. Marks Avenue
The BOTD is a no-frills look at interesting structures of all types and from all neighborhoods. There will be old, new, important, forgotten, public, private, good and bad. Whatever strikes our fancy. We hope you enjoy. Address: 840-850 St. Marks Avenue, corner of Brooklyn Ave. Name: Westminster Hall Apartments Neighborhood: Crown Heights North Year Built:…
The BOTD is a no-frills look at interesting structures of all types and from all neighborhoods. There will be old, new, important, forgotten, public, private, good and bad. Whatever strikes our fancy. We hope you enjoy.
Address: 840-850 St. Marks Avenue, corner of Brooklyn Ave.
Name: Westminster Hall Apartments
Neighborhood: Crown Heights North
Year Built: 1926
Architectural Style: Tudor Revival
Architects: Matthew W. DelGaudio
Landmarked: Yes
Why chosen: In the late 1920’s, early 1930’s the middle classes filled Crown Heights North, due in great part to the opening of the IRT subway line in 1920. St. Marks Avenue, which was the most desirable street in the St. Marks District, began to see its grand mansions, built only thirty or forty years ago, disappear one by one, replaced by large apartment buildings like this. Developers and owners of these buildings used the popularity of Tudor and Medieval revivals in the new banker’s suburbs to build solid, well designed buildings with spacious lobbies and large apartments, the average being around 6 or 7 rooms, including a maid’s room off of the kitchen. They gave these buildings posh, usually English sounding names, like Haddon Court, Parbrook Hall and this one, Westminster Hall. These Tudor Revivals are very popular in Crown Heights, and can also be found in the new middle class enclaves of their time, in the Bronx, in Queens, and Washington Heights. Locally, they are gathered on Brooklyn and New York Avenues, as well as on nearby Eastern Parkway. This building has always been well maintained, and the apartments on the Brooklyn Avenue side overlook Brower Park and the Children’s Museum. Westminster Hall is now a co-op with 54 units.
Close up of Tudor half timbered detail, St. Marks Side of building.
Brooklyn Ave. side of building with park views.
Come see Crown Heights North’s fine collection of apartment buildings, brownstone blocks, free-standing houses and impressive churches. Our 4th Annual Crown Heights North House Tour is tomorrow, Sat. Oct. 2nd from 11-4. We have 8 houses and 2 churches on our program this year, including a house on this block, practically next door. Advance tickets are available today only on our website for $20, and are $25 at the door. See www.crownheightsnorth.org. Tour begins at St. Gregory’s Church, corner of St. Johns and Brooklyn.
Minard Lavefer and Benson:
Sure, there are plenty of Tudor-style apartment buildings in Brooklyn and Manhattan (and Queens). Some never anything much, others, like this one and several on St Marks Avenue, quite good.
St Marks, until about 1960, was a “destination” address and although the buildings were approaching the half-century mark, still in very good shape, fire escapes or not. The lobbies were as big or bigger than those on the West Side (because the buildings were wider and sometimes deeper than in Manhattan — but not as tall, of course), and elaborately furnished. Doctors offices lined the ground floors. Elevators were wood-paneled. Many apartments had drop-down living rooms. And Brower Park and its Children’s Museum (then housed in twin Victorian-era mansions) made the area family-friendly.
As Brooklyn changed, so did the street. But its architectural quality remained quite high, enough so that part of it is now landmarked, as Montrose Morris notes. (Nice to see those towering trees!)
Well, off to a dinner party in SoHo, back in the day an industrial slum. New York neighborhoods — and buildings — come and go. Westminster Hall appears to be holding on. And that augers well for Crown Heights.
I like them. Washington Heights also has several. Question re: these in CH — I never see them listed for sale anywhere. Why is that?
I’m with Minard on this one. I find these types of apartment buildings to be drab. I believe the reason for their bare-bone ambience and aesthetics is how these apartment homes were perceived when they were built.
Unlike the grand apartment buildings of an earlier era, these buildings were considered a stepping stone, not a final destination. As has often been noted, they were typically built as a temporary stop between the Lower East Side and Great Neck or Scarsdale.
The neighborhood I grew up in (Gravesend) had many such apartment buildings, and they were all drab affairs, due to both this perception and rent control. When I was a kid, I never knew such an apartment building that received anything but the minimum of maintenance and upkeep. It was said that they were the catalysts of blight in an area.
the apartment complexes in Jackson Heights were a different thing. They were built as garden apartments and usually took up an entire block with a huge garden in the center. Those buildings were a notch above the ordinary six-story, wood-framed buildings such as this one. The best ones were fireproof construction and had enclosed fire stairs instead of rickety tenement-style fire escapes on the exterior of the building. In the building pictured, one of the fire escapes is directly above the main entrance making for a potential conflict in case of an emergency.
Well, I haven’t been in these buildings but have seen many of the 1920s buildings of Jackson Heights and would love to see how they compare. The ones in JH are quite lovely and liveable. By today’s standards, almost splashy.
The teens buildings were, by comparison, stunted. Some of them seemed to be designed for single people, others for small families escaping tenements in Manhattan.
Then after the relative prosperity of the 1920s, it was back to scraping by, with new atrocities such as combined living-dining rooms.
Many of the apartment buildings built in Brooklyn and the Bronx right after World War I, before the stock market bubble of the late twenties, look like this. They are not brilliant.
In many ways, including the paucity of bathrooms and closets,they are woefully un-modern and boring. The men who designed these buildings did so nickel by nickel for the appreciation of the investors’ accountants and auditors. It was not a shining moment.
Nonetheless they provided and continue to provide solid, middle-class housing (whatever middle-class means) and continue to offer decent light and air, and oh yes, extra closets where those weird rope-operated dumbwaiters used to be.
Wber:
The building look better when I grew up nearby in the 1950s and 1960s. The windows were white-painted wood and had multiple panes (probably six-over-six) which lightened and modulated the facade.
My parents had friends here. Very smug and self-satisfied. (You can tell the size of the apartments by the distance between fire escapes. They were among the largest of buildings along St. Marks. And yes, there were live-in maids.)
Check streeteasy.com for a photo of the lobby’s ceiling, which seems remarkably fresh. I don’t remember the “fresco”, but I do remember the canopy, doorman and my parents’ friends obvious pleasure in living in one of the “best” apartments in the neighborhood. (Although a particular favorite building of mine was down the block and around the corner, where there were duplexes with graceful wooden stairs, stacked like small houses, one on top of another. Fire places, too.)
Crown Heights is full of good early-20th-century apartment houses. If the condo or co-op movement were to find its way here I’m sure that over time it could rival the Slope. Here apartments are apartments, not carved-up brownstones. And there are people like myself who prefer the type.
Nostalgic on Park Avenue
I generally like these 6-story apartments of the interwar years, but I have to say this one (which is fairly late in terms of style) doesn’t particularly do anything for me. It seems rather halfhearted in its Tudor-ness.
The Grand Concourse (and the Bronx in general) is the place to be if you want to see the full panoply of this building type!