Building of the Day: 203 St. Marks Avenue

Brooklyn, one building at a time.

Name: Originally a garage, now Church of God Victory
Address: 203 St. Marks Avenue
Cross Streets: Carlton and Vanderbilt Avenues
Neighborhood: Prospect Heights
Year Built: between 1912-1922, with alterations in 1990s
Architectural Style: Originally Romanesque/Renaissance Revival, now vaguely Moorish/Gothic
Architect: Original — unknown, alterations — Strange & Vella, Architects
Other Buildings by Architect: Building projects in Brooklyn and elsewhere
Landmarked: Yes, part of Prospect Heights HD (2009)

The story: Nothing can change faster than a city block these days. One day a building will be there, the next week it’s gone, and you find yourself trying to remember what was there. That certainly must have happened on this block of Prospect Heights. Before this building was here, 203 St. Marks Avenue was the location of a wood framed row house similar to its next door neighbor. In 1898, it was the home of a little 10 year old boy named William Walsh who couldn’t wait to be old enough to join the 14th Regiment. As America lunged into the Spanish American War, he told the Brooklyn Eagle, “Oh, if I were old enough to help to free Cuba, I would give my head and my heart to God and my country. One country and one flag- the Red, White, and Blue!”

I think perhaps he may have had a bit of coaching there, but I wonder what happened to William Walsh. He would have been 20 years old when the country went to war in World War I. If he kept up his patriotic fervor, he would have enlisted. At any rate, he would not be living at 203 St. Marks. Somewhere between 1912 and 1922, the two houses on this double lot were torn down, and a new garage was built.

The car was taking over the streets, and as the years passed, they became more affordable to middle class Brooklynites. Parking on the street was the usual option, but some people did not want to leave their cars out, and sought garage space. Garages started to go up in more exclusive neighborhoods, and this location would have been convenient for automobile owners in both Park Slope and Prospect Heights.

Service building can be hard to trace, as far as architects, and the LPC had no luck finding this one. Whoever it was, he built a very handsome garage. The 1980s tax photos show the original façade, which was quite ornate, in the Romanesque style. There were three arched bays, with large arched windows on the second floor. The arches were supported visually with pressed metal pilasters, and the building was capped with a pressed metal cornice.
This establishment was a parking garage for many years. By the time the tax photo was taken, in the early 1980s, one of the bays was bricked in in order to facilitate a front door and an air conditioning grille. Around this time, in 1983, this address was home to the World Wide Pollution Control, which offered Marine tank cleaning for fuel oil tanks, water tanks, etc. Their advertisement in the Marine Times is printed below.

In 1990, the space was purchased by the Church of God Victory. They engaged the services of a Brooklyn architectural firm called Strange & Vella to transform the building into a church. Strange and Vella stripped the detail from the front, and gave the building an entire new skin of mauvey- pink concrete stucco and granite, and a new façade unlike anything it had had before. The original lines of the garage have been totally eradicated. Inside they constructed a roomy church sanctuary and back office and rooms. The building went from a house, to a house of cars, to a house of worship, in the space of about 150 years.

GMAP

(Photograph:Nicholas Strini for PropertyShark)