Building of the Day: 59 St. Marks Avenue

Brooklyn, one building at a time.

Name: Row house
Address: 59 St. Marks Avenue
Cross Streets: 5th and 6th Avenues
Neighborhood: Park Slope
Year Built: 1889
Architectural Style: Queen Anne
Architect: W.M. Coots
Other buildings by architect: Alice and Agate Court in Bedford Stuyvesant, other row houses across brownstone Brooklyn
Landmarked: No, part of proposed PS expansion district

The story: Christopher Gray’s Streetscape article this last weekend inspired today’s BOTD. I had taken this photo last summer, and was looking for the right time to feature it. It struck me as so unusual for this neighborhood, where next to nothing is covered in a riot of ivy, so much that one can barely see the building underneath. How long had all of this ivy been growing on this house? And what unusual design elements this house and its neighbor have!

The house and its twin, next door at 57 St. Marks, were built in 1889 by developer H.P. Lyons. He commissioned architect Walter Montague Coots to be the architect. Coots had a very successful, albeit short, career designing middle class speculative houses and small flats buildings in Park Slope, Crown Heights North, Bedford Stuyvesant, Bushwick, Cobble Hill and East New York, all neighborhoods with fast growing middle income populations. He wasn’t the flashiest, or most innovative of architects, but he wasn’t bad.

Coots was the son of a Rochester architect, and received his training as a carpenter’s apprentice, and then at his father’s firm, which became Coots & Son. He came to Manhattan in 1884, and moved to Brooklyn in 1885, opening an office in the Garfield Building on Court Street. He developed a good reputation, and was listed in an 1886 Brooklyn publication as “prominent among the best known architects of this city” after “life training in his profession.” Unfortunately, Coots died young, at 41, in 1906.

His largest project was his biggest failure. He was the first to try to develop the small cul-de-sac enclaves of Alice and Agate Court off Atlantic Avenue in Bedford Stuyvesant (before those names were used), but lost them in foreclosure as he didn’t have enough money to complete the project. Manufacturer Florian Grojean eventually bought the project, and retained Coots as architect. All of the houses of both streets are his design, and are now landmarked.

57 and 59 St. Marks Avenue are typical of Coots’ designs. He mixed elements of the Romanesque Revival, Italianate, Neo-Grec and Renaissance Revival in this group, and it is pleasing in proportions and design. The double French front doors are welcoming, and the elegant Romanesque dog-leg stoop with fine cast iron railings is quite unexpected from a building with Italianate corbels, done in Romanesque Revival Byzantine Leaf, with Neo-Grec carved lintels. That’s quite an architectural melange. And then we have the ivy.

From a photograph taken just this winter, we can see that the ivy is not just tendrils anymore; it is growing from thick tree-like vines. A tax photo from the 1980’s shows the same growth, so this stuff has been there for over 30 years. The debate rages as to whether ivy damages the façade. Some kinds of ivy are destructive, others not. It all depends on how it adheres to the surface of a building. I don’t know the state of this building, but for some, it is impressive, even beautiful, for others, a thing of horror movie proportions. I’m sure there will be varying opinions here, as well.
The house was on sale a few years ago, and was a House of the Day on Brownstoner. GMAP