Saving Three Brooklyn Masterpieces
In the 1890s, developer Louis Seitz teamed up with arguably Brooklyn’s most important architect ever, Montrose Morris, to build three majestic apartment buildings in Central Brooklyn — The Alhambra (pictured above), and The Renaissance in Bedford Stuyvesant and The Imperial just across Atlantic Avenue in Crown Heights. The Alhambra is in a moody palette of…
In the 1890s, developer Louis Seitz teamed up with arguably Brooklyn’s most important architect ever, Montrose Morris, to build three majestic apartment buildings in Central Brooklyn — The Alhambra (pictured above), and The Renaissance in Bedford Stuyvesant and The Imperial just across Atlantic Avenue in Crown Heights.
The Alhambra is in a moody palette of orange and brown and red, while the Imperial turned the corner of the new Renaissance style, airy and light in soft yellow and buff brick and terra cotta. Two-story-high fluted columns give the later building a Roman pomp…The 1892 Renaissance, at Nostrand Avenue and Hancock Street, is essentially the same as the Imperial, although less operatic.
After falling into disrepair (and, in the case of The Alhambra, being gutted by fire) along with much of the surrounding area in the Sixties and Seventies, all three buildings have recently been brought back to life by developers as lower- and middle-income housing with a surprising level of respect for their architectural heritage. In addition to the attitudes of the developers, the buildings’ survival can be attributed to the fact that they were individually landmarked in 1986. The only bummer is that little of architectural significance has survived on the interiors; given what the buildings’ fates could have been, though, the overall outcome is a triumph.
Make sure to check out all the photos on NYC-Architecture.com below.
Three Singular Buildings With a Second Chance [NY Times]
Montrose Morris [NYC Architecture]
How do I co-op or condo in one of these buildings 🙂
TheAlhambra was the first building I saw when I came up out of the subway on my first trip to Bed Stuy in the early 80’s. I moved to the area soon afterwards, as saw the fire, the abandonment, and finally, the revival of this gem, and of the Renaissance and now the Imperial. For once, they got it right – restore the magnificent apartment buildings that exist in our brownstone communities. These buildings now provide necessary affordable housing to hundreds of people, and are well maintained and kept up with pride.
3:28 is right – this part of Bed Stuy so needs to be protected in an historic district. Beautiful architecture needs to be protected, and more development that utilizes the beauty we have, instead of tearing down to build crap, needs to be encouraged.
Neither photo shows one of the largest homeless shelters in the city diagonally across the street.
In both the historical and current photographs of the Imperial, you can see the Bedfordshire to the left
(http://brownstoner.com/brownstoner/archives/2006/10/1200_pacific_ba.html)