Architecture 101: Charles Condon House in BH

Photo from archive of the CUNY Neighborhood Projects

At 123 Remsen Street in Brooklyn Heights sits the former residence of Charles Condon. Widely considered one of the finest examples of French Second Empire architecture, the four-story building (which now houses the Brooklyn Bar Association) has a brownstone basement, topped by three floors of red brick and capped off with a lovely mansard roof. There is some discrepancy about when the house was built–with some accounts suggesting as early as 1856 and others as late as the 1870s. Writing in “An Architectural Guidebook to Brooklyn,” Francis Morrone notes some of his favorite elements:

Several lovely touches make this house a delight, for example the shell forms in round frames in the center of the first-floor lintels, the motif repeated in the round form that rises from the center of the cornice overhanging the central bay of the mansard, and the heavy, carved-stone newel posts.

Morrone’s Books [Francis Morrone]