See This Year's Prospect Lefferts Gardens House and Garden Tour in Photos

About 600 people attended this year’s Prospect Lefferts Gardens House and Garden Tour, now in its 45th year. Photographer, Brownstoner commenter, and longtime PLG resident Bob Marvin took these photos and shared with us his impressions of the tour.

Brooklyn house tours do not typically allow the public to take photos, but as a 32-year board member of tour organizer Lefferts Manor Association, Bob had special permission. This year’s tour took place Sunday, May 31.

Highlights included an art-filled house, a garden party, and a recently installed solar system on a roof. Bob said:

Our tour had seven houses, one apartment, and four gardens. Five of the houses were Renaissance Revival row houses on Midwood Street and Lincoln and Rutland Roads; the others a Tudor revival and a Colonial Revival on Rutland Road and Sterling Street, respectively.

The apartment was a large two-bedroom in Patio Gardens, a two-building early ’60s high-rise on Flatbush Avenue. Eleven local businesses (seven restaurants, four stores) offered discounts or other special incentives to tour goers.

Twenty-six businesses and one local arts organization contributed financially to the tour. Approximately 600 people went on the tour (about 400 ticket sales, the rest neighborhood volunteers who received a comp ticket).

Some of the features that seemed most popular were the refreshments in three local gardens, which where not separately fenced, demonstrating the friendliness and neighborliness of Prospect Lefferts Gardens; an art-filled house (one of the owner’s own paintings), and a house that demonstrated its recently installed solar electric set-up, which actually produces roughly as much power as is consumed.

I was personally struck by the fairly large number of younger people who attended our tour (i.e. 30-somethings). My impression on another tour I attended in a nearby brownstone neighborhood two weeks earlier was that most tour goers there were my age, or older. I take this to be a good sign.

See below for a selection of photos. You can see more of Bob Marvin’s house tour photos on Flickr.

Brooklyn House Tours Start This Weekend! [Brownstoner]
PLG House Tour Coverage [Brownstoner]