Top Ten Brooklyn Architecture

top ten Brooklyn buildings

For a more complete list, see Brooklyn

architect	Olmsted and Vaux
location	Prospect Park, Grand Army Plaza, Prospect Park W, Prospect Park SW., Parkside Ave., Ocean Ave., and Flatbush Ave.
date	Designed 1865. Constructed 1866-1873. Frederick Law Olmsted & Calvert Vaux. Various alterations. Scenic landmark.

Prospect Park is a 585 acre (2.4 km²) public park in the New York City borough of Brooklyn located between Park Slope, Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, Kensington, Windsor Terrace and Flatbush Avenue, Grand Army Plaza and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and seven blocks northeast of Green-Wood Cemetery. It is run and operated by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and is part of the Brooklyn-Queens Greenway.

The park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux after they completed Manhattan's Central Park. Attractions include the Long Meadow, a 90 acre (36 ha) meadow thought to be the largest meadow in any U.S. park; the Picnic House which houses offices and a hall that can accommodate parties with up to 175 guests; Litchfield Villa, the historic home of the previous owners of the southern part of Park; Prospect Park Zoo; a large nature conservancy; the only urban Audubon Center & a Visitor Center (at the Boathouse); Brooklyn's only lake, covering 60 acres (24 ha); the Prospect Park Bandshell that hosts free outdoor concerts in the summertime; and various sports and fitness activities including seven baseball fields. There is also a private Quaker cemetery on the grounds of the Park in an area known as Quaker Hill. (Actor Montgomery Clift is interred there.)

Grand Army Plaza

architect	Olmsted and Vaux
location	All Grand Army Plaza, within Plaza St. at the intersection of Flatbush Ave., Prospect Park W., Eastern Pkwy., and Vanderbilt Ave.
date	1870.
style	Beaux-Arts
type	Monument

Olmsted & Vaux designed this monumental oval traffic circle in the spirit of Paris Etoile (now the Place Charles de Gaulle), that circular 12-spoked traffic rond point that bears in its central island the Arc de Triomphe, although they opposed an arch here. A masterstroke of city planning, this nexus joins their great Eastern Parkway, and their Prospect Park, with the avenues that preceded it on other geometries. This triumphal arch did not arrive for 22 years: the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch W by John H. Duncan, architect of Grant’s Tomb, was built between 1889 and 1892, commemorating Union forces that perished in the Civil War. The arch provided, as in its Parisian inspiration, an excellent armature for sculpture, planned by Stanford White (McKim, Mead & White. 1894-1901), the most spectacular of which is Frederick MacMonnies’ huge quadriga on top (1898). Inside the arch itself is more subtle work, bas-reliefs of Lincoln (Thomas Eakins) and Grant (William O’Donovan), both installed in 1895. On the south pedestals are two bristling groups representing The Army and The Navy by MacMonnies (1901). A museum within the arch is open to the public.

Williamsburgh Savings Bank

architect	Halsey, McCormack & Helmer,
location	located at 1 Hanson Place, at the corner of Ashland Place, near the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues, across from Atlantic Terminal Mall (despite the name it stands in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn rather than Williamsburg).
date	1929
style	Art Deco
construction	512-foot, 34-story
type	Bank, Office Building

The 'Willie' was built by the architectural firm Halsey, McCormack and Helmer from 1927-1929. It is 512 feet tall, and can be seen from Brooklyn housetops as far away as Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights. It is the tallest building in Brooklyn and one of the two tallest buildings on Long Island. Its four-faced clock was the largest in the world in 1929, and held the title until 1962, when it was surpassed by the clocks on the Allen Bradley Building in Milwaukee. The ground-floor banking room boasts a 63-foot ceiling, and windows overlooking Hanson Place are 40 feet high.

The Montauk Club

architect	Francis H. Kimball
location	25 Eighth Avenue. NE cor. Lincoln Place. 1889-1891.
date	1891
style	Venetian Gothic
type	Club
construction	Brownstone, brick, terra-cotta, and verdigris copper.

A Venetian Gothic palazzo, whose canal is the narrow lawn separating it from its cast-iron fence. Remember the Ca d’Oro. But here in brownstone, brick, terra-cotta, and verdigris copper. It bears the name of a local tribe, which explains the 8th Avenue friezes at the 3rd and 4th stories, honoring these former local natives.

Boys High School

architect	James W. Naughton. Additions 1905-1910 C.B.J.Snyder
location	832 Marcy Ave., bet. Putnam Ave and Madison St.
date	1891-92
style	Romanesque Revival
construction	red brick and terracotta
type	School
notes	A major Brooklyn landmark, in splendid Romanesque Revival: arched, quoined, towered and lushly decorated in terracotta in the manner of Louis Sullivan.

232 Hancock St

architect	Montrose W. Morris
location	232 Hancock St, se cor. Marcy Ave.
date	1886
style	Queen Anne
construction	Brick and stone.
type	House

Bedford-Stuvvesant is the amalgam of two middle-class communities of the old City of Brooklyn: Bedford, the western portion, and Stuyvesant Heights, to the east. Today's BedfordStuyvesant is one of the city's two major black enclaves; the other is its peer, Harlem. Bed-Stuy differs from its Manhattan counterpart in its much larger percentage of home owners, although Harlem is rapidly following its lead in gentriying its own blocks. The southern and western portions comprise masonry row housing of distinguished architectural quality and vigorous churches whose spires contribute to the area's frequently lacy skyline. The northeastern reaches have considerable numbers of wooden tenements, containing some of the nation's worst slums. But on the whole, Bed-Stuy has a reputation that doesn't fit with reality: a stable community with hundreds of blocks of well-kept town houses.Where Bedford-Stuyvesant has distinguished architecture, it is very good. Its facades of brownstones and brickfronts create a magnificent townscape as good as-and sometimes better than-many fashionable areas of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Parts of Chauncey, Decatur, MacDonough, and Macon Streets, and the southern end of Stuyvesant Avenue, are superb. Hancock Street, between Nostrand and Tompkins Avenues, was considered a showplace in its time (why not now too?). Alice and Agate Courts, short cul-de-sacs isolated from the macrocosm of the street system, are particularly special places in the seemingly endless, anonymous grid.
Bed-Stuy comprises roughly 2,000 acres and houses 400,000 people, making it among the 30 largest American cities.

Excellence Charter School

architect	James W. Naughton restored with addition, Robert A. M. Stern 2005.
location	225 Patchen Ave.
date	late 1880s
style	Second Empire Baroque From Napoleon III's Second Empire: a mansarded central block over brick and brownstone: an admiring follower of Lefuel and Visconti's Louvre.
construction	red brick with brownstone trim
type	Education

James W. Naughton’s 1880 gauged red brick and brownstone school building was abandoned in the late 1970s after a major fire. Uncommon Schools, a non-for-profit organization known for developing urban college preparatory charter schools in the northeast chose the site for its academy in Brooklyn – Excellence Charter School – after an exhaustive search.
“The lowest-risk strategy would have been to demolish the charred shell of the building,” said David Saltzman, Executive Director of the Robin Hood Foundation and a trustee of the Excellence Charter School. “It required the extraordinary vision of Robert A.M. Stern Architects to reincarnate this lost treasure as a new charter school.”

Williamsburg Art and Historical Society

architect	King & Wilcox. William H. Wilcox.
location	135 Broadway, NE cor. Bedford Ave, Williamsburg.
date	1868
style	Second Empire Baroque
type	Bank

Bands of smooth and vermiculated Dorchester stone and slender Ionic and Corinthian columns alternate to enliven the exterior of the banking floor of this splendid Second Empire masterpiece. Victorian at its best, even the interior is carefully preserved, the gaslit chandeliers all present (but wired for electricity). Look at the plaited Indian hut in the entry pediment.

Williamsburgh Savings Bank

architect	George B Post. Additions, 1906, 1925. Helmle, Huberty & Hudswell. Restorations, 1990s. Platt Byard Dovell.
location	175 Broadway, NW cor. Driggs Ave, Williamsburg.
date	1870-1875
style	Neoclassical
type	Bank

The eclectic Victorian crossbreeding of Renaissance and Roman parts. It is a sharp, hard, gray place reminiscent of the work of Brooklyn's own great architect, Frank Freeman, at the old, long since demolished, Brooklyn Trust Company (below the dome).

178 Meserole Street

architect	unknown
location	178 Meserole Street, bet. Grahame and Humboldt Aves. S side, Williamsburg.
date	ca. 1880s
style	Renaissance Revival
construction	wood
type	Apartment Building

Exuberant, painted wood tenements -two of the city's best. "Tenement" is perjorative today; in fact it describes a walk-up apartment house that covers most of its building site. Here the light in the back rooms is minimal, but the visible architecture is magnificent. A quite incredibly rare surviving example of the type of decorative cladding that once adorned all such timber frame buildings in Brooklyn.