Walking Brooklyn. Adrienne Onofri
entirely between 1869 and 1884.
Turn right on Hoyt Street. Those first four brick rowhouses on your left are the oldest homes in the historic district.
Turn right on Carroll Street. All the houses on this block date from 1871–74, except for #297 and #299, which were built in 1986 to fill a gap left after a former Norwegian church burned down.
Turn left on Smith Street. When the Gowanus Canal—located on the other side of Hoyt—was thriving as a commercial waterway in the first half of the 20th century, this was a strip of taverns and rooming houses for laborers.
Turn right on 2nd Place. To your left is a community garden on MTA-owned land.
Turn right on Court Street, then left on 1st Place.
Make a right at Clinton Street, across from an 1856 church that has been converted from Westminster Presbyterian to the Norwegian Seamen’s Church to apartments. At the next corner on your left, the F. G. Guido Funeral Home occupies an 1840 mansion that’s considered one of the city’s finest examples of Greek Revival architecture. Diagonally across the Carroll Street intersection stands St. Paul’s Episcopal. Its architect was one of its parishioners, Richard M. Upjohn, a Gothic master like his father, Richard Upjohn.
Make a right on President, where you pass a variety of freestanding residences and apartment houses before returning to brownstone uniformity. The magnificent 1893 home at #255 used to be the rectory of South Congregational Church—hence, the churchlike windows on the top level. Next to it, the church’s ladies parlor (1889) has also become a private home, while the 1850s church itself was turned into an apartment co-op in the early 1980s. Take note of the twisted-rope shape of the property’s lampposts, an homage to the neighborhood’s maritime ties.
Turn left on Court Street, where G. Esposito, Monteleone’s, and Marco Polo preserve the traditional Italian flavor on a block also home to newer businesses like a yoga studio and fro-yo joint. And what could better represent the upscaling of the neighborhood than the big new residential complex on your left past Union Street? On the right, the
Turn left at Kane Street. The
Make a left on Tompkins Place, a one-block street of 1840s and 1850s classics that you could enjoy for their door enframements alone.
Turn right on Degraw and then head back to Kane via another one-blocker, Strong Place. At the corner with Degraw is a recent church-to-condo conversion. This 1852 building, designed by Minard Lafever, a preeminent church architect of the time, had stood vacant and neglected for nearly a decade before being acquired by the condo developer.
Turn right at Kane, walking beside Christ Church, the oldest Episcopal church building in Brooklyn. Come around to its front on Clinton Street, and stand beneath the 120-foot, four-spire steeple. This 1842 masterpiece was designed by Richard Upjohn and was completed while his most famous project, Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street in Manhattan, was under construction. Christ Church’s altar, pulpit, and some windows were designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany.
Go in the other direction on Clinton. On your left across Baltic Street, #296 was the home of Richard Upjohn, who also designed it (in 1842), although with only three stories (another was added later) and with a bay window rather than the slightly thrust front that replaced it.
Walk west along Baltic Street next to the Upjohn house. Richard M. Upjohn designed this apartment-house extension to his father’s former home in 1893. Farther down on the right is the neighborhood’s oldest long row of houses built together, starting with #181 and extending to the end of the block. They’ve all been modified one way or another since they were erected in 1837–39.
On the next block, you need only peek into the mews next to 145 Baltic, as you’ll be going into it shortly, but look for the plaque on the side of 141 Baltic that tells you its name: COTTAGES FOR WORKINGMEN. Hmm. In the meantime, don’t overlook the handsome twin houses on both sides of Warren Place. Finishing out the block, you have the Home and Tower buildings to your left and right, respectively, which today constitute the Cobble Hill Towers.
At Hicks Street, first go left and check out the Home apartments, as they were known when they went up in the late 1870s in tandem with the Tower across Baltic. Both were built for the working class—“model tenements,” offering those of modest means attractively designed housing with decent plumbing and ventilation. Then turn around and walk north on Hicks in front of the Tower complex.
Turn right on Warren Street, then enter
Cobble Hill Park
Turn left on Henry Street. The entire west side of the block is occupied by Cobble Hill Health Center, now a nursing home but built as a church-affiliated charity hospital in 1888.
Turn right on Verandah Place, which was probably an alley of stables and carriage houses before the houses were built in the 1850s. Thomas Wolfe lived in the basement of #40 in 1930 and described it in You Can’t Go Home Again: “follow the two-foot strip of broken concrete pavement that skirts the alley, and go to the very last shabby house down by the end. . . . The place may seem to you more like a dungeon than a room that a man would voluntarily elect to live in.” Don’t despair—he also wrote that “he found beauty” here, from “a tree that leaned over into the narrow alley . . . .”
Turn left on Clinton Street and enter
Turn right again at Henry. On your left as you approach Amity Street is a regal structure built for those in need. Toward the top it bears the name THE POLHEMUS CLINIC, founded in 1895 to provide medical services for poor residents of the waterfront district (the harbor’s just two blocks beyond). Long Island College Hospital, of which Polhemus was part, closed in 2014, and now its entire site is targeted for mixed-use redevelopment.
Turn right on Amity. The busily embellished corner building on your right was also part of the hospital,