A Tour of the Houses On the Heights
On Saturday, the Brooklyn Heights Association will host its annual Landmark House and Garden Tour. The Heights, New York City's first historic district, includes excellent examples of 19th-century residential architecture — many of which are open to the public on this selfguided tour.
The five homes on the tour range in style. A Greek Revival structure on Columbia Heights has 14-foot ceilings and is at least 30 feet wide — unusually spacious for a townhouse. Its back-yard features landscape work by Nigel Rollings, an instructor of urban garden design at Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
Also on Columbia Heights, a Renaissance Revival home boasts views of Manhattan and the East River from every West-facing room. The home itself has an important contemporary art collection that is set off by antique rugs and furniture.
A former carriage house on Garden Place, a street among the most popular for families and trick-ortreating, features several pieces of Biedermeier furniture and Asian and American pieces.
On Clinton Street, a former rooming house that served as a mosque and later, a single-roomoccupancy hotel, offers less original detail than the other homes on the tour, but the house has been spruced up with modern interior design and decoration.
The wooden Federal house on Joralemon Street will soon be up for sale, which is seldom the case for homes on the tour. "[It] looks small from the outside but is big on the inside," the executive director of the Brooklyn Heights Association, Judy Stanton, said of the white frame structure.
Although it was partially damaged in an electrical fire a few years ago on New Year's Eve, the house has been newly renovated and restored. (It is also the only home featured on the tour that is unfurnished.)
Another highlight of the tour is one shared by all residents of Brooklyn Heights: the view.
"Only in Brooklyn Heights does one have the view that we have — the one over the Promenade," Ms. Stanton said.
One of the purposes of the tour is to show the benefits of landmark preservation. The Heights has in recent decades become a haven for young couples and families, and the tour now attracts between 750 and 1,000 visitors, from preservationists to those nostalgic for Brooklyn's old port and sailor town.
Brooklyn Heights Landmark House and Garden Tour, Saturday, May 12, 1–5 p.m., entrance to St. Ann's School, 129 Pierrepont St., between Clinton and Henry streets, 718-858-9193, $30.
