The man Calvert Vaux called “the Sir Christopher Wren of America” was born in New Jersey, in 1798. Throughout his career as an architect, Minard Lafever lived in Williamsburg. At the time of his death in 1854, that was still not part of the city of Brooklyn. But Lafever worked a great deal in Brooklyn, especially Brooklyn Heights, which boomed just as Lafever came of age as an architect. Unfortunately, most of Lafever’s buildings are gone. But there is nowhere better to take the measure of this architect than within a roughly four-block stretch along Clinton Street, in Brooklyn Heights. There we find three Lafever buildings, each a first-class example of his work.

We will start in the south. The Packer Collegiate Institute is a private preparatory school on Joralemon Street between Court and Clinton Streets. Lafever designed this imposing building shortly before he died, and it was completed just after he died. The style, as with all three of these buildings, is Gothic. This boldly scaled brick edifice, with brownstone trim, features an eyepopping, two-story-high, pointedarch window above the main entrance. On either side of the window rise towers that project out from the wall plane. But it isn’t symmetrical: The tower on the right is far larger than the one on the left. The crenellations on the left side, and the high gable on the right, add to the Romantic asymmetry, and the effect is enhanced by the way the building is set back in a garden. It is perhaps the most outstanding piece of “Collegiate Gothic” design in New York.

Though Lafever arguably was New York’s first outstanding Gothic Revivalist, he was also more responsible than any other American architect for the spread of the Greek Revival. He exerted his influence both through his buildings and through “pattern books” like “The Young Builder’s General Instructor” of 1829, which taught a generation of architects how to adapt the Grecian influence to a variety of modern building types. The nearby Brooklyn Borough Hall (1845-48), at Joralemon and Court Streets, attests to the Grecian moment Lafever did so much to promote.

At Montague and Clinton Streets stands St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Church, built in 1844-47, a flawless specimen of the English Gothic style some Episcopal congregations had just begun to favor. Unlike Brooklynite Richard Upjohn, the principal purveyor of High Church Gothic in New York, Lafever was not a churchman, but rather stood ready to deliver what the congregation needed. That said, Unitarians, of which Lafever was one, were about as far from High Church Episcopalians as you could get. Yet for the Church of the Saviour, around the corner on Pierrepont Street and Monroe Place, Lafever designed in a Gothic that, if not as ecclesiologically “pure” as at the other church, nonetheless was quite serious.

Like Sir Christopher Wren in late 17th-century England, Lafever was a form-giver. His designs helped to define the American landscape.

fmorrone@nysun.com