If you stand on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 3rd Street in Park Slope and look diagonally across the avenue, you will take in a sweeping prospect that, though aesthetically nondescript, encapsulates some 300 years of Brooklyn history. In the foreground of your view is J.J. Byrne Park, a neighborhood recreational park of pleasing scale, comprising the full block bounded by Fourth and Fifth Avenues and 3rd and 4th Streets. The park is named for a 1920s borough president.

Within the park you will notice an old-looking structure of stone. This is the fabled “Old Stone House at Gowanus.” Its story is a little complicated. In 1699 (or so) a family named Vechte, which owned a farm comprising a chunk of present-day Park Slope, built a farmhouse here. In 1776 the house was involved in Revolutionary War skirmishing in the Battle of Brooklyn.

Here, Lord Stirling and his Maryland volunteers made their valiant attack upon Lord Cornwallis’s British forces. Heroics aside, the battle seemed to portend a quick end to hostilities – in Britain’s favor. Across 4th Street from the park stands the 1951 William Alexander School, or J.H.S. 51. William Alexander was Lord Stirling. A few blocks away, Prospect Park’s Lookout Hill is adorned with a Stanford White-designed column commemorating the Maryland volunteers.

Before Ebbets Field was built, the Brooklyn Dodgers played at Washington Park, the entrance of which was at the northeast corner of Fourth Avenue and 3rd Street. When the stadium was built in 1898, the team called itself the Superbas, changing its name to Dodgers in 1911, its penultimate year at Washington Park. Oddly, it changed its name back to the Superbas in 1913 (the year Ebbets Field opened), then to the Robins in 1914, finally settling on the Dodgers in 1932.

The stone house was demolished in the 1890s. There is a persistent legend that it was the Superbas’ clubhouse, but that seems unlikely. That said, Washington Park had two predecessors on or near the site of the 1898 stadium, and the house may have served the earlier Bridegrooms (who became the Superbas).

So if the house was demolished, what’s the thing there now? In 1930, Byrne ordered its reconstruction, presumably recycling the original stones.

Today from our corner one sees a growing backdrop to the house. It is the rising steel frame of a very large apartment building a block away on Fourth Avenue. The city recently rezoned dismal, expressway-like Fourth Avenue to encourage the development of luxury buildings at the western periphery of fashionable Park Slope. Fourth Avenue, once as unlikely a setting for luxury buildings as one could imagine, now seems ripe, as Fifth Avenue, astonishingly, has become a chic commercial thoroughfare.

The scale of the new building is daunting. In an overheated market, I guess nothing is unlikely.