The words “Greek revival” bring to mind buildings with temple fronts of freestanding columns, like the Parthenon. Such buildings are usually of large scale; Federal Hall National Memorial on Wall Street is one example. On the domestic side, we see the temple mode adapted to large houses, like the plantation houses in the South. But urban row houses?

Historians give many reasons for the popularity of things “Grecian” from the 1820s to the 1850s. Sympathy for the Greeks in their war against the Turks led to such examples of Grecian idolatry as Fitz-Greene Halleck’s 1827 poem “Marco Bozzaris,” while a new sense of Greek design, based upon archaeological findings, came on the scene just as architectural fashion was ready to change.

In New York City and Brooklyn, the row house had been the standard housing type for many years. Could the new Grecian fashion be applied to a sort that seemed to defy a monumental style? One architect who thought so was Brooklyn’s Minard Lafever. He disseminated his ideas through “pattern books” that builders used to supply fast-growing towns and cities with houses, churches, and other buildings. Pattern books created the great era of “architecture without architects” during which much of the best of urban America was built. Lafever’s “Modern Builder’s Guide” (1833) and “Beauties of Modern Architecture” (1835) spread the Grecian gospel.

Brooklyn, chartered as a city in 1834, was a beneficiary. Borough Hall (1845–48) is a temple-like building, as was a church Lafever designed on the present site of the Brooklyn Municipal Building. But the Grecian note is also evident in the row houses of Brooklyn Heights. An excellent example is the row at 29–75 Joralemon St., between Hicks and Furman Streets. Twenty-five houses step down the bluff of the Heights toward the river, creating the kind of tumbling skyline Italian hill towns are celebrated for. “Grecian” row houses, it seems, can be seen on every block on the Heights. So how does the style of the Acropolis adapt to the 25-foot-wide row house?

A colonnade would swallow such a façade whole. But a column on either side of the doorway at the top of the stoop worked, as at 1–13 Washington Square North in Manhattan. A simpler alternative was the boxy pilaster (a flat representation of a column in relief), and that’s the easiest identifier of a Greek revival row house. “Trabeation” — flat forms, without arches — generally prevailed; no more elliptical fanlights. Pitched roofs with dormers, as in the earlier “Federal” style, were out; straight rooflines with attic windows forming a frieze were in.

A modest Grecian house was no bigger than a big Federal house, but always seemed so. Wide stoops, high basements, and straight lines did the trick. So too did a new kind of entrance, the doorway placed behind a deep entablature that could keep you dry in the rain, with a step down to the stoop landing and an areaway between the stoop and the front gate and a last step down to the sidewalk. The sequence was not only grand like a temple, but spoke of society’s ever-increasing separation of public and private space. Finally, the iron railings and fences of the period, which are New York treasures, bear extraordinary Greek ornamentation, especially the anthemion, or honeysuckle, without which New York streets would be so much drearier.