John Petit’s Visionary Home Designs

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Around 1900, the former town of Flatbush, by then part of the borough of Brooklyn, took shape around several subdivisions in which developers laid the infrastructure and hired architects to design houses suited to what the papers called “high-class residence districts.” They were of varying grandeur, and today, some are gone. The earliest of the fancy subdivisions was Tennis Court, small in comparison to later developments but in other respects prototypical. Today, Tennis Court is merely the name of a street, half a block south of Church Avenue between Ocean Avenue and East 18th Street.

Later subdivisions included such beautiful developments as Ditmas Park and Fiske Terrace. But the grandest was Dean Alvord’s Prospect Park South.There’s no other New York experience like walking west on high-energy Church Avenue, then turning left on Buckingham Road into a still, storybook enclave of large freestanding houses of encyclopedically varied styles. Alvord bought 50 acres of land here in 1899 “to create a rural park within the limitations of the conventional city block and city street.”That’s one thing that makes Prospect Park South different from the slightly later Forest Hills Gardens, which has its own street layout of curving paths and village greens.

In Flatbush, Alvord had to achieve his “garden city” effects in other ways. On Buckingham Road, for example, the planted median is rounded off and swells to create the illusion that you’ve left the grid. The planting of trees back at the building line and the broad curbside lawns create parklike spaciousness — again illusory. The ingenious landscape architect was John Aitkin.

The architect most associated with the development is John Petit, whose firm, Kirby, Petit & Green, was contemporaneously responsible for Dreamland, the short-lived, self-consciously classy Coney Island amusement paradise. Petit is one of the most underrated of New York architects. That happens with architects who design well in too many styles, and appear uncommitted to a vision.Yet the vision may be in the variety itself.

No. 131 Buckingham Road (1902–03), between Church Avenue and Albemarle Road, is Petit’s most famous work — the “Japanese house.” This was apparently a show house used to publicize the development. But my favorites of Petit’s are on another street. Take a right on Albemarle and walk two blocks to Rugby Road, then take a right. On the west side are two houses, no. 100 and no. 94, next to each other. No. 94 (1907) is in a Spanish Mission Revival style, with wonderful, large–stepped and curved gables dominating each façade. No. 100 (1900) is a Swiss chalet, whose sawtooth brackets recall the complex bracketing on the Japanese house. Petit thus gave us a Japanese house, a Spanish Mission house, a Swiss chalet — each beautifully designed to the every detail.

To add to the fun, John Nitchie designed no. 101 Rugby Road (1900), a Queen Anne extravaganza that featured in the film Sophie’s Choice.These architects made it seem as though nothing could be more natural in a garden setting in Brooklyn than such riotous eclecticism, like a giant exhalation of all the great-hearted zaniness of the preceding half century in American architecture.

fmarrone@nysun.com


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