Letting Carroll Gardens Grow
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

For me, one of the principal charms of Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood is the architectural diversity, which is in part the result of alterations that might not be permitted in a landmark district.
The changes have occurred in a mostly gradual manner, and have given Carroll Gardens the most warmly lived-in appearance of any of Brooklyn’s brownstone neighborhoods.
There are two ways to lose that quality. One is overdevelopment. The other is overprotection. For now, though maybe not for long, the neighborhood is straddling the line between those.
Many people who know there is a Carroll Gardens Historic District are shocked to realize how small it is. The area designated by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1973 comprises both sides of Carroll and President streets between Smith and Hoyt streets: four block fronts plus a little extra on Hoyt.
These streets exemplify — as indeed do many others in the neighborhood — the clever plan of Richard Butts, one of the surveyors of the young City of Brooklyn in the 1840s.
It was Butts’s idea that the houses be set back behind unusually deep front yards, giving the historic-district blocks plus the blocks bounded by 1st and 4th places and Smith and Henry streets their remarkable spaciousness and many lushly, even fantastically, planted gardens. Yet the houses are all row houses, mostly brownstones, so that for all the spaciousness there is still an urban density.
As important as the gardens is the way Butts skewed the grid so that all the streets from President Street to 4th Place going east or west visually terminate at Smith Street, where the pedestrian or driver must jog to the left (going east) or right (going west) to continue along the street past Smith. It sets up terminal vistas our New York grids too often deny us. In Carroll Gardens, it’s like having your grid and eating it, too.
Add to all of this Carroll Park, bounded by President and Carroll streets and Smith and Court streets. At almost 2 acres, this was once an ornamental square surrounded by stately brownstones.
Established in the 1840s and originally privately owned (like another 1840s residential square, Gramercy Park), Carroll Park was purchased in the 1850s by the City of Brooklyn and maintained as a public park. It eventually became the recreational park it is today, aided particularly by the alterations made in the 1930s under the recreation-loving Robert Moses. While now a place of raucous activity, with a public school along one side of it, the park still is a major neighborhood amenity and works with the deep yards and jogging vistas to give a unique and uniquely lovely character to the district.
In part compensating for the tiny historic district are the neighborhood’s several individually designated landmarks. For example, at Clinton and Carroll streets stands a gorgeous house from 1840.
That’s very early for this area, which didn’t take off until the Hamilton Avenue Ferry opened in 1846. A man named John Rankin built his country house in the Greek Revival style. When we think of Greek Revival mansions we may think of Southern plantation houses with colonnaded porches. But here there’s no air of mint juleps on the veranda. Rather, the ascetic forms we once erroneously ascribed to the ancient Greeks (who in fact loved exuberant ornamentation and coloration) express a mercantile austerity.
But as Mies van der Rohe, the architect of the Seagram Building, said, “God is in the details”: the granite pilasters and front stairs, the granite sills and lintels, the subtle modulations of the brick façade, the iron railings. It’s perfection, and has been exceptionally well-maintained as the F.G. Guido Funeral Home.
Lacking landmark protection and having become a red-hot real estate market, Carroll Gardens (a name that came into use in 1965 or 1966, supplanting “South Brooklyn” and “Red Hook”; many a neighborhood old-timer still calls the area by those names) has attracted the attention of developers. The International Longshoremen’s Association Medical Center on Court and Union streets was recently razed for a new condo project by the Clarett Group and the architects Rogers Marvel. (The building directly across Court Street once housed the office of Anthony Anastasio, the longshoremen’s union boss who inspired the Lee J. Cobb character in “On the Waterfront.”)
Another projected new development is on Smith Street at 2nd Place, where the developer William Stein is teaming up with the architects KSQ.
On July 23, the City Council unanimously passed a zoning amendment that will profoundly affect the garden blocks of Carroll Gardens. These blocks had been zoned as wide streets — because the deep front yards were bizarrely counted as part of the street width. In fact, the streets are quite narrow, and the zoning change acknowledges as much, limiting new construction on these blocks to 55 feet in height.
This zoning change affects the Stein project, which is slated for 70 feet. It appears the construction was not sufficiently along to be grandfathered under the old zoning. The Clarett project is unaffected by the zoning change.
In addition, many residents support a general downzoning for the neighborhood as a whole, as well as an extension of the historic district boundaries.
Carroll Gardens has evolved beautifully — organically, unpretentiously, adding Virgin Mary shrines to the front yards of brownstones built for the Puritans moving down from Brooklyn Heights. Here the unlikeliest things, from the vivid storefront of Esposito’s pork store on Court Street to International Style longshoremen’s-union buildings, seem to fit — across 170 years. May it be so for another 170 and more.
fmorrone@nysun.com