Willow Place and Columbia Place, in Brooklyn Heights, form a secluded enclave that is well worth a visit. The two streets run south from Joralemon Street for all of one block to State Street, where the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway swoops down westward from Cobble Hill to run beneath the Promenade.

The charming and diminutive Willow Place Chapel sits on the west side of Willow Place, set back from the street behind a small garden. A gabled structure of red brick with sandstone trim, it features a projecting porch and flanking pinnacles. This is picturesque simplicity itself.

This delicate Gothic miniature, built between 1875 and 1876, brought together two men of large temperament: Russell Sturgis and Alfred Tredway White. Sturgis designed the chapel. In addition to being an architect, he wielded a pervasive influence as one of the leading American art and architecture critics of the 19th century. He was a principal figure in the importation of the ideas of the great English critic John Ruskin. As an architect, he mentored a generation of designers, most notably Charles McKim of McKim, Mead & White. He also designed several buildings on the Yale campus. As an influential professor at Columbia, he promoted “progressive” architects like Louis Sullivan and Bruce Price.

White was a Brooklyn-born philanthropist who created model tenements and helped found the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. He was a parishioner of the First Unitarian Church on Pierrepont Street and Monroe Place, several blocks to the north and east, and he built Willow Place Chapel as a “settlement chapel” of First Unitarian.

One of White’s model tenement projects, the Riverside, stands on Columbia Place, behind the chapel. Built in 1890, the Riverside followed on White’s pioneering projects, the Tower and Home Buildings and the Workingmen’s Cottages, a little to the south in Cobble Hill. Jacob Riis, in his 1890 book “How the Other Half Lives,” called the Riverside “the beau ideal of the model tenement.” Nine buildings surrounded a courtyard that ensured light and air to each apartment. White held concerts for the buildings’ tenants in the courtyard’s bandstand. Each apartment was equipped with its own toilet. (Bathing was communal and in the basement.)

Alas, four of the nine Riverside buildings were lost to the BQE. Still, the Riverside remains a fine looming mass of surprisingly intricate details along the west side of Columbia Place. Note the four stories of balcony bays recessed within broad segmental arches with intaglio-patterned brickwork in their spandrels.

Across Willow Place from the chapel stands an intriguing 1840s ensemble of four red-brick houses screened by a continuous colonnade of thirteen square wooden columns. This is a simple, almost rustic, variation on the “colonnade row” concept that we see at LaGrange Terrace on Lafayette Street in Manhattan.

Willow Place is a place of beguiling contrasts. A great city is made up in part of such surprising nooks and crannies.

fmorrone@nysun.com