Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, counts among those New York neighborhoods people are surprised to learn are not designated historic districts, and among those neighborhoods that seem sure to receive such designation in the near future. Advocates of designation for Prospect Heights point to the losses and potential losses along the neighborhood’s northern edge as a result of Forest City Ratner’s proposed Atlantic Yards development. At the same time, Prospect Heights, long regarded as Park Slope’s poor cousin, is increasingly well known as a place loved by its residents for its own special qualities.

The neighborhood’s boundaries are neatly defined: Atlantic Avenue on the north, Eastern Parkway on the south, Washington Avenue on the east, and Flatbush Avenue on the west. The “high street” is Vanderbilt Avenue, which parallels Washington Avenue and extends from Grand Army Plaza north to the Brooklyn Navy Yard at Flushing Avenue. Vanderbilt is a wonderfully intact 19th-century commercial street with many handsome, modestly scaled buildings and original storefronts. The forces of postwar “renewal” mostly spared Vanderbilt, and lately a number of attractive small shops, restaurants, and bars have opened up. One feels many more could open up and Vanderbilt still wouldn’t lose its unique, mellow charm. It’s also a great spine for a walk through the neighborhood. Prospect Heights begins with a bang at Grand Army Plaza, the grandest civic space in New York City. Just north of the plaza, two gorgeous school buildings stand on either side of Vanderbilt at Sterling Place. At the northwest corner stands P.S. 9, built in 1867-68, shortly after this part of Brooklyn was linked by horse-drawn streetcars to East River ferries and began its suburban development. Prospect Park had not even been built yet when this school opened. The architect was Samuel Leonard, who was the public-school architect for the City of Brooklyn between 1859 and 1879, when he was replaced by James W. Naughton, who designed an addition to this building in 1887. Eight years later, Naughton designed the stupendous P.S. 9 Annex on the other side of Vanderbilt. This sort of sensational Romanesque Revival that one associates so strongly with Brooklyn had become a bit passé by 1895. But who cares? This is truly one of the handsomest school buildings in a city filled with them. (It has been converted to apartments.)

I suggest heading north on Vanderbilt while turning left onto Prospect Place and St. Mark’s Avenue to see one of the city’s best — and most well-preserved — collections of 1880s and 1890s row houses, mostly brownstones, in the Italianate, Romanesque Revival, and néo-Grec styles. Houses built in the last of those styles are especially interesting in this neighborhood, as they are among the best-designed and -preserved of their kind in the city. Four houses (numbers 203–209) on Prospect Place, between Vanderbilt and Carlton avenues, were built in 1885 in the néo-Grec style. Their unusual brackets make it no surprise that the architect was Rudolph Daus, in whose works there was often an element of the eccentric. Then again, the 1880s was the most varied decade in American architecture.

On the next block of Prospect Place stand six houses (numbers 123–133) from the 1870s, wonderful survivors of the French Second Empire style, with their tiled mansards like top hats. On St. Mark’s Avenue between Flatbush and Carlton avenues, look for the five houses (numbers 122–130) built in 1881. These were designed by a prominent Brooklyn architect, Marshall Morrill, in the néo-Grec style. The style, known for its emphasis on weight and chunky mass, and incised Grecian ornamentation, emerged in the France of Louis Philippe and dominated the pedagogy of the École des Beaux-Arts when Richard Morris Hunt, the first American to attend the École, was there in the 1840s. He brought the style to New York in the 1850s. On Pacific Street just east of Vanderbilt stands tucked away the wholly unexpected sight of one of the grandest Catholic churches in Brooklyn, St. Joseph’s of 1912, designed by the gifted Francis J. Berlenbach. It’s seen better days, and one can only dream that it will one day be fully restored. Part of a large ecclesial complex, the church is among the rare classical-eclectic progeny of Stanford White’s Judson Memorial Church of the 1890s in Greenwich Village. Gothic became so dominant in New York church architecture that the grand classical churches are to be cherished.

At last, at Atlantic Avenue, Prospect Heights ends, as it began, with a bang. Only here, instead of classical civic grandeur, we have industrial grandeur: The depressed Vanderbilt train yards surrounded by big reinforced-concrete factories make an awesome sight.

A plaintive note: The Ward Bakery, at 800 Pacific Street, clearly visible to the south across the yards, dates from 1911. It’s one of the most beautiful of the city’s early reinforced-concrete factories, sheathed in white brick and white terra-cotta that were meant to convey the utter cleanliness of the bakery’s operations, which involved producing 250,000 loaves of bread a day. The bakery operated (as Pechter Fields) until 1995. At more than a million square feet in floor area, it seems insane that it could not have been saved and adaptively reused in any new development around here. Rather, it is being torn down.