The Splendor of Row Houses
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Bedford-Stuyvesant may be the largest row-house neighborhood in the country. As the hyphenated name suggests, it is a conglomeration of once-distinct communities. One of the communities was known as Bedford Corners, a name that sounds like a combination of Bedford Falls, from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and Grover’s Corners, from “Our Town.” Because it is so large, Bedford-Stuyvesant didn’t develop all at once, or in a uniform pattern. There is also a nomenclatorial problem: Parts of what once were considered Bedford-Stuyvesant have, mysteriously, come to be known as parts of Crown Heights.
That said, Hancock Street, between Marcy and Tompkins Avenues, is in Bedford-Stuyvesant by anyone’s reckoning. Though of landmark quality, Hancock falls just outside the Stuyvesant Heights Historic District; but several buildings near here are individual landmarks. I point out this street both as splendid in itself and as symbolic of the quality of the area’s row-house streets. Hancock Street showcases houses by one of Brooklyn’s greatest architects, Montrose W. Morris.
Morris designed splendid houses in Park Slope, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, and Crown Heights. He also designed Brooklyn’s best apartment buildings. He grew up in Brooklyn and was only 22 when he started his firm. In 1885, when he was 24, he built a house for himself at 236 Hancock Street. He made it a show house, opening it to prospective clients in a shrewd marketing move for this prodigy of his profession.
Morris’s house was part of a fivehouse row he designed at nos. 236–244, on the south side. He intended for these houses to be a unified row: three gabled houses sandwiched between houses (including his own) with flat roofs projecting out from the wall plane, looking like end pavilions of a grand structure. His materials are red brick with stone trim and elaborate terra cotta work. The houses he designed a year later at nos. 246–252 are in a lighter palette, with limestone and Roman brick.
On the other side of his own house, Morris also designed no. 232, of 1888. Across the street, nos. 255–259 are from 1889. The queen of Hancock Street is no. 247, a spectacular 80-foot-wide Italian Renaissance-style mansion. In brownstone, this followed upon McKim, Mead & White’s Villard houses on Madison Avenue, the clarion of Renaissance sobriety after the gallimaufry of the High Victorian.
Great as Morris’s houses are, his nearby buildings are even better. At the southwest corner of Hancock Street and Nostrand Avenue is a Morris apartment building, the Renaissance, from 1892. Five stories of Roman brick and terra cotta, the châteauesque beauty is reminiscent of the 16th-century Château d’Azay-le-Rideau in the Loire Valley.
A block south on Nostrand Avenue, at Halsey Street, is Morris’s Alhambra (1889–90), the Dakota of Brooklyn. Like the Renaissance, the Alhambra is a designated landmark. In 1900, half its apartments had live-in servants; the storefronts were added in 1923.
Look up: The mansard, conical roofs, gables, and high chimneys make a deliriously variegated skyline. Such forms etched against the sky were felt by architects to be a necessary vertical resolution to a building’s mass. They were right.
