Not long ago, Americans discussed the “urban crisis.” One measure of how little the phrase is used nowadays is that while Wikipedia has entries for “Energy Crisis” and “Urban Sprawl,” the online encyclopedia has no entry for “Urban Crisis.” It is no longer part of the lexicon of the young, but it was a phrase once much bandied, and its byword was Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Life cycles of American urban neighborhoods have been volatile in the age of sprawl. (What sprawl giveth, sprawl taketh away.) That age may be passing. We now regard it as altogether unremarkable that inner-city neighborhoods recently written off by banks, pundits, and social scientists as unredeemable should now command top dollar for houses.

Bedford-Stuyvesant became a heavily African-American community in the 1930s. “Gentrification” or, as I like to call it, “unsprawling,” began in New York as early as 1900, and had a great ride through the affluent 1920s. But depression and war took an awful toll on New York’s housing stock, which was victimized by “deferred maintenance” and the conversion of single-family homes to rooming houses.

After World War II, the press hailed the continued migration of Southern blacks to New York. We were still in our legislated interregnum of immigration, and the no. 1 industrial city on Earth faced a shortage of factory workers. For a brief while, at least, African-American and Puerto Rican migrants were viewed as New York’s economic saviors.

Then the roof fell in. The factories decamped. Government loan programs, reflected in the practices of private lending institutions, forsook the rehabilitation of existing inner-city housing stock. A perfect storm involving structural shifts in the economy, unprecedented (and generally baleful) direct government involvement in the housing market, and large-scale demographic changes (“white flight”) came to pass — and seemingly to devastate such places as Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Yet here is Bedford-Stuyvesant. It is certainly not without its problems (including those that accompany success as well as failure), but it also boasts some of the brightest, tightest, and most exemplary streets in New York. The British philosopher Roger Scruton has written, in extolling the traditional architecture of British and American cities, that its quality will out: “It needs only private ownership and the prospect of social and economic security for the population to respond to the call of their surroundings and once again to take pride in them.”

As to ownership, Bedford-Stuyvesant may be affected by the subprime crisis. But the great wave of rehabilitation began well before the dicey lending practices of the latest cycle, and can also be seen to go back to the sweat equity of Brooklyn’s original “brownstoners” — the African-Americans of Bedford-Stuyvesant.

To take the measure of these streets, stroll along them, beginning in the Stuyvesant Heights Historic District, on MacDonough Street between Stuyvesant and Lewis avenues.

The freestanding villa at 347 MacDonough St., from the 1860s, is of the type that characterized the early suburban development of the original City of Brooklyn’s outer edges, following the extension of the horsecar lines from downtown Brooklyn. One of Bedford-Stuyvesant’s pleasures is the persistence of these older villas. This one was beautifully converted by Monique Greenwood and Glenn Pogue into the Akwaaba Mansion bed-and-breakfast in 1995.

Across the street, handsome St. Philip’s Church (1898-99) is undergoing restoration with aid from the New York Landmarks Conservancy, whose Sacred Sites program is, for New York’s churches, a godsend.

Take a left on Lewis Avenue. The combination of the architecture and businesses — such as the lovely café Bread Stuy (403 Lewis Ave.), opened in 2005, and the excellent Brownstone Books (409 Lewis Ave.), opened in 2000 — impart to this corner of Bedford-Stuyvesant the air of a quaint village.

At the next corner (Decatur Street) stands Mount Lebanon Baptist Church, which was Embury Methodist Church when it opened in 1894. Designed by the versatile British-born Brooklyn architects the Parfitt Brothers, this is one of the finest Richardsonian Romanesque buildings in New York, a sun-dappled radiance of Roman bricks.

Return to MacDonough Street, take a left, and walk two blocks to Throop Avenue. Our Lady of Victory Catholic Church, designed by Thomas Houghton, dates to 1891-95. Constructed at a time when the neighborhood was home to many upwardly mobile Irish-Americans, it is a Gothic beauty with a luscious contrast of Manhattan schist and limestone trim.

The next corner, Tompkins Avenue, is dominated by the splendid 140-foot tower of George Chappell’s Tompkins Avenue Congregational Church (1888-89, now First African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church).

Continue two blocks to Nostrand Avenue, take a right, and walk one block. Between Macon and Halsey streets stands the stupendous apartment house — “the Dakota of Brooklyn” — called the Alhambra, built in 1889-90 and designed by one of Brooklyn’s greatest architects, Montrose Morris. The infelicitous storefronts were added in 1923.

Across Nostrand is Girls High School (1885-86), alma mater of Lena Horne and Shirley Chisholm. Architect James Naughton believed public schools should be neighborhood landmarks with high towers sharing skyline space with church steeples.

Finally, on the next block, Hancock Street, stands Montrose Morris’s Renaissance apartments (1892), a symphony in Roman brick and terra-cotta, with fantastic corner towers that belong every bit as much on Nostrand Avenue as they would in the Loire Valley.

fmorrone@nysun.com