A Protestant, mostly New England-bred, haute bourgeoisie colonized 19th-century Brooklyn Heights. No street was more elite than Pierrepont Place, between Pierrepont and Montague streets. On that block, three prominent families – the Whites, the Lows, and the Pierreponts – built houses. Two of the three still stand. The “AIA Guide to New York City” calls them “the most elegant pair of brownstones remaining in New York.”

Frederick A. Peterson designed both, and both were built in 1857. Alexander Moss White built 2 Pierrepont Place, Abiel Abbot Low no. 3. For today, we are concerned with no. 3. Abiel Low’s father came from Salem, Mass., to Brooklyn in 1839. An importer, he employed his son, who later went to work in Canton for Russell & Company, the pre-eminent firm in the China trade. Eventually, Abiel Low returned to Brooklyn and formed his own company. The “House of Low,” royalty in the Far East trade, sailed its elegant clippers from the South Street docks right across the river from Brooklyn Heights. Indeed, Abiel Low so situated his Pierrepont Place house that from its rear windows he could view his ships in port.

Abiel’s son, Seth Low, grew up in this house. He attended Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, one of the nation’s finest secondary schools (still going strong as “Poly Prep”). He went on to Columbia, with which his name would forever be associated. In 1881, Brooklyn elected him its mayor; he served in 1883 at the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. Six years later, Columbia made him its president, and he oversaw construction of the magnificent campus on Morningside Heights. He built, largely with his own funds, Columbia’s library, named for his father: the Abiel Abbot Low Memorial Library. In 1901 the recently consolidated New York City elected Seth Low its mayor. A reformer, Low’s penny-pinching ways with the city budget led to his defeat at the hands of profligate Tammany, and he retired to his upstate farm. Inveterately progressive, Seth Low devoted much time to African-American colleges in the South, and worked with Booker T. Washington as a trustee of Tuskegee Institute.

The Lows’ and the Whites’ houses are elegant examples of the Italianate taste of the 1850s. The scale is large, the bold details crisply executed. In a neighborhood of beautiful houses, 2 and 3 Pierrepont Place impress with their stateliness. No. 3 even made it into the movies: It was the home of Don Corrado (played by William Hickey) in John Huston’s 1986 Mafia comedy-drama “Prizzi’s Honor.”

Seth Low married Anne Curtis of Boston. She was the daughter of Justice Benjamin R. Curtis of the U.S. Supreme Court. You might think that Seth Low should have been able to find a nice Brooklyn girl to marry. But this point cannot be stressed enough: These prominent Brooklynites considered themselves New Englanders first. The famous Congregationalist minister Richard S. Storrs, of Brooklyn Heights’s Church of the Pilgrims, opposed the 1898 Consolidation of Greater New York, hoping that Brooklyn would remain “a New England and an American city.”