No house better encapsulates the history of Brooklyn Heights than does 70 Willow Street, between Pineapple and Orange streets.

Adrian Van Sinderen, of Dutch stock, built the house in the late 1830s, at a time when the Heights experienced one of its booms. In 1886, 38-year-old William Allen Putnam bought the house.

Putnam hailed from the “New England diaspora” that populated 19thcentury Brooklyn with natives of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Putnam’s father had been a China trade merchant in Salem, while Putnam himself was a seat-holder on the New York Stock Exchange. He was also a benefactor of the Brooklyn Museum. He donated to it his collection of Royal Copenhagen porcelain, said to be as fine as any in the world, as well as a collection of Rembrandt etchings.

Putnam and his wife resided in the house for half a century. She was a leader of the women’s movement against … women’s suffrage. While that rings strange to modern ears, closer inspection, based on articles about her in old newspapers, shows something somewhat moving in her quest. Women, she said, already had so many responsibilities as household and social managers that it was unfair for the state to add to their burdens by making them also responsible for civic engagement. What’s touching is the quaint notion that the franchise was not a right but a responsibility – perhaps we all should heed that part of her wisdom.

Caroline Putnam died in 1940. In the 1950s, the social makeup of the Heights began to change, and the house came into the possession of the theatrical designer Oliver Smith. Smith, a cousin of the writer Paul Bowles, who had lived on the Heights in a Middagh Street house with W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten, designed sets for such shows as “On the Town,” “My Fair Lady,” and “West Side Story.”

Smith’s friend Truman Capote visited the house, and recorded his impressions in 1957: “I was most impressed; exceedingly envious. There were 28 rooms, high-ceilinged, wellproportioned, and 28 workable, marble-manteled fireplaces. There was a beautiful staircase floating upward in white, swan-simple curves to a skylight of sunny, amber-tinted glass … and the walls! In 1820 … men knew how to make walls – thick as a buffalo, immune to the mightiest cold, the meanest heat.”

Capote wrote this at a time when Modernist architecture was in the ascendant. Yet the constructional verities of the 19th century appealed to the literary man’s, if not the architect’s, sensitivities. This helped to pave the way, I believe, for the revival of interest in old buildings that began in the 1960s. Indeed, Capote liked the house so much that he rented from Smith his basement apartment, where Capote is said to have composed both “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “In Cold Blood.”

The Heights was long the redoubt of haut bourgeois Brooklyn, much of it of New England ancestry, typified by the Putnams. When the bourgeois life cycle withered, artists and writers, like Smith and Capote, flocked to the beautiful streets on the Heights, preserving the neighborhood for its next round of embourgeoisement.