Greenpoint Historic District

Greenpoint Historic District covers eleven blocks of northern Brooklyn, a neighborhood that grew in the mid-nineteenth century alongside industry on the waterfront. Its streets hold substantial rowhouses built for factory owners and managers, more modest rowhouses and walk-up flathouses for laborers, plus shops, banks and six churches. Italianate houses with high stoops and bracketed cornices dominate, joined by Anglo-Italianate, Second Empire, neo-Grec and Queen Anne buildings, and by neo-Classical banks of 1895 and 1906. Unlike many Brooklyn areas, where developers built long rows for resale to commuters, most Greenpoint buildings were commissioned individually by owners and builders for people who worked nearby. The district was listed because it preserves this distinctive pattern of industrial-era residential life and keeps an unusually high level of architectural integrity. Streets still show vistas little changed since the turn of the century, with only seventeen intrusions among its buildings.