Prospect Heights Historic District

Prospect Heights is a Brooklyn neighborhood of more than 300 row houses and multiple dwellings, built mostly between the 1860s and the early 1890s, with a few turn-of-the-century additions. The district is often called one of the city's brownstone neighborhoods. Its houses were built for the growing middle-class population of what was then the independent city of Brooklyn. Speculative builders put up most of them, many without architects, and the majority are Italianate or Neo-Grec in style. Smaller groups reflect French Second Empire, Romanesque Revival and Neo-Renaissance design, including a row of narrow Romanesque Revival houses designed in 1893 by Magnus Dahlender and Neo-Renaissance houses by John Crown from 1899. Before development, the area was farmland along the Flatbush Turnpike, now Flatbush Avenue. Almost all buildings keep their original detailing, and only five intrusions are identified, mostly garages. Together the streets show what late nineteenth-century residential Brooklyn looked like.