Prospect Heights Historic District (Boundary Increase)

Prospect Heights in Brooklyn is a district of more than 300 row houses and multiple dwellings, built almost entirely between the 1860s and about 1915. Once farmland beside the Flatbush Turnpike, it was developed for the growing middle class of the then independent city of Brooklyn. Most of the houses were put up by speculative builders, often without architects, and carry stock details carved by craftsmen. The earliest are Italianate brownstones from the 1860s and early 1870s, followed by a few French Second Empire rows, then Neo-Grec houses of the late 1870s and 1880s. Romanesque Revival rows and tenements appeared in the late 1880s and 1890s, including a trio designed in 1893 by Magnus Dahlender. Turn-of-the-century Neo-Renaissance houses, such as four on Carlton Avenue designed by John Crown in 1899, complete the range. Because most buildings retain their original detailing, the district shows what Brooklyn's residential neighborhoods looked like in the late nineteenth century.