Stuyvesant Heights Historic District (Boundary Increase)

This addition to the Stuyvesant Heights Historic District in central Brooklyn takes in parts of seven blocks along Decatur Street and neighboring streets, directly south of the district listed in 1975. It holds 151 contributing buildings, three noncontributing buildings and one vacant lot. Most are two- and three-story rowhouses with raised basements and high stoops, built mainly between 1884 and the early 1890s. Neo-Grec brownstone and brick fronts predominate, alongside Queen Anne, Romanesque Revival and Neo-Renaissance designs. Seventeen modest multiple dwellings and one church also appear. Several rows have unusually wide cornices incorporating attic windows, a feature found in significant numbers only in central Brooklyn. The earliest buildings date to 1882 and the latest is a 1926 apartment house. The form argues that the area shares architects, developers, styles and residents with the original district, and that its buildings record the shift from farmland to a built-up neighborhood of the city of Brooklyn. The expansion was recognized for architecture and for community planning and development.