How Well Do You Know Brooklyn Landmarks?

Beyond its brownstone row house districts, how well do you know Brooklyn's landmarks? Find out with this quiz!

 

Which of the following is true of the Pieter Claesen Wyckoff House in East Flatbush?

 

Built on former lands of the Canarsee tribe, the earliest portion of the Wyckoff House dates from around 1652, making it the oldest surviving structure in New York City and one of the oldest in the state. It was the first landmark designated by the Landmarks Preservation Commission following the enactment of New York City’s Landmarks Law in 1965, and was named a National Historic Landmark in 1967.

 

The original house was enlarged around 1740 and again in 1819. It was occupied by members of the Wyckoff family until 1901 and remained a private home afterwards. Threatened with demolition by the proposed extension of Ditmas Avenue in the early 1950s, the house was saved through the efforts of Wyckoff family members, Borough Historian James Kelly, and Borough President John Cashmore. The Wyckoff House Foundation purchased the property in 1962.

 

Now located within Fidler-Wyckoff House Park, the house has been restored to its 1819 appearance and is operated as a house museum affiliated with the Historic House Trust. Educational materials on the house are available at the Wyckoff House Museum website.

 

Designated in 1965 as the city’s first historic district, Brooklyn Heights is an open-air museum of 19th-century residential architecture, containing elegant row houses in the Federal, Greek Revival, Gothic Revival, and Anglo-Italianate styles, as well as historic churches, apartment houses, hotels, and significant Brooklyn institutions. It also contains Riverside, a “model” type of a specific kind of building. What was Riverside built as?

 

Sponsored by housing reformer Alfred T. White and completed on Columbia Place in 1890, Riverside was a “model tenement,” built in response to the overcrowded tenements lacking adequate air, light, and sanitation in which many New Yorkers lived. White’s efforts to develop comfortable, affordable housing for the working class made Brooklyn a national leader in this field. In the late 1870s, White had completed his first model tenements, the Home and Tower Buildings (left) on Hicks, Baltic, and Warren Streets in the nearby Cobble Hill Historic District. They were praised by the New York Times as “the pioneer of all good tenement houses in New York.” His work also inspired Brooklyn oil tycoon Charles Pratt to fund a model tenement in Greenpoint, the Astral Apartments, an individual landmark designed by Lamb & Rich in 1885 (right).

 

Fill in the blank: Designated in 2007, Greenpoint’s Eberhard Faber ______ Company Historic District contains factory, stable, and office buildings constructed and occupied by its namesake firm between 1872 and 1956. Can you fill in the blank with the product manufactured by this well-known company?

 

The Eberhard Faber Pencil Company, credited with bringing German lead pencil-making techniques to the United States, employed hundreds of Brooklyn residents, mostly women, during its peak in the early 20th century. Located on Greenpoint Avenue, Kent Street, and West Street, its complex includes several buildings executed in the German Renaissance Revival style around the turn of the 20th century. Eberhard Faber’s logo, consisting of a five-pointed star within a diamond, was trademarked by Faber in 1861 and appears on several of the district’s buildings. These include the factory building at 47 to 61 Greenpoint Avenue, built 1923-24, which displays the logo framed by Art Deco-style pencils along its roofline (above).

 

Eberhard Faber is adjacent to the Greenpoint Historic District, a primarily residential district that prospered along with the nearby industrial waterfront starting in the 1860s. Many of its finest houses were erected in the 1860s and 1870s, including row houses with cast-iron window lintels and door hoods that were probably cast in nearby foundries. The district also contains several fine churches, including the High Victorian Gothic-style Reformed Church of Greenpoint designed by William B. Ditmars and completed in 1870.

 

All of these places were significant in the mid-19th-century campaign to end slavery in the United States. Located within the Brooklyn Heights Historic District, Church of the Pilgrims (Richard Upjohn, 1844) (left) included abolitionist Henry C. Bowen among its founders, and its minister Richard Salter Storrs preached against slavery. Also within the Brooklyn Heights Historic District, Plymouth Church (1849) (center) was nationally prominent as the home of abolitionist minister Henry Ward Beecher and was a center of Underground Railroad activity.

 

Built in 1847 and designated in 1981, the impressive Greek Revival-style First Free Congregational Church at 311 Bridge Street (right) was purchased by Brooklyn’s oldest continuously active African American congregation, the African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church, in 1854. A major site of abolition activism, this building may have played a role in the Underground Railroad. In 1938, following initial pushback from white residents of the Bedford-Stuyvesant area, the congregation moved to the former Grace Presbyterian Church (Leeming & Kirk, c. 1907) within the Bedford Stuyvesant/Expanded Stuyvesant Heights Historic District, where it remains active as the Bridge Street African Methodist Episcopal Church.

 

For more information on the city’s designated landmarks and the abolition movement, visit LPC's story map New York City and the Path to Freedom.

 

Designated in 1975 as “one of the few remaining authentic Victorian interiors in the city,” Gage & Tollner’s dining room (above) was Brooklyn’s first interior landmark. Protected features of the early-1890s space include its graceful gaslight fixtures, mirrored walls with cherrywood trim, and wallcoverings of Lincrusta, an embossed imitation leather made from wood pulp and linseed oil. Although the original Gage & Tollner closed in 2004, all of these features have recently been restored, and a new Gage & Tollner restaurant will soon open in the space.

 

Other Brooklyn interiors designated after Gage & Tollner include the opulent second-floor library of the Long Island (now Brooklyn) Historical Society designed by George B. Post, completed in 1881, and designated in 1982. Two former Williamsburgh Savings Bank interiors were designated in 1996: the banking hall of the company’s Williamsburg headquarters, designed by George B. Post and completed in 1875; and the lobby and banking hall of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower at One Hanson Place (Halsey, McCormack & Helmer), Brooklyn’s tallest building for eight decades following its 1929 completion.

 

Set on an advantageous Red Hook site with access to an Erie Basin slip, the c.1859 Brooklyn Clay Retort and Fire Brick Works Storehouse was built for a manufacturer of products that made which innovation possible?

 

The J. K. Brick & Company (later Brooklyn Clay Retort and Fire Brick Company), which built this basilica-like storehouse c.1859, is thought to have been the first producer in the United States of clay retorts, airtight vessels in which coal was burned to produce gas for illumination. It also made fire bricks, which were used to line high-heat industrial structures like kilns and furnaces. These products, which were used by the Brooklyn Gas Light Company and other firms, made it possible to burn gas as a light source, a significant innovation in the mid-nineteenth century over candles and oil lamps as light sources. The company produced fire clay products from this storehouse until the early 1930s.

 

Fun Fact: A euonym is a name well-suited to the person, place or thing named. The founder of this fire brick company was named Joseph K. Brick!

 

 

The 1935-41 Brooklyn Public Library, Central Building is located on one of Brooklyn's most prominent sites, facing Grand Army Plaza at the intersection of Flatbush Avenue and Eastern Parkway, part of the scenic landmark Prospect Park. Designed by Alfred Morton Githens and Francis Keally with Art Deco reliefs by Thomas Hudson Jones and C. Paul Jennewein, the Modern Classical library’s striking, 50-foot high entry portico is set into a concave facade that reflects the elliptical configuration of Grand Army Plaza. An expression of both civic pride and public embrace, its plan is shaped like an open book and the inscriptions and sculpture that decorate the spare exteriors express the educational purpose of the library.

 

Did You Know: The library’s dramatic entrance features columns that depict the evolution of art and science in a series of gilt bas-reliefs, and fifteen bronze sculptures of notable figures and characters from American literature, among them Walt Whitman—a prominent, longtime Brooklynite and onetime editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. For a closer look, see more here.

 

Designated in 1979 as the city’s first “suburban” historic district, which of these Brooklyn districts contains one-of-a-kind houses imitating Swiss chalets, Japanese pagodas, and Spanish missions?

 

Brooklyn’s most imposing suburban neighborhood, Prospect Park South was developed by Dean Alvord, who sought “to create a rural park within the limitations of the conventional city block and city street.” After purchasing approximately 60 acres of farmland in 1899, Alvord laid out the utilities, erected brick gateposts, planted lawns and malls, and hired the Scottish landscape gardener John Aitkin to supervise the plantings.

 

Alvord also hired the talented John J. Petit to design large, comfortable houses in a wide variety of styles, some quite unusual. Among Petit’s designs are the Swiss chalet at 100 Rugby Road (1900) (left) and Japanese-inspired house at 131 Buckingham Road (1902-03), on which he was assisted by three Japanese artisans: Saburo Arai, Shunso Ishikawa, and Chogoro Sugai. Petit also designed the Spanish Mission Revival-style house at 94 Rugby Road (right), another of the district’s most impressive houses, in 1907.

 

Other nearby districts of opulent freestanding houses include Ditmas Park (designated in 1981) and Fiske Terrace-Midwood Park (designated in 2008).

 

In 1654, director-general of the colony of New Netherland, Peter Stuyvesant, ordered that a church be built in the new Dutch settlement of Flatbush, which was then known as Midwout. The most central and desirable lots in the settlement were set aside for the use of the church on what is now Church Avenue. The Flatbush Reformed Dutch Church is the third church to be built on that site and thus occupies the site in longest continuous use for religious purposes in New York City.

 

The church complex features a Federal, stone and brick church (Thomas Fardon, 1793-98); a transitional Greek Revival and Italianate parsonage (1853); a Colonial Revival brick church house (Meyer & Mathieu, 1923-24); and a cemetery, the final resting place of members of the prominent local Vanderbilt, Lott, Lefferts, Cortelyou, and Bergen families, among others.

 

Other landmarks that date to independent Flatbush pre-consolidation include the 1874-75 Flatbush Town Hall and the 1786 Erasmus Hall Academy, in the quadrangle of the Erasmus Hall High School. The latter is the oldest secondary school in New York State, the first chartered by the New York State Board of Regents, and was established with contributions from Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and others. It underwent an extensive restoration in 2018-2019 with funding from Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and the Division of School Facilities.

 

The c. 1830 Houses on Hunterfly Road are a unique residential enclave built parallel to a colonial road and are the oldest known extant structures in Bedford-Stuyvesant. They are significant remnants of the early 19th century free African-American settlement known by what name?

 

The Houses on Hunterfly Road were part of Weeksville, a community of African-American landowners established by 1838, when several African Americans purchased lots in Brooklyn’s 9th ward and built wood frame houses. It was named for one of the original property owners, James Weeks, who purchased property from the Lefferts family estate in 1838 and lived there with his family until his death in 1864. This early African-American community, historically located in a remote and rural area, was a safe haven for African-Americans both free and enslaved, and was a principal refuge for black families that fled the violent Draft Riots of 1863. The village offered African-American landowners full citizenship and voting rights during the pre-Civil War era, and provided safety to those on the road to freedom.

 

Restored in 2005 as the Weeksville Heritage Center, a living museum of African-American history and culture, the Houses on Hunterfly Road now serve as a multidisciplinary museum with a mission to document, preserve, and interpret the history of free African-American communities in Weeksville and beyond.

 

The F.W.I.L. Lundy Brothers Restaurant, a longtime Brooklyn institution thought to have been among the largest restaurants in the United States, was the last of the great Sheepshead Bay eateries known as:

 

In the 1840s, visitors began to discover that Sheepshead Bay, then a waterside fishing village, was "just the place to spend a hot summer-day … or to satisfy a craving appetite with a clam-chowder, or a regular fish-dinner.” The 1934 F.W.I.L. Lundy Brothers Restaurant was the last of the great seafood palaces that marked Sheepshead Bay’s transformation into a major resort. Built for restaurateur Frederick William Irving Lundy in conjunction with the government-sponsored redevelopment of the Sheepshead Bay waterfront in the mid-1930s, the popular restaurant accommodated nearly 15,000 patrons on occasions like Mother’s Day in its heyday. The architects, Bloch & Hesse, were specialists in restaurant design and made use of distinctive red Mission tile roofs, sand-colored stucco walls, decorative ironwork, and other features that set the Spanish Colonial Revival structure apart.

 

The Williamsburg Houses were built from 1935-38 and were a collaborative project of the Federal Public Works Administration and the New York City Housing Authority. They are notable as one of the earliest public housing developments in the United States to do what?

 

Commissioned by the Federal Public Works Administration and the then-recently established New York City Housing Authority, the 1935-38 Williamsburg Houses were designed by a partnership that included William Lescaze, the Swiss-born architect who helped introduce the "International" style on the eastern seaboard, and Richmond H. Shreve of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, the architects of the Empire State Building. Lescaze was responsible for the design, which includes 20 four-story structures on four "super" blocks turned at 15-degree angles to the street grid. Oriented to the sun and prevailing winds, this unusual layout produced a series of large and small courts, many of which flow into a large public space at the center of each block. Among the buildings’ most prominent features are sleek Moderne storefronts and entrances marked by blue tile and projecting stainless steel canopies.

 

During the mid-1990s, the buildings underwent an extensive restorations. Sponsored by the New York City Housing Authority in consultation with the Landmarks Preservation Commission, these alterations were remarkably sensitive; the AIA Guide to New York City hails the "revivified" complex as "the best public housing project ever built in New York."

 

Fun Fact: The 1933-34 William Lescaze House and Office, a significant and early expression of modernism in New York City, was the first Modern building to be designated a New York City Landmark.

 

By 1880, as Gowanus became one of Brooklyn’s busiest industrial areas, more than 30 manufacturers made furniture, chemicals, perishables, and other items from robust brick factories along the Gowanus Canal. For convenient raw material transport over the water, structures like the individual landmark Somers Brothers Tinware Factory (later American Can Company) and New York & Long Island Coignet Stone Company Building were built on sites with access to which Gowanus Canal feature?

 

The New York & Long Island Coignet Stone Company Building on Third Avenue between 3rd and 6th Streets was built from 1872-73 on a site with a direct connection to the Gowanus Canal and New York Harbor via the 4th Street basin. The presence of the 5th Street basin, which has since been infilled, at the rear of the Somers Brothers site at the intersection of 3rd Street and 3rd Avenue, was crucial to the firm’s importation of raw materials like tinplate from Great Britain and shipment of complete tinware products to purchasers in the United States and abroad. Somers Brothers, like other companies in the area, relied on coal to power its equipment and would receive shipments of coal transported over the Gowanus Canal to its industrial site via the adjacent canal basin.

 

The 1805-06 Commandant’s House located across the street from the Vinegar Hill Historic District is a three-story Federal-style structure attributed to the eminent American architect (and later architect of the Capitol) Charles Bulfinch in association with John McComb, Jr. It was built to house whom?

 

The Brooklyn Navy Yard was established in 1801 and was an active shipyard for the United States Navy from the early 1810s through the 1960s. The Commandant’s House was built for the chief officer (commandant) of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It is the only building in the five boroughs attributed to Charles Bulfinch, though no known documentation links Bulfinch to its design.

 

The Commandant’s House was home to Commodore Matthew C. Perry, brother of “Hero of Lake Erie” Commander Oliver Hazard Perry, from 1841-43. During Perry’s assignment at the Brooklyn Navy Yard from 1833-43, he made efforts to improve Naval steamship navigation and education, expand American lighthouse service, and was the first commander of the African Squadron, a unit of the United States Navy that worked to suppress the West African slave trade under the terms of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, albeit somewhat ineffectively.

 

During the 19th century, several forts were constructed around New York Harbor to protect it from seaborne invasion. Among them is Brooklyn’s only designated fort. What is it?

 

Located in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of southwestern Brooklyn, Fort Hamilton was built to protect the Narrows, the tidal strait leading from the Atlantic Ocean into Upper New York Bay, the historic heart of the port of New York. Built of granite in 1825-31, its armaments were upgraded periodically throughout the 19th century, although it never fired a shot in battle. It currently serves as the officers’ club of Fort Hamilton Army Base, the city’s last active-duty military installation, in the shadow of the Verrazzano Bridge.