A rare look inside a beautifully-preserved Brooklyn brownstone

Most of [New York's brownstones] were built in the years spanning the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, those heady decades when the city’s population skyrocketed from barely 150,000 to over two million people. By the end of the nineteenth century those houses had coalesced into a utopia of uniformity: row after row, block after block, a brick-and-brownstone world of endlessly repeating stoops, doorways, parlors, bedrooms, and discreet back gardens.

After 1900, New Yorkers, having immersed themselves in an exciting new metropolis of subways, automobiles, electricity, refrigeration, and telephones, yearned for the “French flats” (apartment buildings) that were springing up everywhere and seemed more in step with a taller, faster, modern city than did the brownstones of the gaslight era. By 1920, when Edith Wharton, in The Age of Innocence, described the brownstone of the nineteenth century as a bland coating of “cold chocolate sauce” defacing the city, single-family row houses had begun to seem quaint and outmoded. In the decades that followed, once-elegant row houses were cut up into apartments and, poorly maintained, went to seed. “Today, they are mostly rooming houses, sometimes partly business establishments with dressmakers or low price dentists using them for offices,” Melrose Gower wrote in the Washington Post in 1937. “Dingy and drab, they do not suggest rundown gentility, nor down at-the-heels respectability: they suggest only cheap lodgings of the most somber sort.”

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Today, it’s hard to imagine a time, really not so long ago, when row houses were considered obsolete. Single-family houses in Boerum Hill or Park Slope are so expensive, they’re beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest buyers. In neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant, where generations of middle-class African American homeowners preserved single-family row houses long before brownstoning became fashionable, prices run in the millions. Today a New York City row house embodies not decay and malaise but prosperity, a development that would have been inconceivable when, in 1955, Truman Capote moved to Brooklyn Heights and then half-apologized with the famous line, “I live in Brooklyn. By choice.”

Scroll down to look around an 1890s house on Decatur Street, one of a twenty-five-house row in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn (1894–97).

This extract is taken from Bricks and Brownstone: The New York Row House by Charles Lockwood (Rizzoli, 2019), £65.