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Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill

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Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill:

Standing the Test of Time

Above: Within the Carroll Gardens Historic District, on Carroll Street

BOUNDARIES: Atlantic Ave., Hoyt St., 2nd Pl., Hicks St.

DISTANCE: 2.9 miles

SUBWAY: F or G to Carroll St. (President St. exit)

The “Carroll” comes from Declaration of Independence signatory Charles Carroll; the “Gardens” from the unusually large plots of land bestowed on each house in an 1846 design for the neighborhood conceived by surveyor Richard Butts. Those deep front yards were well cared for over the years by garden-loving Italians, who moved to the area for the longshoreman work and were the dominant immigrant group here throughout the 20th century. Today most parts of Carroll Gardens are unrecognizable as a working-class community, as its proximity to Manhattan and abundance of brownstones have attracted an upscale populace. Cobble Hill, which borders Carroll Gardens to the north, first emerged as a fashionable residential district in the mid–19th century. A plethora of specialty shops and dining destinations that opened over the past 15 years have added a new facet to these neighborhoods rich in historic homes and churches along tree-lined streets.

Walk Description

Exit the subway at Smith and President Streets, and head west on President beside Carroll Park. Use the second entrance to the park, opposite a row of brownstones. Walk straight ahead to the memorial for local World War I casualties. Note that the surnames of the fallen are primarily Irish, Scandinavian, and East European; by World War II, the area’s Italian population would surge. One indicator of the Italian influence in the neighborhood lies nearby: the bocce alley alongside one edge of the basketball courts. Go to your left, passing between playgrounds and to the left of the parkhouse, and exit down the steps onto Smith Street.

Cross Smith and walk straight onto President Street. You’re now within Carroll Gardens’ small historic district, developed entirely between 1869 and 1884.

Turn right on Hoyt Street. Those first four brick rowhouses on your left are the oldest homes in the historic district.

Turn right on Carroll Street. All the houses on this block date from 1871–74, except for #297 and #299, which were built in 1986 to fill a gap left after a former Norwegian church burned down.

Turn left on Smith Street. When the Gowanus Canal—located on the other side of Hoyt—was thriving as a commercial waterway in the first half of the 20th century, this was a strip of taverns and rooming houses for laborers.

Turn right on 2nd Place. To your left is a community garden on MTA-owned land.

Turn right on Court Street, then left on 1st Place.

Make a right at Clinton Street, across from an 1856 church that has been converted from Westminster Presbyterian to the Norwegian Seamen’s Church to apartments. At the next corner on your left, the F. G. Guido Funeral Home occupies an 1840 mansion that’s considered one of the city’s finest examples of Greek Revival architecture. Diagonally across the Carroll Street intersection stands St. Paul’s Episcopal. Its architect was one of its parishioners, Richard M. Upjohn, a Gothic master like his father, Richard Upjohn.

Make a right on President, where you pass a variety of freestanding residences and apartment houses before returning to brownstone uniformity. The magnificent 1893 home at #255 used to be the rectory of South Congregational Church—hence, the churchlike windows on the top level. Next to it, the church’s ladies parlor (1889) has also become a private home, while the 1850s church itself was turned into an apartment co-op in the early 1980s. Take note of the twisted-rope shape of the property’s lampposts, an homage to the neighborhood’s maritime ties.

Turn left on Court Street, where G. Esposito, Monteleone’s, and Marco Polo preserve the traditional Italian flavor on a block also home to newer businesses like a yoga studio and fro-yo joint. And what could better represent the upscaling of the neighborhood than the big new residential complex on your left past Union Street? On the right, the Brooklyn Strategist offers drop-in board-game playing. They have more than 500 games to choose from—not one involves a computer or smartphone. Continuing along the street, you pass some longstanding Italian food purveyors. You also pass from Carroll Gardens into Cobble Hill, but does that happen at Sackett or at Degraw Street? There are no official borders, and some people may say it’s at another street.

Turn left at Kane Street. The Kane Street Synagogue on your left is the “Mother Synagogue of Brooklyn,” home to its oldest Jewish congregation. Built in 1856 as a Dutch Reformed church, it’s been a synagogue since 1905. Aaron Copland was bar mitzvahed here—and was encouraged to pursue his interest in music by the rabbi, Israel Goldfarb, a liturgical composer.

Make a left on Tompkins Place, a one-block street of 1840s and 1850s classics that you could enjoy for their door enframements alone.

Turn right on Degraw and then head back to Kane via another one-blocker, Strong Place. At the corner with Degraw is a recent church-to-condo conversion. This 1852 building, designed by Minard Lafever, a preeminent church architect of the time, had stood vacant and neglected for nearly a decade before being acquired by the condo developer.

Turn right at Kane, walking beside Christ Church, the oldest Episcopal church building in Brooklyn. Come around to its front on Clinton Street, and stand beneath the 120-foot, four-spire steeple. This 1842 masterpiece was designed by Richard Upjohn and was completed while his most famous project, Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street in Manhattan, was under construction. Christ Church’s altar, pulpit, and some windows were designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany.

Go in the other direction on Clinton. On your left across Baltic Street, #296 was the home of Richard Upjohn, who also designed it (in 1842), although with only three stories (another was added later) and with a bay window rather than the slightly thrust front that replaced it.

Walk west along Baltic Street next to the Upjohn house. Richard M. Upjohn designed this apartment-house extension to his father’s former home in 1893. Farther down on the right is the neighborhood’s oldest long row of houses built together, starting with #181 and extending to the end of the block. They’ve all been modified one way or another since they were erected in 1837–39.

On the next block, you need only peek into the mews next to 145 Baltic, as you’ll be going into it shortly, but look for the plaque on the side of 141 Baltic that tells you its name: COTTAGES FOR WORKINGMEN. Hmm. In the meantime, don’t overlook the handsome twin houses on both sides of Warren Place. Finishing out the block, you have the Home and Tower buildings to your left and right, respectively, which today constitute the Cobble Hill Towers.

At Hicks Street, first go left and check out the Home apartments, as they were known when they went up in the late 1870s in tandem with the Tower across Baltic. Both were built for the working class—“model tenements,” offering those of modest means attractively designed housing with decent plumbing and ventilation. Then turn around and walk north on Hicks in front of the Tower complex.

Turn right on Warren Street, then enter Warren Place on your right. This was another development for the working class created by Alfred Tredway White, the altruistic businessman also responsible for Tower and Home, who’d been enlightened about London’s experiments in upgraded worker housing by the newspaper reports of local journalist Walt Whitman. Today, of course, even these narrow abodes are affordable only to those with incomes far above workingmen’s, as their privacy, splendid foliage, and backyards are uncommon luxuries in New York City. Take one path through Warren Place when you enter and the other on your way out. Then continue to the right on Warren Street.

Cobble Hill Park

Turn left on Henry Street. The entire west side of the block is occupied by Cobble Hill Health Center, now a nursing home but built as a church-affiliated charity hospital in 1888.

Turn right on Verandah Place, which was probably an alley of stables and carriage houses before the houses were built in the 1850s. Thomas Wolfe lived in the basement of #40 in 1930 and described it in You Can’t Go Home Again: “follow the two-foot strip of broken concrete pavement that skirts the alley, and go to the very last shabby house down by the end. . . . The place may seem to you more like a dungeon than a room that a man would voluntarily elect to live in.” Don’t despair—he also wrote that “he found beauty” here, from “a tree that leaned over into the narrow alley . . . .”

Turn left on Clinton Street and enter Cobble Hill Park—which may look like it’s always belonged in this neighborhood but is a fairly recent addition. After a 100-year-old church on the spot was torn down around 1960 to make way for a supermarket, local residents rose up in opposition and were able to get the plans changed to a park. Go to the right in the park and come out on Congress Street and head to the left.

Turn right again at Henry. On your left as you approach Amity Street is a regal structure built for those in need. Toward the top it bears the name THE POLHEMUS CLINIC, founded in 1895 to provide medical services for poor residents of the waterfront district (the harbor’s just two blocks beyond). Long Island College Hospital, of which Polhemus was part, closed in 2014, and now its entire site is targeted for mixed-use redevelopment.

Turn right on Amity. The busily embellished corner building on your right was also part of the hospital, opened as a nurses’ dormitory in 1902. Upon crossing Clinton, notice the corner house on the right that is considered Cobble Hill’s prize property, partly because of its generous yard. Known as the Degraw mansion, the house was built in 1845 in the simple Greek Revival mode—still evident from the first three stories of windows facing Clinton (the low iron fence is original, too). Without a lot of other buildings in the way at that time, it had a view of the water. The house was extended down Amity in an 1890 remodeling that also gave it the Flemish gable and large brownstone stoop. Down Amity on your left, #197 was the birthplace in January 1854 of Miss Jeanette Jerome, later known as Jennie Churchill, the American-socialite mother of Winston.

Turn left on Court Street. On the left at Atlantic Avenue, the first Brooklyn Trader Joe’s is in a 1922 bank building whose outstanding features include cornice eagles and a high embossed ceiling. Read the plaque to the right of the door about the American Revolution fort on this site. This is also where a hill identified on a 1760s map as Cobleshill was located; after the name was rediscovered in the 1950s, it was adapted for the neighborhood, which until then had just been considered an outpost of Brooklyn Heights or Red Hook.

Continue north on Court Street four blocks to reach the Borough Hall subway station.

Points of Interest

Carroll Park Smith and President Streets; nycgovparks.org

The Brooklyn Strategist 333 Court St.; 718-576-3035, thebrooklynstrategist.com

Kane Street Synagogue 236 Kane St.; 718-875-1550, kanestreet.org

Warren Place Cottages for Workingmen off Warren Street east of Hicks Street

Cobble Hill Park Clinton and Congress Streets; nycgovparks.org

Trader Joe’s (originally South Brooklyn Savings Institution) 130 Court St.; 718-246-8460, traderjoes.com