With 2022 almost at an end, we are taking our annual look back at the Brooklyn buildings and neighborhoods considered significant enough to merit designation by the Landmarks Preservation Commission during the year.
Brooklyn gained one individual landmark and one historic district this year. The hearing for one potential historic district, the Linden Street Historic District in Bushwick, was taken place in November but the commission has not yet voted.
There was also a loss. Testimony on the Jacob Dangler mansion at 144 Willoughby was heard in July, but a demolition permit was issued days after the hearing and the historic mansion was quickly demolished.
Photo by Susan De Vries
Melrose Parkside Historic District
Parkside Avenue between Flatbush and Bedford avenues, Prospect Lefferts Gardens
The small district of houses constructed between 1909 and 1915 includes a style that originated in Brooklyn, the Kinko House. There are 20 of the two-family houses with separate entrances for each duplex unit. The other 18 dwellings were constructed as single-family row houses and marketed at the time as “easy housekeeping” houses. The rows were designed by two prominent and prolific Brooklyn architects, Benjamin Driesler and Axel Hedman, for developers William AA Brown and Eli H. Bishop & Son. Some locals had been petitioning to have the houses landmarked since 2016, and while most speakers at the October public hearing were in favor of the designation, by the time of the final hearing this month some homeowners submitted letters and a petition expressing trepidation. The district was designated on December 13, becoming the fourth historic district for the Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighborhood.
Photo by Susan De Vries
Lesbian Herstory Archives
484 14th Street, Park Slope
In 1991 the Lesbian Herstory Archives, founded in 1974, moved to a 1908 Axel Hedman-designed Park Slope house after it outgrew its original headquarters in an Upper West Side apartment. While the house is located within the Park Slope Historic District, the historic district’s 1973 designation predated the arrival of the organization, so there’s no mention of the building’s LGBTQ significance in city records. The designation was proposed at the end of Pride Month and received unanimously supportive testimony during an October public meeting. The individual designation in November made it the first LGBTQ site to become landmarked in Brooklyn.
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