Park Slope

So many faces adorn this Park Slope house

Eye on Real Estate: And other architectural eye candy in the neighborhood

July 13, 2016 By Lore Croghan Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Here's a glimpse of 313 Garfield Place, which is a prime piece of Park Slope architectural eye candy. Eagle photos by Lore Croghan
Share this:

I’ve just seen a face

I can’t forget the time or place

Where we just met.

Lots of faces, in fact.

That favorite Beatles lyric came to mind when we were strolling around Park Slope the other day and suddenly came face-to-face with a silky-eared dog — a canine carved in stone rather than a real-live pet — decorating the front stairway of a fabulously picturesque house, 313 Garfield Place.  

In addition to the wide-eyed dog, there were other decorative faces — human faces — staring down at us from the tops of columns on the front of the building. The sculpted faces looked like portraits of actual people.

Have you seen this house? It’s enchanting.

Later, we sat down and did some reading about the 1880s-vintage Romanesque Revival-style house designed by distinguished architect C.P.H. Gilbert.

Back in 1973 when the city Landmarks Preservation Commission created the Park Slope Historic District, the designation report about the neighborhood noted that the walls of 313 Garfield Place had been “smooth-stuccoed and lined to simulate stone.”  

In 1998, the year after Jai Imbrey purchased the stucco-covered property, her husband Robert Apfel told the New York Times, “Right now, we probably have the ugliest house in Brooklyn.”  

So they restored the 26-foot-wide house, which had a red sandstone façade underneath the stucco.

The couple and the architecture firm in charge of the restoration, Edward I. Mills and Associates, were probably responsible for the faces and other terra-cotta ornamentation that now adorn the house, Suzanne Spellen wrote in her “Building of the Day” column in Brownstoner.com.

The Garfield Place house is not the only property on the north end of Park Slope that has stolen our heart.

The Montauk Club and the Chiclet Mansion (AKA 117 Eighth Ave.), which we’ve previously written about, are permanent obsessions of ours.

But there’s so much other old-fashioned architectural eye candy in the neighborhood. It’s high time we showed you some of it.

For instance, we’re charmed by 234 Eighth Ave. In his informative tome, “An Architectural Guidebook to Brooklyn,” Francis Morrone writes, “In many ways, this is the most unusual house in Park Slope.”

It looks like a house in the suburbs, and was built a century ago for Charles F. Neergaard — as in Neergaard Pharmacies, which has been in Brooklyn since the 1880s.

 

 

Subscribe to our newsletters


Leave a Comment


Leave a Comment