Alice Court

Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York City, New York, United States

 

The Alice and Agate Courts Historic District consists of 36 row houses set on two half-block cul-de-sacs designed by Brooklyn architect Walter M. Coots in the Queen Anne style. Located on the north side of Atlantic Avenue between Kingston and Albany Avenues, the houses were built in 1888-1889 for industrialist Florian Grosjean. These row houses form a quiet residential oasis in the midst of the heavily commercial Atlantic Avenue and are characteristic of the late-19th-century development of Bedford-Stuyvesant spurred by transportation improvements. Swiss immigrant Florian Grosjean co-founded the importing firm of Lalance & Grosjean in the 1850s, and by 1863 had opened a tin stamping factory in Woodhaven, Queens. The company’s success, mainly from the manufacture of enamel-coated iron utensils known as agateware, was reflected by Grosjean’s extensive land holdings, including the property speculatively developed as Alice and Agate Courts. A native of Rochester, New York, W.M. Coots relocated to Brooklyn in the 1880s and became prominent as the designer of row houses and other mainly residential buildings. Constructed of red brick, brownstone, bluestone and terra cotta, the buildings of Alice and Agate Courts feature asymmetrical facades, but use collective symmetry within the rows themselves and repeating decorative details to create an interesting overall composition. Among their prominent features are conical-roofed corner turrets, projecting or swelled bays, rock-faced and carved stonework, foliate- and geometric-pattern terra-cotta and metal trim, elaborate ironwork and stained glass windows. To a large extant, the rows retain their original appearance and much of their original material. Situated just north of the busy thoroughfare of Atlantic Avenue, these Queen Anne-style houses form a quiet enclave on two cul-de-sacs and represent the small-scale residential development of late-19th-century Bedford-Stuyvesant.

 

THE HISTORICAL AND ARCHITECTURAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE ALICE AND AGATE COURTS HISTORIC DISTRICT

 

The Early History of the Area

 

The Alice and Agate Courts Historic District comprises 36 row houses on two cul-desacs, designed by architect Walter M. Coots and constructed in 1888 and 1889 in the Queen Anne style. Located on the north side of Atlantic Avenue between Kingston and Albany Avenues, the district is located at the southern border of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in north central Brooklyn.

 

Before the Europeans first made contact with Native Americans on what is now called Long Island, large portions of the island, including present-day Brooklyn, were occupied by the Lenape, or Delaware Indians. The Lenape lived in communities of bark- or grass-covered wigwams, and in their larger settlements—typically located on high ground adjacent to fresh water, and occupied in the fall, winter, and spring—they fished, harvested shellfish, and trapped animals. Although no known evidence indicates that large Lenape settlements existed in the vicinity of Alice and Agate Courts, the area could have held one of their smaller inland campsites, where the Lenape hunted, gathered wild fruits and vegetables, and cultivated corn, tobacco, beans, and other crops.

 

By the 1630s, Dutch and English settlers were taking control of the western end of Long Island. In 1637, Joris Hansen de Raplje “purchased” about 335 acres around Wallabout Bay, and over the following two years, Director Kieft of the Dutch West India Company “secured by purchase from the Indians the title to nearly all the land in the counties of Kings and Queens,” according to Henry J. Stiles’ 1884 history of Brooklyn and Kings County.

 

Currently known as the neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the larger area that contains Alice and Agate Courts saw its first European settlement around 1662, when six men

 

each received, from Governor Stuyvesant and the Directors of the Dutch West India Company, “a parcel of free (unoccupied) woodland there” on the condition that they situate their houses “within one of the other concentration, which would suit them best, but not to make a hamlet.” By 1664, when Governor Stuyvesant awarded Thomas Lamberts a grant “within the limits of a certain village known … [as] New Bedford, Long Island,” the area had its name. At the time of its settlement, Bedford was located along one of Long Island’s most important old roads, or cartways, which connected Jamaica with the ferry that ran between Brooklyn and New York. Beginning in the early 1700s, the cartway was improved and named the King’s Highway, and it would continue to be an important route for decades to come. Improved again in the early nineteenth century, the Brooklyn and Jamaica Turnpike, as it would become known, “straggled crookedly upward and backward” from Fulton Ferry, “out through Bedford Corners and away beyond Jamaica, even to Montauk Point, being … the great highway of travel of Long Island itself.”

 

By the time of the American Revolution, Bedford Corners was a small village consisting of “a tavern, a brewhouse, a schoolhouse, a blacksmith house, and half a dozen farmhouses” centered close to the current intersection of Bedford Avenue and Fulton Street. But despite its modest size, Bedford was located at a significant crossroads. At Bedford Corners, the King’s Highway met the road to Newtown, which was known as the Cripplebush Road. Extending south from Bedford was the Clove Road, which remained the major route, well into the nineteenth century, for Flatbush farmers traveling to the Brooklyn market. As the locus of these highways, Bedford was a strategically important place, seeing action in the Battle of Long Island and the broader Revolutionary conflict, when “British camps were located in the vicinity and the inhabitants of Bedford Corners had their full share of the vicissitudes of war.” King’s Highway, Cripplebush Road, and the Clove Road would later be joined at Bedford by the Wallabout and Bedford Turnpike, which opened in 1829.

 

In the early nineteenth century, Bedford remained the home of many prominent, old Dutch families, but according to Stiles, it was “especially the seat of the Lefferts family,” which had substantial local property holdings that dated back to 1700. Leffert “Squire” Lefferts, whose house was at the intersection of King’s Highway and Clove Road, was a significant figure, a

 

Brooklyn freeholder for two decades who served as a town clerk and assistant justice, and in the Provincial Congress. Like most Kings County landowners, he was also a slaveholder. As Craig Steven Wilder points out, “Brooklyn was founded on the labor of unfree people”; Harold X. Connolly calls the Kings County of 1790 New York State’s “slaveholding capital,” with almost 1,500 slaves, but only 46 free blacks. In 1790, a year in which Lefferts had seven slaves, he was among the 59% of white heads of household in Kings County who owned slaves, giving the county “the highest proportion of slaveholders and slaves in the North,” according to Marc Linder and Lawrence S. Zacharias.

 

In the 1830s, Bedford remained a small village; at that time, according to one later account, “farms bordered upon Hudson Street and Bedford village was considered out of the universe.” Large portions of the area were owned by the Squire’s daughter-in-law and son, Sarah Cowenhoven Lefferts, widow of John L. Lefferts, and Leffert Lefferts Jr., who, like his father, was a person of local prominence, both of whom appear to have owned slaves.

 

The Squire’s son John L. Lefferts (1763-1812), was a farmer who owned considerable property in Kings and Queens Counties including an eighty-three acre homestead at Bedford Corners. Following his death, his former farm was divided up among his heirs, including his widow Sarah and several of their children. The northern portion of the historic district contains land formerly owned by Sarah Lefferts (daughter) and James Lefferts, her brother.

 

Born in 1774, “Judge” Leffert Lefferts, as he would become known, graduated from Columbia College in 1794, served as clerk of the courts from 1801 to 1816—keeping the clerk’s office, like his father had, in their Bedford Corners house—and was appointed first judge of King’s County in 1823. Judge Lefferts died in 1847, and in 1854, his heirs auctioned off his large farm southeast of Bedford Corners as “1,600 desirable lots situated in the level, beautiful, and most desirable part of the Ninth Ward.” This property—located south the former Brooklyn & Jamaica Railroad right of way, north of Degraw Street (now Lincoln Place), west of Troy Avenue, and east of Clove Road—would encompass most of the land of the Alice and Agate Courts Historic District.

 

The Suburban Years

 

Bedford Corners remained fairly rural in the first half of the 19th century, but changes were occurring that would lay the foundation for the neighborhood’s suburban, and later urban, growth. These included, most importantly, new transportation links between Bedford and the ferries along Brooklyn’s waterfront that linked Brooklyn—then a separate city—with New York. In 1836, South Ferry made its first run between Manhattan’s Whitehall Street and the foot of what is now Atlantic Avenue, in Brooklyn; in the same year, the Brooklyn & Jamaica Railroad, which connected the ferry with Jamaica, started up. The B&J’s route, which ran along a right-ofway through farmland (later mapped as Atlantic Street east of Flatbush Avenue), was soon leased to the Long Island Rail Road. Although it included a station in Bedford, it did little to stimulate the area’s growth. Nevertheless, it seemed clear, even in the 1830s, that Brooklyn’s urban development would eventually reach Bedford. In 1835, the New York State Legislature passed “an act authorizing the appointment of commissioners to lay out streets, avenues, and squares in the city of Brooklyn”; ratified in 1839, their plan extended the city’s street grid to Brooklyn’s outer sections, including the Ninth Ward, which Bedford was within. Although, as David Ment and Mary S. Donovan explain, “the mapping of city streets through the fields and woods of Dutch farmers did not mean that the streets would be opened immediately … it did signify the public expectation of the eventual urbanization of the area and established a structure within which future development would take place.”

 

The new railroad faced stiff competition from stagecoach, or omnibus, lines. In the 1830s, an old carryall, or small carriage, made two trips a day from Bedford to Fulton Ferry by way of the Jamaica Turnpike; in the 1840s, a new line using omnibuses and sleighs opened between Clinton Avenue and Fulton Ferry, and it was soon extended to Bedford.

 

Omnibuses were soon supplemented, and largely supplanted by, horsecars, the horse-drawn precursors to electric trolleys. Horsecar service was frequent and relatively fast, with cars from Bedford reaching Fulton Ferry within 30 minutes. Brooklyn’s pioneering horsecar company, the Brooklyn City Railroad, was founded in 1853, and it soon established four lines radiating outward from Fulton Ferry, including one along current-day Fulton Street, through Bedford, to East New York. As residential development increased, the Fulton Street line would be joined in succeeding years by additional horsecar lines that, by the 1870s, would form a “dense transit network” linking western Bedford with other Brooklyn ferries. Among these was the Williamsburgh and Flatbush Railroad, organized in 1866, which traveled through the neighborhood along Nostrand Avenue on its way to the Williamsburg waterfront.

 

As stage and horsecar lines improved access to Bedford, the area began to take on a suburban character. By the mid-1850s, many freestanding country houses, or villas, stood on spacious lots east and south of the former town center. The suburban lifestyle was well established in Brooklyn by 1854, when an ad in the New York Times described Bedford as having “First class improvements…elegant and costly dwellings…convenient and easy of access of New York…a remarkably healthy and pleasant part of the city of Brooklyn.” Some of the residents of the villas in Bedford were businessmen Montgomery Queen, whose house was on Herkimer Street between Clove Road and Nostrand Avenue; and Charles C. Betts, the first secretary of the Brooklyn City Railroad.

 

Bedford-Stuyvesant’s development reflects the mid-19th-century political division of the City of Brooklyn into “wards.” In about 1854, when the area of Bedford east of Bedford Avenue, as well as Williamsburg and Bushwick, were incorporated into the city, the newly added portion of Bedford became the ninth ward. From the 1850s through the 1860s, former farmlands were developed into a “countrified suburb,” and Ward 9 was further subdivided as the areas increasing population necessitated. By 1873, the land in today’s Bedford-Stuyvesant was comprised of all or part of four different wards, including Ward 23, bounded by Bedford, Lafayette, Sumner and Atlantic Avenues, the location of the Alice and Agate Courts Historic District. According to an article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “this section of the city is improving with great rapidity…its growth will very soon justify, on grounds of fairness, the division which has been made – if it does not at present.” These wards had the same boundaries between 1873 and 1898, the period when the bulk of the building stock in the area was erected.

 

While the construction of suburban villas contributed to a population increase and change from farmers and farm-laborers to a mainly middle-class, white-collar residents, it was the construction of row houses that caused the urbanization of formerly-rural Bedford. In the 1870s, development in Bedford began to intensify as construction on the Brooklyn Bridge progressed and the public—including real estate owners, brokers, developers, and prospective homeowners—anticipated its opening.

 

While Brooklyn’s numerous ferries and horsecar lines had opened new areas of the city to development, its growth was limited by the ferries’ unreliability. In January of 1870, ground was broken for the east tower of the Brooklyn Bridge, a project that was widely viewed as a permanent solution to this problem. Boosters predicted that the opening of the bridge would make Brooklyn the biggest city in the country, if not the world; “property values would soar…. Everybody would benefit. Brooklyn was already expanding like a boomtown, and the bridge was

 

going to double the pace, the way steam ferries had. Merchants could expect untold numbers of new customers as disaffected New Yorkers flocked across the river to make Brooklyn their home.”

 

With the Brooklyn Bridge under construction, land in Bedford became more valuable for denser development and an increasingly attractive location for speculative row houses.

 

Row house Development

 

In anticipation of the bridge, the construction of rows of attached houses, beginning in the early 1870s, began a new, intensified phase of development in Bedford. While, like other suburbs, Bedford’s “popularity as a middle-class [suburban] community led to rapid development and the loss of its former countrified atmosphere,” its “status as a fashionable residential district was maintained and enhanced during the brownstone-building phase.” The 23rd Ward developed as a residential ward – there were no major industries located there during the late 19th century – although many shops were located on Bedford, Nostrand, Tompkins, and Gates Avenues and Fulton Street. Establishing many of today’s streetscapes, rows of houses were constructed in the 1870s and 1880s, ranging from modest, two-story homes for the middle class to larger, stone mansions for wealthier professions. The architectural styles represented in the district include Italianate, neo-Grec, Romanesque Revival and Queen Anne, designed by established architects such as Montrose Morris, Peter J. Lauritzen and Isaac D. Reynolds, as well as lesser-known architects and builders.

 

Some of the earliest rows, constructed in the Italianate style in the 1870s, were mainly constructed in the western part of the ward. However, in the eastern section, Curtis L. North, an agent with the New York Life Insurance Company, built two long rows of late Italianate style houses on the north side of MacDonough Street in 1872. North’s example was quickly followed by other investors and by neighborhood speculative builders who continued the development along MacDonough Street. These row house examples, found in the designated Stuyvesant Heights Historic District, are representative of the development throughout the 23rd Ward. Although it was said in the 1860s that the ward had just begun to grow, by 1886 it was two-thirds built (one-third of the area in the east was vacant), with 91% of those residential buildings being row houses and 85% of them masonry.

 

At the same time the neighborhood was becoming more urban, Bedford was chosen as the site for a number of institutions, including hospitals, schools, orphanages and asylums. As former suburban estates came on the real estate market, the associated mansions or large tracts of land provided ideal locations for the establishment of institutions, which blended with the surrounding buildings in this prominent neighborhood. The Brooklyn Nursery, established in

 

1870 to care for the children whose parents could not support them, moved to Herkimer Street in 1885, on the property just to the north of Alice and Agate Courts Historic District and shortly after, the Nursery established a hospital on the site. Other nearby institutions include: the Brooklyn Orphan Asylum and the St. John’s Hospital complex, as well as St. Mary’s Hospital and the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, located farther east. Additionally, Girls’ High School (1885-86), located at 475 Nostrand Avenue, and Boys’ High School (1891-92), located at 832 Marcy Avenue, both designated New York City Landmarks which have roots in the organization of Brooklyn’s first public high school in 1878, were constructed in Bedford’s 23rd Ward.

 

Prior to the construction of the buildings on Alice and Agate Courts, the Kings County Elevated Railway inaugurated service between Fulton Ferry and Nostrand Avenue in April of 1888. The line, which ran through Bedford along Fulton Street, was extended eastward to Utica Avenue in the following month and to East New York by the end of 1889. Terminating close to the Brooklyn Bridge—where a transfer station to the bridge’s cable railway was soon completed—the arrival of the Fulton Street El pushed the row house development to the eastern edge of the 23rd Ward, as well as the surrounding areas.

 

Transit improvements continued in the 1890s. Streetcar travel became increasingly attractive with the conversion of horsecars to electric trolleys, beginning in 1892; by 1895, many of Brooklyn’s old horsecar lines had been electrified. In 1898, the year in which Brooklyn merged with the other four boroughs to form Greater New York City, several trolley lines inaugurated direct service over the Brooklyn Bridge to Park Row in Manhattan, and later that year, the first electrified Kings County Railway train crossed the Brooklyn Bridge.

 

Florian Grosjean

 

Florian Grosjean was born in Saule, Switzerland in 1824. Having studied business, he began his career as a bank clerk in Montbeliard, France, where he became aquainted with a number of successful businessmen. Grosjean immigrated to New York in 1850 and began importing and selling household goods from an office on Pearl Street. He established the Lalance & Grosjean importing business with French businessman Charles Lalance. The firm, which sold house wares and champagne imported from France, specialized in tin ware, sheet metal and hardware. An ambitious businessman, Grosjean, who had found a ready market for his wares, soon determined that he could manufacture the goods more cheaply than he could import them.

 

He brought over artisans from Switzerland and France and established a pressed metal manufacturing plant in Manhattan, the first of its kind in the United States.

 

The firm’s success quickly necessitated expansion, and a new factory was constructed on the south side of Atlantic Avenue in Woodhaven, Queens in 1863. The “country” site was chosen because it offered sizeable tracts of land along a convenient railroad link within close proximity to New York and its shipping points, without the congestion and other expenses of Manhattan. The new location allowed Lalance & Grosjean to expand its production operation, and it began to specialize in kitchen and household pressed metal ware. Among the various lines of “japanned” and enameled culinary ware was a gray-mottled type known by the “Agate ware” trade name. Agate ware, made of enamel-coated iron, became nationally recognized and was favored for its durability and quality. The firm incorporated between 1869 and 1870 and offered stock while expanding its production facilities. In addition, the company built many houses in Woodhaven for its employees. Florian Grosjean himself owned approximately 40 workers houses while 60 others were owned by the firm. A majority of the structures were sold to the workers while others appear to have been rented out for a period of time before being sold off. Although the factory complex was virtually destroyed by a sudden fire in 1876, it was immediately rebuilt with brick and iron fireproof buildings on an expanded scale. Lalance & Grosjean prospered and continued to grow over the next three decades. It opened a plant at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania that contained rolling mills and tin plate works, which prepared plates that were sent to Woodhaven for stamping and finishing. Of the various metal products produced by the firm, an 1890s catalog included brass ware, copper ware, re-tinned ware, japanned ware, blue and white enamel ware, bright iron and steel ware, and agateware, made into every type of kitchen and house ware from pots and pans to kitchen sinks.

 

Grosjean married Eugenia Rosselot of Brooklyn and had a son Alfred, who died in 1888, and a daughter, Alice Marie. In 1884, Alice married Auguste Julian Cordier, a life-long employee of the Lalance & Grosjean Company who had begun working as an office boy at age twelve. Having risen through the ranks of clerk, salesman, and second and first vice president, Cordier succeeded his father-in-law as president of the company upon his death in 1903, although Grosjean had retired from active participation in the management of Lalance & Grosjean several years earlier. Grosjean died at his home on Schermerhorn and Nevins Streets at the age of 79, after several years of failing health.

 

Rival companies from Ohio, established by a former employee of Lalance & Grosjean after 1900, undercut Lalance & Grosjean’s share of the market and eventually led the company to experiment with other lines after World War I. The company found success with stainless steel

 

culinary wares as a replacement for agate ware. Through the Depression years, the stainless steel line was purchased by hospitals, hotels, restaurants, commercial and institutional concerns; and during World War II, Lalance & Grosjean was a major supplier to the United States Navy. However, with profits decreasing from new competition and increased imports, the company was disbanded in 1955, and the Woodhaven plant shut down after nearly 100 years of operation.

 

The Development of Alice and Agate Courts

 

The land under the row houses in the Alice and Agate Courts Historic District was part of the Lefferts Family property, belonging to John L. Lefferts and his brother Judge Leffert Lefferts. The judge’s property in the area was subdivided and sold at auction in 1854, and J. L. Lefferts’ heirs and descendants relinquished their holdings in the subsequent decades. The City of Brooklyn, which had acquired the portion of the block that formerly served as the Brooklyn & Jamaica Railroad right of way – whose original northern boundary is contiguous with the northern boundary of the district – sold its holdings to Nancy Wheeler in 1885. Grosjean began to purchase land around the site of Alice and Agate Courts in the mid-1880s, at the time Bedford’s 23rd Ward was being developed into fashionable row houses. He sold the assembled parcel – a large portion of tax block 1871, including the land on which the row houses were constructed and some adjacent property – to architect Walter M. Coots in April of 1888.

 

Having already designed a number of row houses for speculative developers, records indicate the Coots himself attempted to develop the Alice and Agate Court buildings. According to Department of Buildings records, the new building applications filed in May of 1888 for the first row constructed, 2-18 Agate Court, list W. M. Coots as the owner, architect and builder. By September of the same year, Coots had sold the property, which was encumbered by an outstanding mortgage of $53,000 to Grosjean (from the original purchase), a lien of $20,000 to Grosjean, and a mechanics lien against Coots for $2,546.65, to Grosjean’s son-in-law, A. J. Cordier. The additional encumbrances may indicate that Coots did not have the money necessary to finance the buildings’ construction, listed at $6,000 (2 Agate Court) and $32,000 (418 Agate Court at $4000 each) on the permit applications. Wording in the later deed does not indicate that construction had begun on the row houses. Within the same year, Grosjean purchased the property from Cordier and is listed as the owner on the subsequent building permits for 1-17 Agate Court and 1-17 and 2-18 Alice Court. Coots remained as the architect.

 

An article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in September of 1888, described the demand for houses in Brooklyn as “very good,” with “the greatest demand for [houses having] medium rents,

 

ranging from $400 to $500.” An extra deep block – almost 335’ wide as opposed to the standard 200’, created by the abandonment of the LIRR track in the 1860s – allowed more flexibility in the layout of the speculative properties. Coots laid the row houses out on 36 small, 16’ by 77.5’ lots, although those at 1, 2, 17 and 18 are slightly wider, set perpendicular to Atlantic Avenue and the established street grid. The creation of two cul-de-sacs allowed Coots (and later Grosjean) to maximize the number of houses built on the property (which is over 149’ deep) while also creating a quiet oasis adjacent to Atlantic Avenue, which, with the LIRR running through its center, was already established as a busy thoroughfare. The courts were named for Grosjean’s daughter, Alice Marie, and for “Agate ware” the product with which Grosjean made his fortune.

 

Anchored by larger houses at numbers 1 and 2, which also face Atlantic Avenue, the rows within each court are the mirror image of each other. Reflecting an economy of design, the buildings of Agate Court are a repetition of four basic row house designs, while those at Alice Court, designed one year later, have more variety in their fenestration patterns. Repeating details, such as high stoops, bowed or projecting bays, string courses, cornices, and arched and stained glass windows unify each row.

 

With the exception of 1 and 2 Alice Court, the front facades of the houses are only two stories above the basements, however, the rear facades of the buildings rise a full three-stories (except 1 and 2 Agate Court). The row houses have an additional room (approximately 16’x16’) located at the rear of the roof. Appearing like a rooftop addition, these spaces were part of the buildings’ original design and construction and are minimally visible over the front and Atlantic Avenue facing facades. This unusual feature provided extra space for the buildings’ occupants, and may have been designed as servant-living space. Constructed at time when much of the surrounding area was developed into row house buildings, the additional space may have provided extra incentive to choose these houses in a competitive rental market.

 

At Agate Court, a tall brick wall with cast-stone coping and a low iron railing was constructed to mark the end of the cul-de-sac and separate the street from the adjacent property. The wall, a continuation of the party walls of the northern-most buildings, features recessed panels and corbelled brickwork, and serves as the backdrop for a narrow greenspace surrounded by an iron fence. A historic fountain was the focal point at the end of Alice Court, set in front of a low brick cheek wall. When occupied as rental properties, these features, as advertised in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, were maintained by the owner.

 

The early residents of Alice and Agate Courts were middle- to upper-middle class renters that included bookkeepers, clerks, salesmen, builders, stenographers, and publishers, as well as an engineer, a shoemaker, an architect, a cigar manufacturer, a nurse, a teacher and a minister. The ten- or eleven-room houses accommodated families that often included in-laws and a live-in servant. Advertised as “perfect gems for quiet, refined families,” the “handsomely decorated” houses were located “just 15 minutes from [the Brooklyn] Bridge” and featured “hard wood floors, cabinet finish, mantel mirrors, [and] tiled hearths” on “private streets” with “lawns [and] fountains, all kept in order by [the] owner.” Yearly rentals cost $500 at Agate Court and $540 at Alice Court, with higher prices for the end and the corner buildings. Frequent ads in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle indicate that there was periodic turnover among the early tenants.

 

The Queen Anne Style and the Design of the Row Houses

 

Popular at the time of their construction, the row houses in Alice and Agate Courts were designed in the Queen Anne style. Compared with earlier styles, Queen-Anne-style row houses exhibit a greater freedom in their massing and a more varied, and frequently whimsical, use of ornament. The style is characterized by picturesque and asymmetrical massing of forms and details, including the free use of varied materials, colors and textures. Certain motifs, such as the use of rough-faced stone juxtaposed against smooth stone and brick, heavy round arches, towers, turrets, and stained-glass are used on many of the houses built in this style, but they are arranged and rearranged with other decorative devices in an unending variety of forms. Much of the individuality and distinctiveness of Queen Anne-style houses may be attributed to the artistry and imagination of the anonymous craftsmen who carved their stone ornament and manufactured their leaded-glass sashes.

 

Constructed of red brick, bluestone, brownstone and terra cotta, the homes on Agate Court are two stories high on rock-faced, rusticated basements. The two center houses are connected by a shallow, pressed-metal oriel with geometric and classically-inspired detailing and a starburst-patterned, triangular pediment and finial, which is evident at nos. 9 and 11 Agate Court and provides a focal point for the row. Nos. 1 and 2, the anchor buildings at Atlantic Avenue, have full-height round corner bays on the front facades, and deep, three-sided bays on the rear facades, both characteristic of the Queen Anne style. Nos. 3, 4, 9, 10, 11 and 12 have arched windows on the first floor that historically contained stained-glass transoms with a handsome “peacock tail” pattern (several of which remain). Other smaller stained-glass windows appear above the entry at the second floor of several buildings. In lieu of elaborate decoration, Coots’ design employed contrasting materials and asymmetrical facades, but used collective symmetry within the rows themselves to create an interesting overall composition. The flat facades are relieved by swelled brick bays set on corbels with a decorative, terra-cotta band at nos. 5, 6, 7, 8, 11A, 14, 15, and 16, while nos. 17 and 18 have full height two-sided bays.

 

Common elements on Agate Court include high, rock-faced stoops, rock-faced window lintels and rock-faced door lintels set on elongated, incised brackets, as well as decorative window and door grilles at the basement level, and elaborate stoop and areaway ironwork. A narrow stone stringcourse beneath the second story windows and a metal cornice with geometric and classically-inspired decoration unites each row.

 

The buildings at Alice Court employ the same contrasting materials and details, but designed a year later, are slightly more ornate. The rows are anchored at Atlantic Avenue by nos. 1 and 2, which feature conically-roofed corner turrets, dormers set into mansard roofs, and two-story elliptical bays with foliate and geometric patterning along the avenue. These two-and-ahalf-story homes on rock-faced, rusticated basements share common elements such as a high stoops, wide, geometric- and foliate-patterned, terra-cotta stringcourses, and alternating rectangular and arched window openings with rusticated voussoirs. At the second stories, flat facades with a variety of window styles capped by rock-faced and foliate-carved lintels alternate with either three-sided or swelled bays. Like those at Agate Court and characteristic of the Queen Anne style, the row houses features elaborate stoop and areaway ironwork and basement-level window and door grilles. The corner buildings also are also decorated by metal roof cresting and applied metal quatrefoil ornaments.

 

Walter M. Coots (1865-1906)

 

Brooklyn architect Walter Montague Coots was born in June of 1865 in Rochester, New York. The son of an architect, Coots received his training as a carpenter’s apprentice and in the office of his father, the firm of Charles Coots & Son. In 1884, Coots relocated to New York, opening his first office on Pearl Street in Manhattan. By the following year, Coots had established his office in Brooklyn, in the Garfield Building on Court Street and was living in Park Slope. In 1886, Half-century's Progress of the City of Brooklyn: The City's Leading Manufacturers and Merchants referred to Coots as “prominent among the best known architects of this city” having had “life training in his profession.” Coots designed a number of row houses and apartment buildings in the borough, including several in the designated Park Slope and Crown Heights North historic districts, as well as the Cobble Hill, Bushwick and East New York neighborhoods. Additionally, Coots is credited with having designed the grand stand at the former Brooklyn Players’ League Club in East New York, a shoe factory and a steam laundry.

 

Designed between 1887 and 1892 in the popular styles of the day, the Coots-designed row houses in the Park Slope and Crown Height North districts employ elements of the Romanesque- and Renaissance-Revival and Queen-Anne styles. Like those in Alice and Agate Courts, these houses commonly featured rough-faced brownstone basements and lintels, rough-faced bandcourses, projecting bays, picturesque rooflines with dormer windows, crowning pediments, stained-glass transoms, small-square-paneled double doors, and wrought-iron stoop and areaway railings.

 

Coots married the former Lillian Wynne in 1891 and they had two children, Frederick and Grace. A long time resident of Park Slope, he died on November 10, 1906, at the age of 41.

 

Later History

 

Florian Grosjean maintained the row houses on Alice and Agate Courts as rental properties until his death in 1903. The following year, his heirs and executors, including his daughter and son-in-law, sold the 36 row houses, described in three contiguous parcels with rights to the center line of the adjacent streets, to William H. Mount, a real estate agent. Mount immediately resold the property to John R. Ryon, another real estate agent, who quickly subdivided and sold-off most of the row houses, individually and in small groups. Census records indicate that by 1910, 40% of the houses on Alice and Agate Court were owner-occupied. On the 1930 census, 31 families on Alice and Agate Courts lived in houses that they owned, many of which had been subdivided and rented.

 

Although census records indicate that the population of Alice and Agate Court was predominately white until 1930, with several black servants in 1900 and one mulatto family in 1910, the population changed with the surrounding area. In 1936, the Independent, or IND, Subway opened beneath Fulton Street, replacing the elevated line and providing direct access to the area from Harlem, which was then the center of New York’s African-American community. The line opened up the area to new immigrant groups, including eastern European Jews, Italians, and blacks from the south. Other portions of Bedford-Stuyvesant had attracted a substantial number of African-American families by 1930; and by 1950, it was more than 80% black. At that time, the relatively small number of Caribbean immigrants to New York City tended to settle in Central Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant – which was known as “Brooklyn Harlem.”

 

As early at the late 1930s, crime was considered a problem in Bedford-Stuyvesant. In 1943, “a Kings county grand jury denounced Mayor LaGuardia for his failure to curb lawlessness in Brooklyn’s ‘Little Harlem’.” The investigation, which was fueled by the complaints of “allegedly deplorable and dangerous conditions,” resulted in a police department investigation of the area and an increase in the number of officers on patrol. Although some efforts were made by social service organizations to address underlying social issues, Bedford-Stuyvesant, like many other neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx, experienced deterioration of its building stock and intensifying social problems, including rising unemployment and crime rates, in the 1960s. In response to these conditions, the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation— the first and largest community development corporation in the country—was formed in 1967.

 

The Corporation focused on job creation and “physical asset development”; by 1977, according to Connolly, its activities had included “over 1,000 mortgage loans … financing for nearly 125 businesses … 7,500 workers placed in jobs developed in the private sector; exterior renovation of over 3,800 houses; [and] 1,280 new, rehabilitated, or under-construction dwelling units.” The rehabilitation work has continued into the 1980s and 1990s, through the effort of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, as well as partnerships between city agencies, including the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, and private non-profit organizations. Private funding, by individual homeowners, continues to support restoration work today in what has again become a fashionable neighborhood; and according the Encyclopedia of New York, Bedford-Stuyvesant is considered the “largest black neighborhood in New York City.”

 

Alice and Agate Courts remain a secluded and well-maintained enclave that retains the scale and details representative of the Queen Anne style and late-19th century, small-scale residential development.

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