Sunset Park 50Th Street Historic District
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DESIGNATION REPORT Sunset Park 50th Street Historic District Landmarks Preservation Designation Report Designation List 513 Commission Sunset Park 50th Street LP-2623 Historic District June 18, 2019 ESSAY RESEARCHED AND WRITTEN BY Michael Caratzas and Jessica Baldwin BUILDING PROFILES Michael Caratzas EDITED BY Kate Lemos McHale PHOTOGRAPHS BY Sarah Moses and Jessica Baldwin COMMISSIONERS Sarah Carroll, Chair Frederick Bland, Vice Chair Diana Chapin Wellington Chen Michael Devonshire Michael Goldblum John Gustafsson Anne Holford-Smith Jeanne Lutfy Adi Shamir-Baron LANDMARKS PRESERVATION COMMISSION Lisa Kersavage, Executive Director Mark Silberman, General Counsel Kate Lemos McHale, Director of Research Cory Herrala, Director of Preservation Landmarks Preservation Designation Report Designation List 513 Commission Sunset Park 50th Street LP-2623 Historic District June 18, 2019 DESIGNATION REPORT Sunset Park 50th Street Historic District LOCATION Borough of Brooklyn LANDMARK TYPE Historic District SIGNIFICANCE Comprising 50 row houses framing 50th Street between Fourth and Fifth Avenues, the Sunset Park 50th Street Historic District is one of its neighborhood’s finest historic blocks, significant for its cohesive rows of remarkably well-preserved brownstone houses representing the turn-of-the- century development of Sunset Park. Landmarks Preservation Designation Report Designation List 513 Commission Sunset Park 50th Street LP-2623 Historic District June 18, 2019 Table of Contents Sunset Park 50th Street Historic District 5 Sunset Park 50th Street Historic District Map 6 Testimony at the Public Hearing 6 Boundary Description 7 Summary 9 The Historical and Architectural Development of Sunset Park 50th Street 25 Findings and Designation 26 Illustrations 34 Building Descriptions 50th Street between Fourth and Fifth Avenues 35 North Side (odd numbers) 63 South Side (odd numbers) Landmarks Preservation Designation Report Designation List 513 Commission Sunset Park 50th Street LP-2623 Historic District June 18, 2019 Landmarks Preservation Designation Report Designation List 513 Commission Sunset Park 50th Street LP-2623 Historic District 5 of 91 Sunset Park 50th Street Boundary Description and Historic District Sidewalk Materials Designation List 513 The Sunset Park 50th Street Historic District LP-2623 consists of the properties bounded by a line beginning on the northern curbline of 50th Street at Calendared: January 22, 2019 a point on a line extending southerly from the Public Hearing: May 7, 2019 western property line of 413 50th Street, and extending northerly along said line and along the On May 7, 2019, the Landmarks Preservation western property line of 413 50th Street, easterly Commission held a public hearing on the proposed along the northern property lines of 413 to 471 50th designation of the Sunset Park 50th Street Historic Street, southerly along the eastern property line of District (Item No. 2). The hearing had been duly 471 50th Street, across 50th Street, and along the advertised in accordance with the provisions of the eastern property line of 472 50th Street, westerly law. Twenty-seven people spoke in favor of the along the southern property lines of 472 to 414 50th proposed designation, including Councilmember Street, and northerly along the western property line Carlos Menchaca and representatives from the of 414 50th Street and across 50th Street to the Historic Districts Council, the New York place of beginning. Landmarks Conservancy, the Society for the Architecture of the City, and the Sunset Park The historic district is not characterized by the Business Improvement District. There were no presence of historic sidewalk materials. speakers in opposition to the proposed designation. The Commission also received 50 written submissions in favor of the proposed designation, including from Assemblymember Felix Ortiz, and one written submission in opposition to the proposed designation. Landmarks Preservation Designation Report Designation List 513 Commission Sunset Park 50th Street LP-2623 Historic District 6 of 91 Summary that fall, leaving the other 40 houses unbuilt. Sunset Park 50th Street Historic District These 40 lots were soon acquired by the Hamilton Brothers, also large row house developers, who began building the rest of the block, including 25 two-family houses on the south side of 50th Street. Containing a separate second-floor apartment that could be rented out to help cover expenses, Comprising 50 row houses framing 50th Street two-family houses were being constructed between Fourth and Fifth Avenues, the Sunset Park throughout Sunset Park at that time as a popular 50th Street Historic District is one of its alternative for middle-class families who would neighborhood’s finest historic blocks, significant for otherwise be unable to afford their own homes. its cohesive rows of remarkably well-preserved Construction on the Hamiltons’ houses was brownstone houses representing the turn-of-the- completed from east to west along both sides of century development of Sunset Park. 50th Street between 1899 and 1903. In the mid-1880s, Sunset Park remained Although developed by separate firms, with almost completely undeveloped, with little the Waldrons’ houses credited to architect/builder infrastructure and difficult topography. At the Henry L. Spicer and the Hamiltons’ to Thomas behest of several large area landowners, funding Bennett, all of the houses are remarkably similar, was approved in 1889 for infrastructure combining two popular row house styles of the improvements in the area extending southward from time, the Renaissance Revival and Romanesque Green-Wood Cemetery to Bay Ridge, and by 1891, Revival. All have full-height projecting bays and the City of Brooklyn was working towards opening classical cornices, hallmarks of the former style, as 50th Street in the historic district. Transportation well as rough-faced stone banding and Byzantine- improvements, especially the extension of the inspired reliefs typical of the latter, and nearly all elevated railroad along Third Avenue in 1893, were retain their massive L-shaped stone stoops. additional catalysts for development, as were the Early in its history, the district was 1891 purchase of land for the large recreational occupied by middle- and upper-middle-class grounds called Sunset Park and the industrial families of German, English, Irish, Scottish, and development of the neighborhood’s waterfront. Norwegian descent. Many, including steamship, Row house construction was booming in the barge, and tugboat captains, worked on the southern section of Sunset Park by 1897 when the industrial waterfront. Through the first half of the Waldron Brothers, among the neighborhood’s 1900s, many first- and second-generation largest row house developers, announced plans to Norwegian Americans settled in the district as construct 50 brownstone-fronted row houses on Sunset Park grew into the city’s largest Norwegian both sides of 50th Street between Fourth and Fifth community. Avenues. They soon constructed the ten easternmost Although Sunset Park was negatively houses on the north side of the street and began impacted by redlining, suburbanization, and the advertising them in the spring of 1898 as “the most decline of waterfront industry following World War beautiful two story and basement houses in the II, new residents revitalized the community as it borough” overlooking “the beautiful bay of New evolved from majority white to majority Latino and York.” Deeply in debt, the Waldrons fled to Canada Asian. Today, the Sunset Park 50th Street Historic Landmarks Preservation Designation Report Designation List 513 Commission Sunset Park 50th Street LP-2623 Historic District 7 of 91 District appears much as it did at the turn of the 20th century, remaining one of its neighborhood’s most distinctive and intact historic streets. Landmarks Preservation Designation Report Designation List 513 Commission Sunset Park 50th Street LP-2623 Historic District 8 of 91 Historical and Architectural southwesterly toward Gowanus Bay, the Sunset Development Park waterfront, and ultimately, Bay Ridge. There were at least two Canarsee settlements in Sunset Sunset Park 50th Street Historic District Park: one along this waterfront pathway, near Third Avenue and 37th Street; and the other four blocks to the east, along a separate Canarsee route that extended northward to the main trail and southward to the Fort Hamilton area. Early History of the Area1 The earliest-known European to visit the The Sunset Park 50th Street Historic District lies area was the Italian explorer Giovanni da near the center of the Sunset Park neighborhood, Verrazzano, who sailed into New York Bay in 1524. which stretches from Green-Wood Cemetery In 1609, Englishman Henry Hudson, backed by the southward to Bay Ridge, and from the Brooklyn Dutch East India Company, explored the river that shoreline eastward to Ninth Avenue and the now bears his name and opened the region to Dutch neighborhood of Borough Park. Formerly known colonization. The Canarsee had developed an simply as the Eighth Ward or as part of South extensive trading network with other native groups, Brooklyn or Bay Ridge, Sunset Park adopted its and they initially traded with Dutch and English present name by the 1960s.2 Until the early 2000s, settlers as well. But by the 1640s, the colonists were the neighborhood extended past Green-Wood overtaking and displacing them. Never large in Cemetery to Prospect Avenue, but in recent years, number,