One of the most complex and sociologically significant preservation campaigns of the 21st century occurred in Crown Heights. The area contains some of the most distinguished residential architecture in the borough, yet its scale and complexity required a novel regulatory approach.
- 1,600lots into which the Lefferts family farm was auctioned
- 1888Opening of the Kings County Elevated Railway along Fulton Street
- 1905 and 1913Years between which most Kinko houses were built
Crown Heights North was originally agrarian land owned by the Lefferts family, whose heirs auctioned off the family farm as 1,600 individual lots in the mid-19th century. Development exploded following the 1888 opening of the Kings County Elevated Railway along Fulton Street, which provided rapid transit directly to the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. Marketed to upper-middle-class professionals as the "fashionable" and "beautiful" St. Mark's District, the neighborhood became a canvas for Brooklyn's most skilled late 19th-century architects, including Axel Hedman and William Higginson.26
The architectural vocabulary of Crown Heights North is staggeringly diverse, encompassing Neo-Grec, Queen Anne, Romanesque Revival, Renaissance Revival, Beaux-Arts, and Art Deco styles. Furthermore, the area contains the city’s highest concentration of "Kinko" houses. Built primarily between 1905 and 1913, these innovative two-family duplexes feature completely separate exterior entrances and internal staircases for each family, ingeniously mimicking the privacy and prestige of a single-family home within a denser urban footprint.26
Recognizing that the immense scale of the neighborhood could not be processed in a single regulatory action without overwhelming the agency, the LPC divided the designation process into multiple phases, driven heavily by relentless grassroots advocacy from the Crown Heights North Association.29
| District Phase | Date Designated | Scope | Key Architectural & Cultural Characteristics |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crown Heights North I | April 24, 2007 | 472 buildings | Elite, late 19th-century freestanding mansions and high-style Renaissance Revival rowhouses built between the 1860s and 1930s. |
| Crown Heights North II | June 28, 2011 | 600+ buildings | Transit-oriented development on former Lefferts farmland; proliferation of the unique Kinko houses. |
| Crown Heights North III | March 24, 2015 | 600+ buildings | Early 20th-century apartment flats, Art Deco structures, and monumental religious architecture such as the 1923 Shaari Zedek Synagogue. |
The multi-phase designation of over 1,600 buildings in Crown Heights North reflects a profound maturation in preservation philosophy. It provides legal protection to a neighborhood that, over the mid-20th century, evolved into a vibrant center of Caribbean and African American culture. By protecting these streets, the LPC explicitly acknowledged the social history of the neighborhood, which served as the home to political luminaries such as Representative Shirley Chisholm and literary giants like Richard Wright.30
