New Historic Districts Proposed for Prospect Heights, Wallabout

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wallabout New Historic Districts Proposed for Prospect Heights, WallaboutThe Bloomberg administration is turning its historic preservation scope to mid-Brooklyn.

On Tuesday, the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission is scheduled to start the designation process for two new historic districts: a 13-building set in Prospect Heights (the Park Place historic district) and a 55-building district near Fort Greene/Clinton Hill (the Wallabout historic district).

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The step, officially known as calendaring the properties, is the first motion in what typically results in designation.

The Park Place block is a set of protypical Brooklyn brownstones, and not all that far from the recently-designated Prospect Heights historic district.

The Wallabout proposed district runs along and around the upper reaches of Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn, with many of the buildings being construted in the mid-1800s. (Historic Districts Council has a page on Wallabout here.)

Here’s an excerpt from a summary from the LPC:

The proposed Wallabout Historic District, consisting of approximately 55 buildings on Vanderbilt Avenue between Myrtle and Park Avenues in Brooklyn, is an architecturally significant collection of pre-Civil War buildings. The structures that comprise the study area, many of them frame houses erected in the early- to mid-1800s, retain numerous original details that lend a cohesive quality to the memorable streetscape.

 Wallabout takes its name from a group of Walloons who settled on a modest bay on Brooklyn’s East River waterfront in 1624, calling it Waal-bogt. The area remained rural throughout much of the 18thcentury. Residential development began in the early 19th century and accelerated with expansion of the Brooklyn Navy Yard along Wallabout Bay in the middle of the century

ebrown@observer.com