1137 Park Place

Henry B. Hill filed New Building application 77 of 1902 for four two-family row houses on Park Place, and the Landmarks Preservation Commission records him three times over on each of them, as architect, as builder, and as original owner. The group runs 1133 to 1139, just east of Kingston Avenue. Little else survives about Hill beyond the permits and the city directories: a Brooklyn builder active from 1891 to at least 1902, with a second row at 1102 to 1108 Prospect Place the following year and further work in what is now the Stuyvesant Heights Historic District. The broker copy calls the house a 1901 limestone estate. The tax record says 1901, the permit says 1902, and the permit is the document Hill actually signed.

He was building into a fashion, and the trade press caught it in real time. In April 1902 Brooklyn Life noted rows of two-family houses going up on Dean Street, Pacific Street, Park Place, and Prospect Place in the vicinity of Kingston Avenue, and remarked on how much effort was going into concealing that they held two families at all. The type was practical rather than modest. An owner took the lower floors and rented the upper one to help carry the mortgage, and because the house sheltered fewer than three families it fell outside the city tenement code.

Of Hill's four, 1137 and its neighbor at 1135 are the limestone pair; 1133 and 1139 he faced in brownstone. The designation report describes a curved bay carried from basement to roofline above a rusticated brownstone base and stoop, an entrance framed by pilasters with Corinthian capitals under a molded stone hood, and a continuous molded band that ties the window sills across the front. Three stained glass transoms sit in the bay. The pressed metal cornice above, curved to follow the bay and set on brackets and modillions, is listed as original.

Protection arrived on March 24, 2015, when the Commission designated the Crown Heights North III Historic District, roughly 640 buildings between Kingston and Albany Avenues running from Pacific Street down to Lincoln Place. It was the third phase of a landmarking effort that began with the original Crown Heights North district in 2007 and grew again in 2011. At the public hearing on the proposal, twelve people spoke in favor and none spoke against.

Inside, six bedrooms and four and a half baths spread across twelve rooms and 3,288 square feet, still divided the way Hill drew it. The parlor floor holds the bay and its stained glass, quartersawn oak wainscoting and pocket doors, a fretwork screen set into the arch between the front and back rooms, and a mantel with a mirrored overmantel, with the kitchen and its island at the rear. Bedrooms above take the bay and a mantel of their own. The garden level carries a second kitchen and a wide open room, and the rear opens to a paved garden and terrace, with a washer and dryer, a dishwasher, and hardwood throughout.

The house last traded in the fall of 2023 and came back restored, listed through Corcoran in September 2025 and relaunched in July 2026 with R New York. A hundred and twenty four years after Hill advertised his circular front stone houses in the Eagle, it still reads as one house and still lives as two.

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