134 Henry Street

The house rose in 1843, one of four brick row houses raised that year on the west side of Henry Street between Clark and Pierrepont. The Landmarks Preservation Commission's building record dates 132, 134, 136 and 138 Henry Street to the same year and classes all four as Greek Revival, each entered under a different original owner: Luther Wyman at 132, William Morgen at 134, George Morgan at 136, Richard Thorne at 138. No architect is named for any of them, which is the usual state of the record for a Brooklyn row of the 1840s. The neighbors on either side of the four date it precisely: 140 Henry goes back to 1832, and 130 Henry, an Anglo-Italianate brownstone, arrived fifteen years later in 1858.

Wyman, next door at 132, is the name in that group the city remembers. Luther Boynton Wyman (1804 to 1879) spent forty years with the Black Ball Line, rising from clerk to part owner in the transatlantic cotton trade, and put the proceeds into music. He initiated the Brooklyn Philharmonic Society in 1857, served as its president, and was among the founders of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which opened in January 1861.

What survives is the plain, disciplined vocabulary of the style at its late peak: red brick laid flat across the front, a limestone stoop, three stories over a cellar, and no ornament competing with the proportions. The city's tax lot record gives the dimensions the listing quotes, and they match exactly: a building 22 feet wide and 44 feet deep on a lot 22 by 92.5, three residential units, built 1843. Nearly ninety feet of that lot sits behind the house, which is where the garden comes from.

The landmarks record carries no alteration date for 134, and none for its three 1843 neighbors either. On a block where several houses are flagged as altered, the four are not.

Brooklyn Heights was designated on November 23, 1965, calendar number nine, LP-0099. It was the first historic district in New York City. The hearing six days earlier drew more than forty witnesses in favor and, per the report, not one in opposition. Otis Pratt Pearsall, co-chairman of the Brooklyn Heights Association's preservation committee, testified with a census of the proposed district: 1,284 buildings fronting its streets, at least 684 of them built before the Civil War, 405 of them Greek Revival. 134 Henry Street is one of those 405.

Pearsall also counted 61 early carriage houses "grouped largely along unspoiled mews." Two of those mews, Love Lane and College Place, sit on this same tax block, running in behind the Henry Street houses toward Hicks.

Four doors north stands the First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn at 124 Henry Street, a Gothic Revival church and parish house of 1846 by W. B. Olmstead, with its Anglo-Italianate rectory of 1859 at 128. Directly across the street, 137, 139 and 143 Henry are wood-frame Federal houses from 1828, three of the oldest survivors in the Heights, and they are what the front rooms here look out at.

The 2 and 3 stop at Clark Street, roughly a tenth of a mile north, opened in 1919 eighty feet down and is one of only three stations in the system reachable only by elevator, through what was once the lobby of the Hotel St. George.

The house is configured as three apartments and is delivered that way. The garden floor is entered under the stoop through its own private door: exposed brick, hardwood floors, an open kitchen with white marble counters, shaker cabinetry and stainless appliances, a full bath in mosaic tile, and a bedroom with a den or office in the rear extension looking into the garden. The parlor floor keeps the tall front windows, opens the kitchen to the living room, and ends in a wall of glass in the extension with a door straight out to the yard. Both floors share a washer and dryer and both reach the garden from the interior hall.

Above them, the upper duplex runs three bedrooms and two baths with antique hardwood floors, exposed brick, exposed beams and a private deck over the garden. The east-facing living room looks down Henry Street; the west-facing kitchen has marble counters and glass-paned cabinetry; a skylit bath opens from either of the two large bedrooms. Five bedrooms and four baths across roughly 3,500 square feet, which can stay as it is with an owner in one floor and open-market rent from the others, or be pulled back toward an upper triplex over a garden rental, or back into a single house.

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