180 8th Avenue

The front of 180 8th Avenue faces east-southeast across Eighth Avenue, a block west of Prospect Park West, and the parlor's two arched windows look into the street trees. The Landmarks Preservation Commission's 1973 report on the Park Slope Historic District lists Nos. 178 to 184 on this blockfront as a row of four Romanesque Revival brownstones, built in 1893 by their architect-owner, Frederick J. Griswold, who lived at 497 First Street.

The report picks out what the row carries on its front: incised scroll panels between the arched windows of the top story, carved pilasters up the sides, a balustrade of unusual dwarf columns above the second-story bay, and corbelled bays on deep brackets over engaged columns at the parlor floor. Each can be seen on the front of No. 180, which has its number in the fanlight over the double doors. The report places the row last in a series Griswold began on First Street in the late 1880s and carried to Garfield Place in 1891, and calls his later houses a purer Romanesque Revival.

Inside, the parlor floor runs front to back: the parlor with its 13-foot ceiling and a mirrored mantel, pocket doors to the stair hall, a dining room under a plaster frieze of swags and wreaths, and a kitchen at the rear with a stained-glass band over its double window. A deck off the dining room steps down to the garden. The garden level has its own entrance and the top floor a deck of its own, and the city counts two residential units in a house that is lived in as one.