210 Hoyt Street

The city keeps a one-letter opinion of every building it taxes, and its opinion of 210 Hoyt Street is S2: a two-family with one store. That is not a zoning aspiration or a broker's idea of flexibility. It is what the building has been long enough for the record to stop arguing about it, and it is exactly what you see from the sidewalk, a black steel shopfront under two floors of windows, oxide-red stucco pinned between a red brick neighbour and a mustard one.

Look up the rest of the blockfront and the pattern holds. 208 Hoyt is coded S3, 216 is S9, 218 is S2. Four buildings in a row, every one of them apartments over a store. This stretch of Hoyt was never a brownstone row that later gave in to commerce. It was built to trade on the ground and sleep above it, and it has not changed its mind.

The shop runs 13 feet 6 inches wide by 40 feet 6 inches deep, which is a long way to walk inside a 20-foot lot. It is stripped to plaster and a plank floor now, with a pressed tin ceiling overhead that survives the full length, its border running unbroken from the shopfront to the back rooms. A steel storefront frames the street at one end; two windows and a wall of trailing plants close it at the other, and past those a door lets out to a walled patio of 20 by 26 feet. A full basement, 19 by 45 feet 6 inches, sits under all of it.

The tin turns up again three floors later. The top-floor room carries a different pattern, a geometric one, over old oak boards and two windows filled with treetops. The middle flat has a yellow Formica counter with a chrome edge cantilevered off a pipe, the kind of fitting nobody installs on purpose any more. These are the parts of the building that were never renovated, which is why they are the parts worth having.

In 1834, the year Brooklyn incorporated as a city, Charles Hoyt and Russell H. Nevins bought up the Martense land here and cut it into building lots. Nevins had been the fifth president of the New York Stock Exchange three years earlier. Neither man is remembered for much else, and both got a street out of it: Hoyt and Nevins run parallel through Boerum Hill to this day, a subdivision map that outlived its surveyors.

A block north, Boerum Park fills the square between Warren, Hoyt, Baltic and Smith. It carries the name of Simon Boerum, 1724 to 1775, a delegate to the Continental Congress whose family farm covered this ground before any of it was drawn into lots, and it has been run jointly by Parks and the Board of Education since 1967. The neighbourhood is named for a farmer, the street for the man who sold off the farm.