509 3rd Street

Seventeen feet of brownstone on the wide stretch of 3rd Street, the blocks between Seventh Avenue and Prospect Park West that run broader than anything else in Park Slope. The 1973 Landmarks designation report records the house going up in 1892, owner-builder Julius Anderson working from architect Lewis Anderson's drawings, one of a row of four. The report reads the facade with real affection: late Romanesque Revival with lingering neo-Grec details, an L-shaped stoop rising to a doorway crowned by a cornice slab on stone brackets, square-headed windows set flat in flush brownstone banded with rough-faced stone, a bracketed wood cornice at the top. And it notes the quirk that gives the house its footnote in the district: when the boundary was drawn, the line landed mid-row, and 509 became the only one of the four inside it.

The interior explains itself once you know who lived here. One family held the house from the 1960s on, and the previous owner, an engineer, spent decades restoring the woodwork; the result is cherry and oak millwork running the length of the house, a parlor with its original pier mirror and tile-surround mantels, plasterwork borders and ceiling medallions overhead, and a second-floor pass-through with its original built-in storage intact. A stained glass window is set into the bath, wainscoting lines the garden level, and the original hardwood floors run throughout. At 3,128 square feet it is legally a two-family living as a four-bedroom single, with a private yard behind and nearly 1,500 square feet of unused FAR in reserve.

The street itself is the last piece of the story. 3rd Street runs conspicuously wide through Center Slope, a breadth local historians trace to Edwin Litchfield, the railroad lawyer who began grading and paving these blocks at his own expense in 1853 and drove this street by carriage between his canal office in Gowanus and his hilltop villa, the one whose grounds the city later absorbed into Prospect Park. A block laid out as the approach to something grand still reads that way: P.S. 321 a few blocks north, the park at the top of the street, and a row of 1890s fronts facing each other across an avenue's worth of sky.

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