537 Second Street

Robert Dixon belonged to Brooklyn. Born in the borough in 1852, trained at Brooklyn Polytechnic and in the office of Marshall J. Morrill, he opened his own practice in 1879 and became one of the most prolific row-house architects Park Slope would ever employ. Through the 1890s he worked his way along this stretch of Second Street, beginning with the ten-house row at 515 through 533, designed with James Nelson and J. L. Allan between 1894 and 1898, a run Brownstoner has described as an elegant Romanesque Revival row in Roman brick.

In 1898 he returned a few doors along, this time under his own name alone, with a trio at 537, 539 and 541. The landmarks commission dates the house firmly to that year and credits Dixon as sole architect, though city tax records say 1901. What stands is a Roman brick facade trimmed in limestone and brownstone, filed by the commission as Neoclassical. Read against the Romanesque row just before it, the trio is the same architect in the same pale brick with the vocabulary easing toward the classical, one block recording a change in taste in real time.

The house is legally a two-family, offered here as a single household. A triplex occupies the upper floors, and a garden-level suite connects internally, so the whole thing lives as one house: five bedrooms and three baths across four floors, with a private garden below and a terrace above. Central air runs throughout.

It comes furnished, which changes the calculus. There is no container ship of belongings to schedule, no year of half-empty rooms while a place slowly acquires its furniture. You arrive, and the house is already a house, on a block preservationists claimed more than fifty years ago.

The connected garden suite is the flexible piece. It can absorb whatever the household needs it to be, a guest wing when family visits, a proper office with its own gravity, or simply the quietest bedrooms in the house, a level removed from the main rooms. Few rentals of any size offer that kind of give.

When the city drew the Park Slope Historic District in 1973, this Center Slope block made the first cut. The district later grew twice, south in 2012 and north in 2016, but 537 never needed an extension. The house sits between Seventh and Eighth Avenues on ground the commission thought worth protecting before almost anywhere else in the neighborhood.

For a tenant, that designation is a quiet guarantee. The streetscape Dixon built out in the 1890s, the Roman brick and stone trim marching down Second Street, will look this way for the length of the lease and long after. You are renting the house, but the block comes with it.

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