The Lowdown on New York’s Brownstones
Take a walk through Brooklyn into such neighborhoods as Bedford Stuyvesant, Park Slope, and Fort Greene, and you’ll notice the incredible number of brownstones. These days, it seems that any townhouse or rowhouse is called a brownstone, but originally the term brownstone was used to describe a house that was made of the chocolatey sandstone called “brownstone.”
In the late 1800s a building boom was occurring in New York City. Thousands of single-family dwellings were being built on the standard 20-foot wide lots with the inexpensive, widely found, and workable brownstone. The brownstone was quarried in nearby New Jersey and Connecticut. Before the Portland Quarry in Connecticut closed in the late 1890s, it provided over 10 million cubic yards of brownstone for building projects along the East Coast.
In the 1980s brownstones were being snapped up as part of New York’s city-wide gentrification. Many new owners realized that the soft brownstone didn’t weather well and the hundred year-old dwellings were literally dissolving. To repair the houses brownstone was imported from Germany and the Portland Quarry reopened to meet the new demand for brownstone.
Today, prices of single-family brownstones in Brooklyn easily start at $1,000,000.
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[...] Brownstones are few and far between in New York. Much of the city is covered in multi-unit buildings, like these tenements in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. [...]