“The most special features would be the woodwork, the plaster work, the coffered ceilings, the pocket doors, the beautiful inlaid flooring, fireplace mantels with all of the beautiful carved marble,” Ms. Even the now-iconic stoops were designed in part to encourage a level of separation between wealthy residents and the public.
“This was for the wealthy elites, shippers, builders, the industrial capitalists of the day.”Īs such, higher end brownstones were built with grand staircases and rooms for entertaining, ornate detailing (sometimes even including stained glass), and areas originally designed to act as servants’ quarters. “This was not proletariat housing,” said Jason Haber of Warburg Realty in New York City. “There were probably 10 or 15 speculative builders who did them, and would do four or five on a block, and that’s why they look similar.”īut quick construction didn’t mean that brownstones were in any way a bargain. “One notable feature of brownstones is that architecturally, they look the same,” Ms. This partly explains the uniform look seen on many blocks of brownstones throughout the city.
“It was easy and cheap, so speculators built these houses.” “In times when speculative development was going gangbusters, there were evidently just piles of materials you needed to build houses right on the street,” said Mosette Broderick, a professor of art history at NYU and author of a forthcoming book on the history of houses between Washington Square and 95th Street in Manhattan. “Brownstones are all townhouses, but not all townhouses are brownstones,” said Kenneth Tiger Koehn, a broker with Bond New York.īrownstone and other building materials were easily accessible for New York builders at the time, leading to a trend of construction by speculators. Herrera said, thanks to nearby quarries in Connecticut and New Jersey. Rather, a brownstone specifically refers to houses with facades built from a type of brown sandstone-as opposed to brick or limestone-that was popular and easy to acquire in New York after the Civil War, Mr. Herrera said.Ī crucial distinction comes in here: “Brownstone” isn’t a catch-all term for a townhouse, though it’s often used that way. “Stylistically, the Italianate period was the time between 18 that the brownstones in New York hit their peak,” Mr. While townhouses and row houses have been a part of New York City since its early development, brownstones specifically flourished in the mid-19th century as part of the craze for Italianate architecture. “They have space, they have privacy, they’re beautiful-what’s not to love?”īut before the current gold rush, the city’s brownstones also spent decades falling out of favor, and in many cases, falling into disrepair. “They still remain some of the most coveted residences in the city,” said Alex Herrera, director of preservation services at the New York Landmarks Conservancy. The most well-known example may be 64 Perry Street, the West Village brownstone that the provided exterior shots for Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment building on “Sex and the City.” (The show’s star, Sarah Jessica Parker, is also one of numerous celebrities famous for living in Greenwich Village’s historic homes, and recently sold a townhouse for $15 million after purchasing for $2.995 million in 2000.) While brownstones have become synonymous with well-off sections of Brooklyn, they’re hardly exclusive to the outer boroughs, and still pepper certain parts of Manhattan, as well. Buchman, brownstone prices in the neighborhood currently run anywhere from $3.5 million to $10 million.) The most recent ascension of brownstones as trophy properties started as far back as the early 1980s, when upper middle class Manhattanites began gravitating toward the cheap, historic, old homes of Park Slope (and toward Brooklyn’s significantly lower property taxes), and, as The New York Times reported in 1982, “driving up the price of brownstone houses well past the $200,000 mark.” (According to Ms.
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