Eye candy is dandy in Victorian Flatbush

Eye on Real Estate

December 20, 2017 By Lore Croghan Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Welcome to Victorian Flatbush, which is full of architectural eye candy such as this house at 1510 Albemarle Road. Eagle photos by Lore Croghan

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Eye candy is dandy in Victorian Flatbush.

If a house looks great even when the skies are gray and the trees are leafless, you know you’ve got a winner.

Everywhere you turn in this neighborhood, that’s what you see.

The other day we strolled over to look at two of our favorite houses in the Prospect Park South Historic District, which is a prime part of Victorian Flatbush.

By pure happenstance, both properties were being used for a film shoot. Even with gigantic Christmas decorations and swaths of fake snow strewn on their lawns, they looked fabulous.

Dean Alvord, the developer of Prospect Park South, built both houses. His first chief architect, John J. Petit, designed them. They’re cater-cornered to each other at the intersection of Albemarle and Marlborough roads.

The front of 1510 Albemarle Road looks like a Greek temple. Petit incorporated an astonishing mix of Greek Revival, Federal and Georgian architectural elements into the design of the Colonial Revival-style house.

It was built in 1900. For seven decades it belonged to the McAllisters, a family of tugboat operators.

The other house where filming was being done, Queen Anne-style 1423 Albemarle Road, was designed in 1899.

We gleaned these nifty historical facts, as well as additional ones mentioned elsewhere in this story, from the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s 1979 designation report about the Prospect Park South Historic District.

Nifty neo-Tudors and butter-yellow houses

We continued walking down Albemarle Road, where two houses that look like Tara in “Gone With the Wind” are being renovated. One of them belongs to actress Michelle Williams. See related story.

Another one of our favorite houses on this street, 1306 Albemarle Road, was built in 1905 for a dye manufacturer named John S. Eakins. It was also designed by Petit.

After strolling to the corner of Coney Island Avenue, we made an about-face and wended our way along Prospect Park South’s north- and south-running roads.

One of the many eye-catching houses that we noticed was shingle-clad 80 Argyle Road, which is painted a vivid shade of blue. It was designed by Petit in 1903.

We saw terrific neo-Tudor houses sprinkled here and there. The one at 165 Argyle Road was designed by architect John B. Slee in 1905.

In 1910, architect J.L. Theodore Tillack designed Colonial Revival-style 210 Rugby Road, which has a round tower on the roof of a wraparound porch. It was one of the many buttery-yellow houses that caught our eye.

In the absence of sunshine, the sunshine-hued paint was a welcome sight.