Ditmas Be the Place

A FEW DAYS BEFORE HALLOWEEN, a crumbling 5,870-square-foot single-family home was listed for $2.6 million in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Ditmas Park. Realtor photos lit creepily by flashlight showed a grand staircase with carved balusters falling out like teeth, a wood-paneled parlor flanked by an ornate fireplace, and a taxidermy Canada goose frozen midflight above a trove of antiques on the floor of a forgotten library. The New York Post called the six-bedroom, one-bathroom Colonial Revival, formerly owned by a Mr. and Mrs. George Van Ness, “one of Brooklyn’s few surviving Victorian-era homes” and lamented its “tragic” state of disrepair. A March New York Times feature cast the “once-majestic mansion” at 1000 Ocean Avenue as “a temple of profligate neglect” with a “murky” past and “even murkier” future. To the locals quoted in the article, the house’s deterioration was “an absolute tragedy”—and just plain spooky.

The mansion was designed by George Palliser, an English architect who emigrated to New Jersey in the mid-1800s, best known for his firm’s pattern books offering model home designs. Built in 1899, the Van Ness house is technically Victorian (the sovereign in question died in 1901). And though it looks onto siren-plagued Ocean Avenue with its pounding semitrucks and prewar apartment blocks, it is also, technically, at the eastern fringe of the Ditmas Park Historic District, a roughly eight-block microneighborhood contained within the much larger Flatbush. In all its haunted grandeur, the relic speaks to a particular fantasy that has defined this quarter of Brooklyn for more than a century. Locals tend to speak of the Van Ness mansion as a regrettable example of ill-preserved history, but its story is even more compelling for what it obscures.

Flatbush, a sprawling neighborhood to the south of Prospect Park, was home to a group of Lenape people, the Canarsee, for thousands of years before European settlers arrived. The Dutch “purchased” the area from the Canarsee, who famously did not believe in land ownership. Historians of Flatbush have pointed out that this ethos was reflected in the Canarsee habit of descriptive naming—parts of the monarchically monikered King’s Highway, for example, were formerly a trail called Mechawanienk, meaning “ancient pathway.” European settlers seemed to follow this tradition at first. “Flatbush” derives from the Dutch Vlacke Bos, meaning “wooded plain,” or “flat area with bushes.” But the Dutch established farms and homesteads and eventually got down to calling things after themselves. The Canarsee were forced into extinction, though many of our major thoroughfares still follow the course of their trails; in a cruel irony, a neighborhood (Canarsie) still bears their name. Flatbush became one of the original six European towns of Brooklyn and remained farmland, largely Dutch in culture and character, through British occupation, the American Revolution, and well into the nineteenth century. The town was annexed into Brooklyn and then greater New York City in the late 1800s, when private railroad development, a precursor to the city-funded subway system, made daily commuting increasingly convenient.

The history of the area is in fact directly tied to the history of mass transit. In the 1860s, a stagecoach toll road ferried passengers to and from the city of Brooklyn along present-day Flatbush Avenue. Further development was swift, and by the 1880s, Flatbush was known as “The Great Railroad Center,” with steam engines and cable cars crisscrossing from downtown all the way to the resorts of Coney Island. Early neighborhood advertisements touted “a suburb within a city” and noted the journey of just twenty-three minutes from Manhattan via the newly completed railroad (now the B/Q, which has rarely in my experience made the trip in even thirty). The homes were not designed in isolation but as part of planned urban enclaves with buried utility lines, tight building restrictions, and cohesive aesthetic visions and value systems. An early developer marked out lots and renamed many of the north-south running streets, swapping the simpler numericals for anglophile monikers—Stratford, Westminster, Argyle, Rugby, and Marlborough Roads, or “SWARM,” to use a local acronym. The chosen names speak more to what living here was meant to evoke than to the landscape’s actual history as Dutch farmland on Canarsee territory. More than a century later, the appeal of rus in urbe—to quote Martial, as one developer did—remains strong. Its shaded streets, plush lawns, and wraparound porches hold out the possibility of suburban ease without giving up on the dream of New York City.

I moved to Ditmas to escape a sarcophagal two-room apartment on a truck route in East Williamsburg. It was May of 2020, and I pushed a stroller past rumbling morgue trucks on my daily walks. The wealthiest had skipped town. My version of this flight was to move several miles south. My baby was exactly eight months old when we arrived at a ground-floor rental in a turquoise Victorian with flaking cobalt trim. A plane tree shaded the front porch, and an aged pin oak sheltered the picnic table in the backyard, which supported real grass and unruly rose bushes. The screech of pneumatic brakes faded. The buzzing and cheeping of small things took over the soundtrack.

Mid-May is an especially intoxicating time in Ditmas Park. In our first weeks there, I made Tetris shapes walking up and down the long north-south blocks and cutting across the short east-west ones. I awed at the mature trees that shaded the streets, the coiffed gardens with confetti petals weeping onto ample lawns, the flower-studded shrubs beneath the candy-box façades. The homes nearest the train tracks had a settled look of mild disrepair and had been subdivided into rentals; those on the quieter streets were well-restored single-families with gingerbread latticework and Grecian columns and old, rippled glass in the windows. If the pediments were sometimes oversized and heavy, if the pilasters seemed to reach toward an ideal they didn’t quite meet, if the ornaments bordered here and there on gaudy, I didn’t hold it against them. I marveled at the unmistakable tinkling sounds, from behind trimmed hedges, of a fountain or pool. I had the sensation, later confirmed via particle pollution maps, that I breathed a purer air.

DITMAS PARK IS A PSEUDOSUBURBIA hemmed by city sprawl. As is often the case with New York City neighborhoods, its boundaries are contested, though many put its northern border along Church Avenue, named for the Flatbush Reformed Church that has stood since the mid-1600s. The former country lane now buzzes with halal and Mexican restaurants, bodegas, local discount chains with battalions of spandex-clad mannequins, and fruit stalls that spill across sidewalks. Some place the boundary farther north to include the microneighborhood Caton Park. Beyond Caton are the recreational fields of the Parade Ground, which lead on into Prospect Park and the Botanic Garden, the larger green spaces this pocket suburb is meant to mimic. To the west of Ditmas is Coney Island Avenue and its four lanes of traffic. Lights drape across the street during Ramadan, and Pakistani sweetshops and cafés thrive between auto garages, hardware stores, supermarkets, and funeral homes. To the south, Ditmas trails from Fiske Terrace into suburbanizing Midwood. To the east is the rest of Flatbush, home to the largest Caribbean diaspora in the world. Some houses in East Flatbush were built in the early 1900s, not long after the ones that first enthralled me, and a few late-1890s homes still stand in East Flatbush’s Vanderveer neighborhood, but they are not considered part of “Victorian Flatbush.” That label—favored, I noticed, by realtors and homeowners’ associations—makes not just an architectural distinction but socioeconomic and cultural ones as well.

The houses of Victorian Flatbush are not actually Victorians. With the exception of the Van Ness mansion and a few isolated clusters, the bulk of the Anglophilic neighborhoods sprung up between 1902 and 1914 and were the work of a handful of enterprising developers. The advancing railroad had put an end to centuries of bucolic farm life. Those entrepreneurs who saw an opportunity in the large swaths of undeveloped land south of the newly established Prospect Park also intuited a demand for homes in the by-then familiar Victorian aesthetic.

Considered in that light, Victorian Flatbush took on the modular trappings of contemporary suburbia, of the David Weekley Homes that, with their gated subdivisions and thematic street names, were the campy hallmark of my own childhood in Houston’s sprawl. But “Victorian,” I learned, is more of an aesthetic shorthand—in today’s worn vocabulary, a vibe—than a distinct architectural period, and Victorianism itself began as a revival style that pulled from various periods and traditions, borrowing freely from Queen Anne, Gothic, Tudor, Greek, Colonial Revival, and beyond. It was an eclectic idiom that allowed for mash-ups and encouraged picturesque asymmetry. If Victorian architecture was always something of a callback, its flourishes intended to evoke earlier iterations of grandeur, then part of what we preserve when we restore a Victorian house is the nostalgia of our forebears.

To call the Ditmas Park homes Victorians is thus not incorrect so much as inexact. A related mistake: believing you live in Ditmas Park at all. The other houses on my street were Victorian in style, it was true, and they shared some visual continuity with the blocks nearby. My floors creaked like the others. Exterior paint flaked into our soil, as it did across the neighborhood. But it turned out that Ditmas Park proper was a landmarked area that straddled the train tracks several blocks to the south and east, originally developed by one Lewis H. Pounds beginning in 1902. I lived in a still-unlandmarked zone with smaller lots called Beverly Square West, begun in 1898 by T. B. Ackerson, who also developed Fiske Terrace to the south, starting in 1905. To the north was the more imposing (and very much landmarked) Prospect Park South, brainchild of perhaps the most ambitious of these developers, Dean Alvord.

Mistakes such as mine have been common since the neighborhoods were built. A Brooklyn Eagle news item from August 1910 was coyly titled “Now who does reside in fair Ditmas Park?” Owners of single-family homes who had protested a sixteen-unit apartment block under development on Ditmas Avenue and Twenty-Second Street learned that they were in fact domiciled “without the gates of fashion.” The reporter took cheeky aim at “people who believe that they are living in exclusive Ditmas Park, but who aren’t really.” The confusion stemmed “from the common habit of referring to the whole neighborhood, loosely, as ‘Ditmas Park,’ without regard for exact geographic boundaries.” Today we are even less precise, and often use the more casual “Ditmas.”

But those boundaries are critical to the area’s makeup. If nostalgia for imperialish grandeur and a longing for a suburban lifestyle are two pillars of Victorian Flatbush, the third is exclusivity. This is perhaps best illustrated in Prospect Park South, the most expensive swathe of this part of Brooklyn.

Construction on Prospect Park South commenced in 1899. Alvord—who had also worked on the nearby Knickerbocker Field Club, now one of the city’s oldest private tennis courts—renamed the north-south streets and conceived Albemarle Road. Albemarle was designed in the grand boulevard style, with a wide mall and homes set back from the street. The developer stipulated that trees would be planted well in from the road, near the houses, so that the lawns and the mall would read as a continuous greensward. Home prices at the time of this writing range from the high fours to over eleven million dollars.

During the height of the pandemic, I saw families enjoying picnics mere inches from the road, a bluegrass band rehearsing, a woman in balloon pants practicing interpretive dance, and teenagers making out beside a spray of bodega roses and a grease-stained pizza box. I even had a therapy session there, in a dusty circle of dried out gardening mulch at the foot of a pin oak. The tree was likely planted at the behest of the Scottish landscape gardener John Aitken, who is characterized in a guidebook produced by Prospect Park South’s neighborhood association as a “gardener to British peerage.” His work was indeed nonpareil. Albemarle’s mall is carpeted in soft mowed grass and dotted with mature trees—mostly pin oaks and elms but also a few evergreens, rare in the city beyond this strip of garden. Crocuses appear in wild patches in early March, and the daffodils and tulips volunteer in April. The magnolias drop their ticker-tape petals in languorous puddles that drift in the breeze and collect in gutters. In summer, waist-high shrub roses bloom near the cross streets. Aitken designed the mall to exist in “continuous bloom,” stated a Brooklyn Eagle feature from April 1900. “As one species fades another takes its place, so that the wealth of color suffers no impairment from springtime to autumn.” Spring is actually longer if you can afford to live on Albemarle Road.

There are several malls like this one throughout Flatbush, but Albemarle’s is the most visited. Today, it’s maintained by the city parks department. It is a relief to take rest or recreation there, but in another way, it’s uncomfortable to congregate, traffic on either side, in full view of empty lawns sprawling in wide moats around the stately mansions. Local news reports celebrating the impromptu whimsy of the median as community space during the first summer of Covid-19 didn’t mention the strange, creeping feeling of sitting under the glinting windows of the homes there. In the pandemic days, one had signs out front that read, “Please enjoy our lawn!” and people took them up on it. The house next door swung in the opposite direction. Little posts stuck in the soil around the garden beds displayed signs admonishing, “Keep off! Private residence.”

In an early prospectus, Alvord maintained that “it is pleasant to live where wife and children, in going to and fro, are not subjected to the annoyance of contact with the undesirable elements of society.” The same Brooklyn Eagle article from 1900 characterized Prospect Park South as a refuge for “carriage people”—“exiles” desperate to escape the “invasion by the shopkeeper” that plagued them in formerly fashionable neighborhoods. (Alvord successfully pressured the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company to add a “residential” train station at Beverley Road, just one block north of the more commercial Cortelyou Road, today the shortest distance between MTA stops across all the boroughs.) Early neighborhood advertisements do not mention the working-class population that kept this paradise afloat; 1910 census records show that 25 percent of Prospect Park South residents were poor, many of them African Americans from the US South and newly arrived Irish immigrants who worked and often resided in wealthy households. This racialized division of labor echoed an earlier reality of Flatbush: Per a 1738 census, a quarter of Kings County’s population was enslaved, the highest per capita in the state; by 1800, 70 to 80 percent of households in Flatbush and nearby communities included an enslaved African, according to historian Craig Wilder. Emancipation was slow, with the last birth of an enslaved Flatbush resident recorded about a decade later.

Since the early 1900s, demographics in Flatbush have massively shifted. After the white ethnic boom that transformed many postwar American cities, European immigrants moved out; South Asian, Caribbean, Haitian, and West Indian immigrants moved in. In 1950, almost 100 percent of Flatbush and East Flatbush residents were white; by 2021, the area was 12 percent white, 61 percent non-Hispanic Black, and 15 percent Hispanic. Census reports do not exist for “Victorian Flatbush” specifically, or for the microneighborhoods it contains, but the figures available reveal that they too have become more diverse, if not economically then at least ethnically. A 2021 national race and ethnicity map shows diversity even in landmarked areas. What’s striking is their low density, as evident in the negative space blooming across Prospect Park South, Ditmas Park, and Fiske Terrace.

In “desirable” neighborhoods, suffering is pushed to the margins—not absent but just out of view. New York City crime maps depict a blank paradise over the stretch of Albemarle contained within Prospect Park South. Auras of grand larceny, robbery, and burglary proliferate to the east, toward Flatbush Avenue, and to the west, along Coney Island Avenue, with blooms of activity near apartment blocks and around the busiest subway stops. Air quality indexes show the highest particulates along bus and truck routes, which cut a polite rectangle around the historic houses. The New York City Tree Map reveals a profusion of varied species across Victorian Flatbush. My layman’s afternoon with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health Sound Level Meter app showed Church Avenue to be 35 percent louder than Albemarle, where birdsong was audible—except in the case of yard work, when the data inverted. Upsetting these utopic reports is the heavy metal contaminant map. This part of Brooklyn has some of the highest soil lead levels across all five boroughs, a data point with no regard for landmark distinctions or home value. One visualization plunges the whole region in a deep, indiscriminate crimson. Another, showing likelihood of lead waterlines, appears randomly spackled, with even some of the largest mansions at risk of contamination.

Albemarle dead-ends at the subway trench. The road starts back up on the east side of the tracks, where there is no urban garden. Dog waste and trash accumulate on sidewalks, especially near blind alleys. Apartments—the bane of homeowners’ associations—loom on all sides. As early as the 1930s, tower blocks on that side of the tracks had replaced the first micro-neighborhood in the area, a development dubbed Tennis Court to match the abutting Knickerbocker Field Club. A pedestrian overpass once connected the two sides of Albemarle; I imagined residents strolling leisurely across for doubles. The damaged foot bridge was demolished sometime in the 1980s or 1990s—when there was high crime, residents reminded me—and was never rebuilt.

Sometimes, in picturesque neighborhoods, I have the sudden feeling of collective pretending: as if the people are pretending to walk their dogs, buttoning their pretend coats before stepping out of pretend coffee shops with pretend lattes, headed for pretend obligations. That simulacrum feeling has to do with hidden wealth—a nagging awareness that the apparent economic activity of the neighborhood is not sufficient to support its affluence on display, that the money must come from elsewhere, from finance or big tech or a family trust. The neighborhood, in that formulation, is an inorganic setting for playing out a lifestyle.

Homeownership turnover is low in Victorian Flatbush, and the rental market is considered stable. Even so, a sense of impermanence pervades, as if the residents don’t really live there but are only visiting, for a time. In the cascading way of all gentrification, Ditmas itself has long been a stopover for the economically mobile. It’s notable that the grand houses lining the blocks of Victorian Flatbush, with all their gestures toward history, are not generational homes. For the most part, the original residents didn’t stay. Many present-day homeowners bought in the ’80s and ’90s, when “young, largely white, professional families were … attracted by the still-grand parts of the housing stock and life in a multiracial neighborhood,” writes political scientist and sociologist John Mollenkopf. Some of those buyers subdivided their houses and took renters. (I lived in two such apartments—the one in the turquoise house, then the top-level rental of a white house down the block—before rising rents sent me two miles east.) In recent years, property values have exploded. When residents sell, often reaping huge profits, the new owners, as one realtor told me, tend to renovate homes back into single-families. Two or three million dollars gets you an apartment in Park Slope; in Ditmas, it gets you a whole house. It’s hard to imagine the neighborhood growing more accessible, especially to renters.

“Prospect Park South offered the most favorable conditions for the creation of a high class aristocratic suburb,” reads the Eagle, “the tone and character of which could not be disturbed or changed for a long period to come.” What strikes me now is how dutifully we have received this vision.

THE MANSION AT 1000 OCEAN AVENUE has a “kissing cousin,” as a 2007 Times feature put it: At 1010, on the corner lot and in much better repair, is an even more stately abode, once owned by George Van Ness’s father-in-law, Thomas H. Brush. Also designed by George Palliser, the Brush house is slightly larger and a bit taller than its relative—from not having settled, a realtor told me. It lived on as a synagogue, then as a church, and now as a doctor’s office, complete with medical waste bins adorning the porch. The Brush and Van Ness families appear often in the society pages of the Eagle, as hosts of fundraisers and clubs and once as victims of a burglary. In 1912, the Van Ness place was looted while the servants were away and the couple was at dinner next door. “Mr. Van Ness sees no hope for the residents [in Flatbush] except by constantly guarding their homes,” the paper reported. By 1914, the Van Nesses had sold and the Brushes next door had foreclosed.

An early photo shows the mansions side by side. They are the only houses visible on that stretch of Ocean Avenue, then a tree-lined dirt road vanishing into the horizon. Distant suburban homes, some of the earliest in Ditmas Park, encroach beyond the leaves. Why were the mansions built so far from the other houses, yet so close together? In the relative quiet of 1899, the inhabitants could have feasibly held conversation between the open windows. Did they not crave the space Alvord and others had promised? Couldn’t they afford a double lot? The houses were two travelers huddled against danger, ready to depart at dawn.

In 1975, ownership of the Van Ness mansion passed to its most committed owner, Bernice Schleicher. She and her husband, Sam Kekis, watched over the house for the rest of their lives. They lived in one room on the second floor, the only room with utilities, which they’d renovated to include a kitchenette and the mansion’s only bathroom. “Bernice loved the house. It was her pride and joy,” Gemma Sokoletsky, a realtor who sold the property in 2021, told me. The couple owned an antiques business in Park Slope and filled the house floor-to-ceiling with inventory. “It was fantastic, just over the top how many treasures, what was just laying around,” Sokoletsky said. Schleicher had intended to fully renovate but hadn’t been able to. Kekis died in 2020, and Schleicher put 1000 Ocean Avenue on the market. A few weeks after the sale went through, she died due to complications from Covid-19. “It was a sad situation. It’s almost like they died with the house,” Sokoletsky said, “I hope someone restores it.”

The current seller purchased the home for $1.5 million in 2021 and made no perceivable changes. Though the “improbable” $2.6 million price tag, as the Times put it, has recently dropped to $2.3 million, it’s hard to envision a promising future for the place. It was landmarked in 1981, and “any buyer could have to reckon with a tangle of bureaucratic challenges.” A nearby homeowner who restored a comparable property on Albemarle estimated the total cost could far exceed $10 million. And, amid a housing crisis, it’s worth asking: What is the value of a single-family mansion, no matter how historic?

The Van Ness house, it turns out, represents not a golden era in Brooklyn so much as a suburban fantasy—hardly unique to Victorian Flatbush—that has always been the domain of the economically mobile. Remembering its full history means remembering the people left out of that dream, from the Canarsee, perhaps, to the renters who get priced out today.

And yet the mansion does offer public value, of a kind. New Yorkers desperately need affordable housing—but might we also long for the occasional luxury of a haunted palimpsest, an Ozymandian ruin, an anachronous rent in the monotonous grid of efficiency? I too want to save it.

The 1645 marriage of Pieter Claesen Wyckoff and Grietje Cornelisse Van Ness is said to have produced as many as 65,000 descendants. I met one of them by chance in a regional Texas airport while reporting this story. He was of retirement age but still working as a professor. He wore a felt cowboy hat and sensible shoes—his boots waited in his carry-on. He liked talking. He asked if I’d heard of the Wyckoffs and the Van Nesses, if I knew that the Van Ness mansion on Ocean Avenue was built to manage some sort of legal issue around property taxes. “They needed a residence in Brooklyn,” he said, handing my daughter her first Werther’s Original. I was amazed at my luck, but when I pressed for detail, he moved away. First class was invited to board, and he departed.