Everybody Must Get ’Stoned

CLAD WITH FAÇADES of Triassic-Jurassic sandstone rock, pink upon quarrying and deepened by exposure into mantling shades of umber, russet, and wenge, the serried ranks of brownstone Brooklyn have for more than a century been a prize contested by various strivers: upwardly mobile European emigrants, Black people from the West Indies or Harlem or the South, the “brownstoner” yuppies who fled Manhattan beginning in the 1960s, millennials of means. They are a fortress from modernity that must be preserved. A cry of protest against the ugliness of the gray five-over-one. Renting an apartment in one requires StreetEasy overpayment, extortionate broker’s fees, or, miraculously, eagle-eyed scouting from a blurry Craigslist photo—a myth to be talk-shouted at bars, droned dutifully on Hinge dates. But the achievement of renting an apartment in a brownstone converted into a multiunit dwelling will always be a little ambiguous. This is because, in its stolid, bourgeois repose, the brownstone telegraphs to the careful observer that there’s only ever one way to hack it in America: Own some property!

A line of row houses in good repair speaks univocally from behind its screen of greenery and with the moneyed voice of a block association. The same street in bad repair, with crumbling ornament, chipped stoops, decapitated newel posts, and peeling surfaces, is easily labeled a slum. The difference between the two often comes down to in-residence ownership. Since the beginning of the white professional class’s return in the 1960s, Brooklyn has led the city in conversions (or rather restorations) of multitenant buildings into single-family homes, with some 55,000 units lost since 1950.

If the individual brownstone is intimate for its inhabitants, taken collectively, a block of row houses set flush have a monumental aspect. Details get obscured by repetition. While few blocks were filled by a single developer, each architect builder tended to do their part to maintain a unified effect. The most impressive views thus come at an oblique angle: a sweep toward a vanishing point, with the perspective line pleasantly corrugated by bay windows, cornices, consoles, pediments, and stoops that link the buildings from their standoffish setback to life in the street. Especially where built in largely uniform style, as in Bed-Stuy, there’s little impetus to stop and examine the individuating details of each.

Personally, I did not until spring 2020. Death was in the air. My roommate had bought an Xbox. Fleeing the daily rerunning of the Battle of the Bulge that reverberated throughout our apartment at the eastern reaches of brownstone Brooklyn, I began walking for five or six hours a day. Sometimes, I’d make my way to the cemetery where Bed-Stuy, Bushwick, and Ridgewood meet. Most often, I went along the streets that stretch west from Broadway toward downtown Brooklyn. There was one feature along this stretch I came to particularly admire: the incised, semiabstracted floral motifs on nearly every lintel. The more geometric ones resemble a post horn; the more organic ones, lace filigree. These carved ornamentations give the blocky façades a friendly physicality and, by inviting viewing head on, push back against the monumental vistas of row construction. The color affinity with soil comes to the fore. As I walked, I began to wonder: Where did these designs come from? Why did some so closely recall Pynchon’s Tristero symbol? Was there perhaps a connotation of the sub rosa? What did they mean?

TODAY, THE GILDED AGE mansions of what would become Prospect Park West have largely been demolished, victims of rising property values. The New York row house preceded these mansions and the tenement both. From its origins as a single-family home for the well-off, it has continued to adapt and thus remain: as a boarding house for the indigent, as renovated apartments, and now again a single-family home. Like the later brownstones, the early row houses of Manhattan were built of brick. Unlike them, they eschewed stone facing for modest trim in marble or limestone, though occasionally brownstone, while not yet pervasive, would be used as well. As observed in Charles Lockwood’s Bricks and Brownstone (1972), row houses in this early Federal style represented a cultural continuity with prerevolutionary tradition—specifically, with the eighteenth-century English tradition of Locke, the Enlightenment, and the four King Georges. The clean lines of the Federal row house were a universalizing ideal boiled down from classical models, reflecting the austerity of a city less rich and socially competitive than it would become. Even today, the row house betrays its origins as a Georgian gentry home squeezed into a city plot. The sunken English basement sets the kitchen (where the servants cooked) near the garden (where they did the wash); the stoop elevates the door from the insalubrious streets, with the help entering discreetly through its side.

In the 1870s of The Age of Innocence (authored by vocal brownstone hater Edith Wharton), the corpulent Mrs. Manson Mingott forces her relations to make uptown pilgrimages to her magnificent and lonely abode in the desolation that then pervaded the east side of Central Park. Commentators at the time wrote with wonder about the constant progress of the “building line,” the surging northward of new construction as once-empty tracts were filled in with residences according to the block-by-block city plan laid out in 1811. As new areas opened to development, once-fashionable neighborhoods fell out of favor, and the row houses therein were subdivided for use as tenements while retaining, at least from without, the tattered lineaments of a single-family home.

As the price of land rose, the squeeze intensified: Attics with dormer windows became full floors; at times another story was added to account for shrinking width. The modesty of the Federal style didn’t survive the explosive growth of the 1820s, the new stylistic druthers coming, as they would throughout the nineteenth century, in the form of an architectural revival movement. Where the intended effect of the Federal-style façade was the projection of the domestic order within, the Greek revival self-consciously evoked the owner’s outward participation in an ascendant American democracy. Fluted columns (for the rich) and pilasters (for the slightly less rich) replaced simple door enframement. Enormous foliate designs blossomed in plaster on parlor ceilings. While public architecture, banks, and mansions turned to marble-clad façades and colonnades, the simple row house remained brick accented by stone. Classical motifs like the Greek key, acanthus leafing, laurel wreaths, and the omnipresent honeysuckle came into vogue, especially as the expense of ornamentation decreased. Fences and fretwork were increasingly made from cast iron rather than wrought, and stucco and papier-mâché replaced plaster. Steam-powered machinery pumped out wooden moldings.

The growth in industry that would make New York a center of manufacturing was also powering the rise of an emergent bourgeoisie, for whom there was a new lifestyle option: moving to Brooklyn. In 1830, Brooklyn counted fewer than 21,000 residents. By 1850, that number had grown to around 139,000. But aside from scattered exceptions in Brooklyn Heights, the city’s first suburb, it wouldn’t be the brick and marble of the Greek revival that defined the streetscape, now spreading across old Dutch farm holdings toward Fort Greene and the amorphous “South Brooklyn.” Instead, a more middle-class, more populist style came to the fore, suiting the needs of new homebuyers.

Part of the broader anti-Enlightenment reaction of romanticism, the gothic revival, advanced in England by John Ruskin and an early-career William Morris, set autochthonous against universalizing form, rejecting classicism’s pretensions to an architecture of pure reason. The rugged, dark brownstone, excavated in Connecticut and New Jersey, thus fit well with nascent transatlantic sensibilities valuing homegrown styles, local materials, and organic forms. Yet it was the Italian Renaissance palazzo, not the English country manor nor the Norman cathedral, that inspired the first blocks of sandstone-faced row houses. The resulting Italianate style provides the iconic image of the Park Slope brownstone: a sheer, smooth facing, imposing but restrained, with scrolling consoles and feathered acanthus moldings supporting a heavy pediment above the door like a brow. These buildings feel consciously intended for serialized visual consumption, row succeeding row as house succeeds house, with the clean, heavy lintels allowing the gaze to trip along.

Then as now, the comparatively affordable prices of Brooklyn helped meet the needs of the upwardly mobile. With ferry traffic swarming the not-yet-bridged East River, rows of brownstone-faced brick row houses spread out from Brooklyn Heights and from waterfront loci of shipping and manufacturing. The era of the brownstone had begun.

IN THE WANING YEARS of the Italianate, brownstones were largely constructed by speculators according to cookie-cutter plans on recently opened lots. The need to recoup one’s outlay led to a conservativism in design that matched the conservativism of prospective buyers. James Fenimore Cooper once commented on the capricious yet conformist fashions of New York, how a gathering of “souls, collected from all parts of Christendom,” ended up “referring fashion and opinion altogether to a sort of popular will.” Because of New York’s rapid expansion, its buildings, where preserved in quantity, encase in masonry the shifts in public aesthetic consensus as it was hashed out in papers like the Brooklyn Eagle. Though at times decried as drab (in 1934’s A Backward Glance, Wharton recalls the New York of her childhood as “cursed with its universal chocolate-coloured coating of the most hideous stone ever quarried”), the brownstone offered a standardized solution for the homebuyer anxious to keep up appearances. But acquiring one was only the first step to respectability: Décor opened up a near infinite set of perils. Guides were required.

The son of a lawyer and the nephew of an uninspired academic painter, Charles Locke Eastlake fought alongside Ruskin and Morris in the British civil war between the gothic and the classical. Though he studied to become an architect, it was in furniture design that he excelled. Like Ruskin and Morris, he tended to talk about design in moral terms, railing against Victorian artifice. Like Holden Caulfield, he hated phonies. Veneer was to be despised. It was an “evil day” when stucco was invented. Form, he believed—in a premonition of the century to come—should follow openly from function. The greatest sin was to conceal the true nature of an object.

Eastlake’s Hints on Household Taste, published in New York in 1872, quickly became the go-to reference for Brooklyn’s middle-class arrivistes. The homeowner his book imagines is an earnest truth seeker beset by hucksters peddling meretricious wares. Salesmen are guided by two chief principles: “the relative price of his goods and the social position or wealth of those customers in whose eyes they find favor.” To the shopper, Eastlake comes with a gentle warning from the ranks of the British elite:

In his best writing, Eastlake praises the organic union of form and function in the simple household bucket. His practical minded advice, which might seem condescending if not for its precision, spoke to a class not far removed from working with their hands, needing to define themselves at once against their betters and lessers.

How should one swag drapes? What goes on top of bookshelves? What are the proper applications for marquetry? Comically, Eastlake advises on the number of ridges in a picture frame while scolding others for their obsession with ornament. But in advocating for restraint, Eastlake was providing a moral justification not only for economy, but for beauty. The gothic was a weapon in the fight against artifice, but he didn’t consider modernity an enemy per se. Nor did he completely decry ornamentation. The mysterious connection between beauty and function was two-sided, like the reproductive organs of the flower. There is a latent democracy in Eastlake’s aesthetic philosophy: The purpose of ornament wasn’t to declaim status but to make beauty, at least in principle, accessible to all. In his own furniture designs, mass-produced, to his dismay, in shoddy copies, he employed simple, abstracted floral motifs that pleasantly fused the artificial and the organic.

Repurposed for brownstone façades, these would become known as the Eastlake motif—the great denouncer of veneers thus inadvertently lent his name to a decoration carved into a thin stone cladding used to gussy up brick. Brownstones bearing the Eastlake motif were built in the neo-Grec style, which resolved the nineteenth-century architectural debates by accenting an austere “classical repose” with “gothic light and shade” (in the words of the Real Estate Record & Guide), stripping the leafy consoles but retaining the heavy enframements of the Italianate. Like Eastlake himself, the neo-Grec style was both a product of the machine age, with blocky, uniform construction, and a reaction against it, with the varied Eastlake motifs providing opportunities for individual expression. These are the buildings I admired in Bed-Stuy. After discovering the origins of my own personal Tristero symbol, however, I was—like many readers of The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)—left wondering what I had from the first: What did it mean?

FOR MOST OF ITS HISTORY, New York did not have well-defined neighborhoods. “Bedford-Stuyvesant” is a later, racialized designation, formed from the names of two old Dutch townships during the influx of African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans into Brooklyn in the 1920s and ’30s. For much of the twentieth century, the name simply referred to a large, amorphous area in central Brooklyn where Black people lived, including present-day Crown Heights, Weeksville, and more. Early settlements like Bedford Corners were farming towns, and the area remained agricultural for a surprisingly long time. The names of the great Dutch landholders are still visible on Brooklyn street signs today—Remsen, Suydam, Lefferts. In the back half of the nineteenth century, those families that had held on to their tracts were richly rewarded for their patience. The ninety-acre plot of the improbably named Judge Leffert Lefferts, for example, was posthumously divided into 1,400 city lots stretching between Bedford and Stuyvesant Avenues in 1878. As Bed-Stuy suburbanized, the bourgeoisie were attracted by the soon-to-be-completed Brooklyn Bridge (1883) and elevated railways like the Fulton Street Line (1888). Naturally, the neo-Grec brownstones built to meet the demand were outfitted with details from the furniture designs of this demographic’s foremost tastemaker, Charles Locke Eastlake. The use of recently invented power tools brought out the latent geometry of Eastlake’s designs, and the vines and flowers collectively known as the Eastlake motif were incised across Bed-Stuy and elsewhere.

In antiquity, the honeysuckle and the acanthus leaf were already stylized into abstraction. The reference was to tradition and thus to social distinction, not vegetation. Though the gothic revival indeed restored more lifelike foliate forms to ornamentation, the goal was not to reproduce the natural world as such. As Eastlake wrote with admirable confidence, “It is an established principle in the theory of design that decorative art is degraded when it passes into a direct imitation of natural objects.” The Eastlake motif and its repetition reproduce the interplay of pattern and variation found in nature—but do so while remaining true to the mechanical means of construction and the substance of stone. Here, ornament was a way of making a building or neighborhood more hospitable by drawing, in part, on nature’s effects.

It’s tempting to read Eastlake’s aesthetics through arguable inheritors of his tradition like Frank Lloyd Wright or fellow travelers like Louis Sullivan, Wright’s “Lieber Meister.” In a sense, the eventual crystallization and triumph of Ruskin’s, Morris’s, and Eastlake’s ideas in modernist form has made their own stylistic predilections seem antiquated. But what is the function of ornamentation? What should the composition of a façade achieve? One of Ruskin’s criteria for the gothic was “redundance,” by which he meant generosity. “No architecture is so haughty,” he wrote, “as that which is simple; which refuses to address the eye, except in a few clear and forceful lines; which implies, in offering so little to our regards, that all it has offered is perfect.” The earlier styles of row house strike me as haughty in their stately homogeneity, the later ones (to which we’ll shortly turn) as self-conscious, their eager pursuit of variety for its own sake militating against the artlessness Ruskin truly sought. The neo-Grec brownstones of Bed-Stuy, a resolution of the classical and the gothic effected by the machine age, strike me as generous. Sure, the Eastlake motif was employed as a perfunctory invocation of middle-class taste. But today, it still clearly states that the role of domestic urban architecture is to invite long-term intimacy—that the purpose of a beautiful façade is to make a neighborhood somewhere you want to live.

AS BROWNSTONE CONSTRUCTION resurged after the crash of 1873, the so-called eclectic period began. American architects, increasingly self-conscious as a profession, shook free from standardized templates and textbook historical revivalism in favor of a more fantastical, freewheeling referentiality that gave larger scope for individual expression on the part of both the architect and the homeowner. At this point, buildings become more difficult to date by sight. The Romanesque introduced rounded arches, two-toned Moorish brickwork, and wild Byzantine leafing. The so-called Queen Anne style, which has nothing to do with Queen Anne and which, confusingly, bears only a tangential relationship to the English Queen Anne style, imported turrets and asymmetrical floorplans. Increasingly, it was agreed that buildings were supposed to be (as Eastlake so memorably scoffed) “not only ‘elegant’ but ‘unique.’”

Even as it fell out of vogue, the neo-Grec brownstone continued its march across Bed-Stuy, reaching its eastern terminus by the close of the nineteenth century. Row houses of all types would continue to be built along old models until the First World War halted new construction. But by then, the single-family home was no longer a site of urban aesthetic innovation. Apartment buildings had first been sold to the upper classes as a luxury from France after the Civil War, soon branded “French Flats” to differentiate them from tenements. Then metal skeleton construction allowed them to rise ever higher, leading to the destruction of many shorter, less profitable, and now unfashionable buildings, especially on Manhattan’s hitherto brownstone-stuffed Upper West and Upper East Sides. Brownstone Brooklyn has its share of magnificent apartment buildings, such as Montrose Morris’s Romanesque Alhambra on Nostrand and Halsey, but they never became ubiquitous. Today, thanks to preservation districts, it seems the brownstone is here to stay.

When constructed with care, a brownstone building should be as durable as any other. But “to last,” Charles Lockwood notes in Bricks and Brownstone, the sandstone of the façade “must be cut across the grain and laid ashlar, i.e., with the grain running perpendicular to the building façade.” Often, this expensive, time-consuming process was ignored, such that most brownstones require intensive upkeep or brownstone-colored stuccoing. A block’s appearance isn’t timeless. Works like Suleiman Osman’s The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn (2011) have historicized the return of white yuppies fleeing elevator apartments in Manhattan to a Brooklyn they saw in bucolic, primeval—gothic—terms, evicting poor boarders in the process. In an echo of Victorian anxieties, these so-called brownstoners published sundry guides to brownstone repair and typification. In an echo of the gothic revival, they craved authenticity, circulating history pamphlets articulating a neighborhood mythology that elided many people who had actually lived there. They planted gardens and trees to restore neighborhoods to a state that only ever existed in their imaginations. They formed neighborhood associations to promote façade renovation. They demanded that banks provide financing. They organized against development. The idyllic repose of Park Slope doesn’t come from an unbroken link with a timeless past—it was achieved by the efforts of homeowners with access to capital and political power.

But what about those people they ignored? Emphasizing the novelty of the brownstoners’ preservation efforts risks obscuring continuities with what many groups of status-conscious Brooklyn homeowners have done since the borough was amalgamated into the city in 1898. On her Substack, the great contemporary chronicler of brownstone Brooklyn Suzanne Spellen has recently traced a continuous thread of “Block Beautiful” movements from the turn of the century to the present. Historic preservation wasn’t always valued as it is today. In richer areas beginning in the 1920s, stoops and other detailing were removed from many rowhouses to account for changing tastes and to better enable multitenant living. But in his Battle for Bed-Stuy (2016), Michael Woodsworth describes how, in the 1950s and ’60s, the Black middle class of Bedford-Stuyvesant, confined by redlining and excluded from the wealth building that followed World War II, organized themselves along similar lines as the brownstoners and employed similar means to stave off blight and preserve their hard-won social position. Community organizations worked with then-Senator Robert F. Kennedy to craft the Community Home Improvement Program, which charged only $25 for total façade repair and trained local youth for the work. The idea that historic housing stock, properly restored, can provide an alternative to slum clearance as a method of urban renewal comes from Bed-Stuy, comes from these neo-Grec, Eastlake motif–outfitted brownstones.

These relatively modest, uniform row houses, Woodsworth writes, are “physically, aesthetically, and spiritually connected,” and thus “demand a communal effort from owners keen on maintaining property values. Lacking lawns, driveways, or spacious backyards, they propelled their inhabitants out onto stoops and sidewalks.” By virtue of a conjoined structure that sets them on flush, narrow plots, brownstones foster an admirable collectivity, but the ability to maintain that collectivity depends on in-residence ownership with access to capital or government support. This support can be justified not only through the economics of development, but also in the name of beauty, understood as a public, community-binding good. The play of repetition and difference on the façades invites sustained attention, new detail revealing itself to a resident with each passing year. Even when returned to its original role as a single-family home for the wealthy, the brownstone continues to express the admirable idea that you should care about the place where you live. A façade is a covenant between occupant and neighbor, between neighborhood and passers-through. Ornament is its seal.