Brooklyn brownstones are a signature
— — the stoop, the warm-stone street, the long block.
Not only on a wall.
“The four- and five-storey row houses built from Connecticut and New Jersey brownstone that line the long blocks of Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Fort Greene. High stoops, deep parlour windows, cornices the colour of strong tea. Most were built between 1860 and 1900. Roughly twenty thousand still stand across the borough.
Brooklyn brownstones are a signature, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Brooklyn's brownstones are row houses faced in Triassic-period sandstone quarried mainly from Portland, Connecticut, and the Passaic basin of New Jersey. The borough holds roughly twenty thousand of them, concentrated in Brooklyn Heights — the city's first designated historic district, declared in 1965 — and across Park Slope, Cobble Hill, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Most rose between 1860 and 1900, in Italianate, Neo-Grec, Queen Anne, and Romanesque Revival styles, often by speculative builders working a full block at a time. The stoop and the deep parlour-floor windows are the visual signature.
The stone itself is a fine-grained brown sandstone laid down in the Triassic period in shallow basins on either side of what is now New York Harbour. Portland, Connecticut, along the Connecticut River, supplied most of it; quarries in the Hackensack and Passaic valleys of New Jersey supplied the rest. The Portland quarries closed for good in 2012 after one of the last working pits flooded, ending the active supply chain. Restoration in Brooklyn now relies on salvaged stock and on lime-and-aggregate patching compounds tinted to match the original warm tea-coloured surface.
The densest stretches of intact brownstone sit in Brooklyn Heights between Henry and Hicks Streets, in Park Slope along Garfield Place between Sixth and Eighth Avenues, and along Hancock and Macon Streets in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The 2 and 3 trains feed Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope; the C and the A feed Bed-Stuy. There is no admission, no gate, no ticket. The houses are private homes, lived in, and best read from the sidewalk on a slow walk through any of the historic-district blocks the city has protected since 1965.