49 Eighth Avenue, 1960. The large building on the corner of 8th Avenue and Berkeley Place may only be 25 feet wide but has more than 6,500 square feet of space in its 4-plus stories. A fine example of Park Slope architecture with decorative metal work lining the mansard roof and the projected (oriel) window, the entire home has 42 windows. When the home was on the market in 2009 listings noted a ballroom on the parlor floor.

“90 Eighth Avenue, formerly the home of C. T. Christensen, and later of Timothy Lester Woodruff, Park Commissioner of Brooklyn and three times Lieutenant Governor of New York State. 1928.” Woodruff — a member of the Skull & Bones secret society at Yale — was major figure in the city’s Republican politics. As Park Commissioner, he was an advocate of bike paths, a full century before protected lanes along Prospect Park West became a local political flashpoint. The “for sale” sign advertises a “desirable apartment house site.” Indeed, the house was bought and razed later that year. Today, a ten-story apartment building occupies the site, which is part of the Park Slope Historic District.

General Warren Statue, date unknown. Gouverneur Kemble Warren was a New York-born Union Army General. After participating in a number of early Civil War battles, he was named Chief Topographical Engineer of the Army of the Potomac in 1863. Later that year, he was wounded at Gettysburg. Referred to as the "Hero of Little Round Top," he survived the war (and the humiliation of being relieved of his command during the 1865 Battle of Five Forks). His later career included building railroads near the Mississippi River in the Corps of Engineers. He died in 1882. He is one of three Civil War monuments in Grand Army Plaza. His statue was commissioned in 1896 by the G.K. Warren Post, No. 286, Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal organization. Created by German sculptor Henry Baerer, the memorial was dedicated on July 4, 1896. Baerer's likeness of the Warren is similar to an earlier statue erected at Gettysburg in 1888. The statue's pedestal is made from granite quarried at Little Round Top, the site of his heroic moment.

St. John’s Episcopal Church, 1960. The Victorian Gothic church was completed in 1869, becoming the permanent home of the St. John’s Episcopal parish, founded in 1826. At the time, the church building included only the transepts (left) of the current structure. The present nave and chapel (right) were added during the 1880s, by which point the corner of Seventh Avenue and St. Johns Place (renamed from Douglass Street in 1870) was home to three churches of three different denominations: St. John’s, Grace United Methodist, and Memorial Presbyterian.

50 Prospect Park West, 1972. Financier Henry Hulbert built his grand Romanesque Revival mansion in 1889. Designed by one of Brooklyn's architects to the wealthy, Montrose W. Morris, the mansion was rendered in a gleaming white limestone, unlike the dark red and brown tones of most Romanesque Revival buildings. The home also features a number of telltale Morris features including extensive stained glass, wrought iron, and carved detail. A number of schools and cultural organizations have called the asymmetrical building home since the mid-century. Since 1995 it has been home to the lower school of Poly Prep.

Survey photograph showing the intersection of Plaza Street West, St. John's Place, and Flatbush Avenue; September 15, 1914. The photo was taken ahead of the construction of the IRT Eastern Parkway Line. Today, an there is an entrance to the Grand Army Plaza station immediately to the north of the fire hydrant in the foreground.

Manual Training School, September 9, 1930. Constructed in 1904 in the classic H-shape that Snyder devised, the Manual Training School is a Renaissance Revival style building. Originally housing a school which filled the niche between a trade school and a technical school, the structure is best known as John Jay High School, which it became in the 1960s. During its time as John Jay, the school earned a reputation as the place the Board of Ed. sent its troubled students. The high school closed in 2003 and has been reopened in the educational complex model of current NYC public high schools in which the building houses a number of smaller, professionally focused schools.

This grand corner home within the Park Slope Historic District was designed by Lawrence B. Valk for Charles Pied. The corner home and the three buildings to the south were all designed in the same Romanesque Revival style. No. 21 is known as the Lillian Ward Mansion as it was once the home of Ward, a famous late 19th century singer. On the morning of December 16, 1960 two commercial airliners collided in the airspace over Staten Island. One of the pilots, attempting to land the plane in Prospect Park, came down instead at the corner of Sterling Place and 7th Avenue, directly in front of the Ward Mansion. All 128 people on both planes were killed, as well as six people on the ground. The debris scattered around the neighborhood and set more than 10 buildings on fire. A church on Sterling Place was completely destroyed while the building directly across from No. 21 had its cornice sheared off by the crashing plane. Somewhat surprisingly the mansion was left completely unharmed.

Montauk Club This club found its inspiration in the Palazzo Santa Sofia (Ca' d'Oro ) in Venice. It is built of brick and terra cotta, and a warm yellow color pervades the whole structure. Certain windows, reminiscent of the loggia of this Italian palazzo, are replete with flamboyant Venetian Gothic detail.

The House that Gum built! In the late 1860s, Thomas Adams carried out a series of experiments with chicle, which is extracted from Mexican Sapota trees, hoping he could make the rubber-like substance into toys, boots or bicycle tires. The trials were a failure. He was just about to throw the chicle into the East River when he remembered that his boss, who was the ex-dictator of Mexico, regularly chewed it. Experimenting by adding sugar, he created a better-tasting gum than any other available at that time. Adams and his son, Thomas Jr. began production of the gum in 1871 and in 1888 they opened a factory in Brooklyn, which was one of the largest of its kind in the world. With his gum fortune, Thomas Jr. built a mansion at 117 Eighth Avenue. This house, located across the street from the photo above, was designed as a double house in the Romanesque Revival style by C.P.H. Gilbert, with one entrance facing 8th Avenue and the other facing Carroll Street, it is decorated with stained glass windows and dragon ornaments. It was also the first on the block to have an elevator. The home pictured is similar in style and was constructed as its neighbor, though this building was demolished to make way for a new apartment building in the 1950s. The story around the neighborhood goes that one summer the family came home from vacation to find their calls for the servants went unanswered. When they went to look for them, it transpired that the elevator had stuck. The servants were all trapped, no one had heard their calls, and they were all dead inside the contraption! Residents of the building have claimed to hear voices crying in an Irish brogue, "Mary Mother of God help us!" Though there is little proof that this actually happened, it sure is an interesting tale. In 1897, Thomas Jr. sold his home for $75,000 and moved to New York City. Thomas Sr. retired from the business in 1898, leaving his sons in charge. On February 7, 1905, he died of pneumonia at the age of 87. He is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery.

Sixth Avenue Baptist Church, February 28, 1960. Founded in 1872 following a split with the nearby Hanson Place Baptist Church, the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church first occupied a wood-frame Sunday school mission on its present site. Construction on the current church building commenced in 1880 and completed just after Christmas of that year.

"East side of Sixth Avenue between Berkeley Place and Lincoln Place, looking north."

The Montauk Club, 1928. Described as “an architectural treasure on the slope” in the 1973 Park Slope Historic District Designation Report, the Montauk Club building was the headquarters of an exclusive gentlemen’s social club, whose founders included Gilded Age luminaries like Charles Pratt. The club was named after the Montauk Native American tribe, whose history is depicted in a continuous terra cotta frieze atop the third story, along the Eighth Avenue, Lincoln Place and Plaza Street facades. The massive Venetian Gothic clubhouse was designed by Francis H. Kimball, who took inspiration from the Ca' d'Oro, a 15th century Venetian palace on the Grand Canal. Kimball’s design includes Gothic Arches with intricate terra cotta ornamentation, surmounted by quatrefoils, and that most Venetian of features: a second floor loggia (covered exterior corridor), itself an element of a grand two-story bay facing Plaza Street. The Club was unusual for its acceptance of Jewish members and its inclusion of women in Club activities (though they were excluded from full membership until the 1960s). A separate “women’s entrance,” left of the main entrance led to a staircase to the second floor dining room. Today, that entrance leads to the residential portion of the building — the club continues to operate, but declining membership and rising costs forced members to convert and sell the upper floors and basement.

“Beth Elohim Temple House. Temple exterior, September 16, 1929." Congregation Beth Elohim was founded in 1861 as a Reform breakaway from Congregation Baith Israel, first meeting on Myrtle Avenue, and later worshiping in renovated church buildings on Pearl Street (1862) and State Street (1885). In 1908, the congregation purchased land for a purpose-built and permanent home at the corner of Garfield Place and Eighth Avenue in Park Slope. The Classical Revival synagogue was completed in 1910, with a verse fragment from the Book of Isaiah carved above the sanctuary entrance: “Mine house shall be an house of prayer for all people.”

The Hampton Apartments, ca. 1905. While Prospect Park West was developing in the early 20th century, the housing stock was made up of attractive rowhouses and mansions. In 1902 real estate developer Carl J. Zimmerman changed all of that with his plans for an upscale apartment house. The Hampton was six-story brick and limestone structure with an elevator. It was designed by Schwartz & Gross, who would go on to become one of the city's most prolific apartment house designers (particularly on the Upper West Side). The Hampton remained one of the few large apartment houses on PPW for the next 20 years. The late 1920s saw an brief influx in the construction of these types of buildings and the Hampton was victim to that development. It was purchased by developer Samuel Wander, demolished in 1928, and replaced with a 15-story (plus penthouse) building the next year.

"St. John's Place, west from Eighth Ave., showing Grace Methodist Episcopal Church at the right, and the Memorial Presbyterian Church at the left, in the background." This 1928 looking west along St. John's Place is unobstructed enough that the photographer could capture the steeples of the two church at the next corner at 7th Avenue. The greening of these residential streets of Park Slope have made that same view today certainly more verdant but also less far reaching. This current lush view was likely created by the Park Slope Civic Council, which in the 1950s and 1960s advocated against urban renewal demolition, for historic preservation, and for the greening of the neighborhood through the planting of thousands of trees.