East side of Alice Court, September 13, 1940. This view shows the first row of houses developed on Alice Court, one of two half-block cul-de-sacs off of Atlantic Avenue, between Kingston and Albany Avenues. The development’s 36 Queen Anne rowhouses were built by architect W.M. Coots in 1888-9, for the industrialist and developer Florian Grosjean. Alice Court is named for Grosjean’s daughter.

Thallon Mansion, 1930. Robert Thallon was a Scot who arrived in the United States in 1853. Over the next decade he became a pioneer in the field of food exporting and a founder of the New York Produce Exchange. After a decade aboard post-retirement, Thallon and family returned to New York. Thallon the elder bought a home in the tony community along St. Marks Avenue at no. 816. Robert Thallon Jr., an accomplished musician and music teacher, set up a studio in his own mansion, seen here at no. 900. Between 1885 and 1901, when the mansion was sold, Thallon Jr. presented more than 600 weekly morning concerts with the assistance of his students, family, and invited musicians. This private venue became an important center of musical life in Brooklyn. The concerts often featured the home's walnut-encased, custom-made pipe organ. The land what was once occupied by the Thallon Mansion is today the children’s playground inn Brower Park. While the house was lost, the organ that once delighted visitors had survived. It was purchased by the Methodist Church of Naugatuck, Connecticut, where it remains in use.

St. John's Park, 1953. The name of the park references the asylum that used to sit nearby, St. John's Asylum for Boys. The refuge was opened almost a century earlier by the Catholic church to provide aid for disadvantaged children, all of Irish descent. The asylum was relocated to Long Island in 1948. The city gained possession of the land the buildings occupied to construct the Albany Houses, a NYCHA project. As part of Robert Moses' plan as Parks' commissioner, the housing development was not complete without a park and recreational center. The rec center was completed in 1956 with a swimming pool, exercise rooms, gymnasium, and boxing facilities. The park boasted three softball fields, a comfort station, basketball and handball courts. At the opening ceremony, Moses claimed: "The opening of this building will enable the Department of Parks to establish a well-rounded recreation program in the heavily populated Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn where such a program is urgently needed.” The Recreation Center was renovated in 1987 and is still open today.

Brooklyn Orphan Asylum, ca. 1905. In 1833 a group of local progressive (and wealthy) reformers established the Orphan Asylum of the city of Brooklyn. The orphanage was originally located on Cumberland Street, but by the 1860s the building was running out of space. Fundraising by the wealthy Brooklynites who founded the organization allowed them to buy land in Bedford Stuyvesant and erect a new structure in 1870. The new orphanage, “Modern English Gothic” in style and massive in size, housed both boys and girls for the next seven decades. By the 1940s both the cost of building upkeep in the face of WWII and the declining population of orphans prompted the organization to relocate to Long Island. After the asylum vacated the space in 1942, the building was commandeered by the War Department to house troops before they shipped out. Following the close of the war, the city purchased the land and demolished the building for the full-block St. Andrew’s Playground.

Short, mid-block streets inserted into the existing street grid, usually called “places” for through streets and “courts” for dead-end streets, were constructed in Brooklyn beginning in the late 19th century. The construction of these mid-block streets allowed developers to fit more houses onto a smaller parcel and created private enclaves desirable for home buyers. These three feature picturesque rows of houses of varied heights, many of which are lower rise than the rest of Crown Heights North. Revere Place, the earliest of the three, features houses in the Romanesque Revival and Renaissance Revival styles, while the houses on Hampton Place and Virginia Place were designed in the Colonial Revival style, perhaps to evoke their street names. The novelist Richard Wright and his wife Ellen lived at 11 Revere Place in 1941-42, when the neighborhood began to shift to a majority African- and Caribbean-American population. Revere Place, Hampton Place and Virginia Place are all located within the Crown Heights North III Historic District.

Commercial High School, ca. 1928. The former Commercial High School is a classic H-shaped facility designed by the proponent of this layout and New York's most influential school builder, C.B.J. Snyder. Constructed sometime between 1898 and 1906, the Beaux-Arts school followed Synder's modus operandi: multi-level facility with courtyards that allowed for light and air in all rooms, large windows for the same purpose, all built around a strong steel skeleton. The school went through a number of names, reputations, and closings over the last 100 years. It was Commercial, then Alexander Hamilton Vocational HS, then Paul Robeson High School. It was closed again around 2006 and was re-opened in 2011 as Pathways in Technology Early College High School, technology-based public school with funding from IBM.

Former Shaari Zedek Synagogue 221 Kingston Avenue Designed by Eisendrath & Horowitz, 1923-25 Formed in 1902 and originally located in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Shaari Zedek Synagogue relocated here after the congregation merged with the Brooklyn Synagogue of Eastern Parkway in 1922. The synagogue and community house were completed in 1925 to the designs of Eisendrath & Horowitz, who had also been responsible for Temple Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Temple Beth Emeth in Prospect Park South, and Temple B’nai Israel in Sunset Park. All of these, like Shaari Zedek, were designed in the Colonial Revival style, which was popular for American synagogues in the early 20th century. The limestone and light grey brick building features a grand entrance portico with Ionic columns, a triangular pediment, and an entablature that reads “Gates of Righteousness,” the English translation of “Shaari Zedek.” An impressive standing-seam metal, octagonal dome sits atop the structure. When it was completed, the synagogue bore the distinction of housing the city’s largest Conservative Jewish congregation. In 1969, the building was sold to the First Church of God in Christ of Brooklyn. The Former Shaari Zedek Synagogue is located in the Crown Heights North III Historic District.