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.

First African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, ca. !!!!. The denomination known as the A.M.E. Zion Church traces the origins of its congregation to the John Street Methodist Church in Lower Manhattan. The John Street Methodist Church was a mixed-race congregation, which welcomed Black worshippers as many Methodist churches did following the Great Awakening. Though allowed to worship freely, Black members of the church still experienced overt discrimination, leading them to eventually break off into and form another church. The smaller churches that separated from the John Street Methodist Church were attended by only Black congregants, though the ministers were still exclusively white, causing tension among those who attended and those who led the church. The church separated for a second time, following Minister James Varick, an early attendant of the John Street Methodist Church. Varick, a Black man, became the first bishop of the newly-formed and independent African Methodist Episcopal Zion denomination. By 1866, the A.M.E. Zion denomination had 42,000 members and, by 1868, its size had quadrupled. At the end of the Civil War, the church was sending missionaries to the South to educate newly emancipated freed men. A.M.E. Zion is sometimes referred to as "Freedom Church" for its connection to Abolitionism. The First A.M.E. Zion Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant was originally part of what was known as the Fleet Street Church, which was organized in 1885 by a small group of 15 people who applied to join the A.M.E. Zion denomination. Like many other historic Black churches in the borough, the group had separated from the Bridge Street A.M.E. in Downtown Brooklyn. The church's first building was the largest of the A.M.E. Zion denomination. By 1942, they purchased the building seen here at Tompkins and MacDonough Street, which seats about 6,000 people and is even today one of the largest A.M.E. Zion buildings.

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.

P.S. 93 is an elementary school located in Crown Heights, Brooklyn at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and New York Avenue. The school was built in 1907 in the "Collegiate Gothic" style. It was designed by the "school builder" of New York City, C.B.J. Snyder, who designed hundreds of school buildings in New York over his lifetime. In fact, he was appointed the Superintendent of School Building in the borough of Manhattan in 1891. Like many buildings in the Collegiate Gothic style, Snyder's P.S. 93 is meant to invoke feelings of academic prestige. The plan of the building is an L-shape, a departure from the architect's signature H-shaped school buildings, though a reflection of the corner lot it occupied. The building's structure is a steel skeleton frame to allow for large windows to let light and fresh air into classrooms. The bricks used in the building are fire-proof terracotta. Decorating the facade, the faces of medieval scholars and various owls of wisdom adorn the structure. This building still operates as an elementary school to this date.

The Brooklyn Children's Museum was first opened in 1899 located in two Victorian mansions on Brooklyn Avenue. Founded through the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, it was the first museum for children in the country and grew immensely popular. Eventually in 1975, the two mansions that housed the museum were demolished and its current building designed by architectural firm of Hardy Holzman & Pfeiffer Associates was constructed. Moreover, its 2008 renovation prompted another first: the first NYC LEED-certified Green museum. It continues to be one of the nation's premiere children's museum, boasting a permanent collection of more than 30,000 items.

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.

825-833 St. Marks Avenue, 1925. This series of Renaissance Revival rowhouses was constructed circa 1884 and designed by George P. Chappell, who designed many rowhouses and mansions in Crown Heights.The corner building (no. 833), along with its three neighbors, have all had their stoops removed and entrances relocated to the basement level.

Brooklyn Children's Museum 145 Brooklyn Avenue Designed by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates 1977; expansion: Rafael Viñoly, 2008 Despite the Brooklyn Children’s Museum’s contemporary design, the institution itself is believed to be the oldest children’s museum in the country. It has been located on this site since 1899, when a mansion on this property – the William Newton Adams House – was converted into a children’s museum. It proved to be a huge hit, so at some point over the next two decades, the museum expanded into the L.C. Smith House next door. By 1967, the museum had outgrown both mansions and began planning for a new building on the site, which was completed in 1977. The current iteration of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum was mostly constructed in 2008, but its design is in fact an expansion of the 1977 structure, which was largely subterranean. The expansion, whose wavy design and primary color palette are in stark contrast to the character of the surrounding neighborhood, is clad in 8.1 million yellow ceramic tiles. The expansion roughly doubled the building’s size to 102,000 square feet.

Row of shops on Fulton Street, west of Tompkins Avenue, May 14, 1942. P.L. Sperr’s photo was taken almost two years after the Fulton Street elevated line was dismantled, and four years after the IND Fulton Street subway opened. The shops — grocery stores, lunch counters, and meat markets — occupy a row of wood-framed structures dating to at least 1880. Today, those buildings appear intact, though cornices have been stripped and upper story clapboards have been replaced with synthetic siding.

This villa-style home is one of the oldest surviving structures in the neighborhood and a vestige of Bedford-Stuyvesant’s bucolic days. It was constructed for William A. Parker in 1863, who was a local hops and malt merchant. The house was later occupied by James McMahon, the founder and president of the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank. Since 1945, this structure has been occupied by the United Order of the Tents. The United Order of the Tents was founded as part of the underground railroad, and after the Civil War, was officially organized as a charity and lodge. It is one of the oldest lodges for African-American women in the nation.

St. Matthew’s Protestant Episcopal Church (formerly Tompkins Avenue Presbyterian Church), ca. 1905. This red brick Victorian Gothic church was built in the early 1870s, by Massachusetts-born architect George Hathorne. However, by July, 1875, the church had been foreclosed on, and was rented to the Tompkins Avenue Congregational Church. In 1889, the Congregational Church moved into a brand-new structure directly across MacDonough Street, and the original Tompkins Avenue Presbyterian Church was sold to St. Matthew’s Protestant Episcopal. Since 1944, the Stuyvesant Heights Christian Church has worshipped there.

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.

Ludwig Nissen Mansion, 1932. Ludwig Nissen was a German immigrant and son of aristocratic German family, who arrived in New York alone and poor in 1872. He went on to find much success as a leading diamond dealer. He also was a Mason, president of a number of Brooklyn social clubs and professional associations, and served as a Civil Service Commissioner of Brooklyn. In 1904 he bought a plot of land on St. Marks Avenue which included a mansion, built in the 1870s, for sugar refining executive John G. Searles. Nissen had the original mansion razed and erected his own huge house, modeled after a palace in Potsdam, Germany. The house went through a number of owners after Nissen, including the Russian (Soviet) consulate and Abraham Shapiro, a local developer of mansion-replacing apartment houses. In the early 1970s the mansion was one of the last homes still standing on what was known as "Millionaire Row." in 1976 it was demolished for the construction of the Marcus Garvey Senior Residence.

While not a particularly distinguished architectural contribution to the neighborhood on first glance, Stuy Park House, a senior housing complex, holds an important cultural significance to Crown Heights North. Its architect, John Louis Wilson, Jr., was the first black architect to graduate from the Columbia University School of Architecture. Throughout his 50-year career, he served as a mentor to black architects, helping many to get their start in the field. In the mid-1950s, he founded the Council for Advancement of Negroes in Architecture, which eventually merged with the American Institute of Architects (AIA). In 1984, the AIA honored Wilson with the Whitney M. Young Jr. citation. His most famous work was the Harlem River Houses at 151st Street and the Harlem River Drive in Manhattan, the first federally financed housing project, completed in 1937.