The Decatur Playground is owned by the Parks Department and the Board of Education. It opened to the public in 1942. It is one of the many WPA projects in south Brooklyn and is used by children of nearby IS 35 and the neighborhood which surrounds it.

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.

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.

Public School 35 annex, March 3, 1931. P.S. 35 was established in 1873, on Lewis Avenue at Decatur Street. This photo depicts the P.S. 35 annex (then No. 201 Decatur), built in 1890 to accommodate a growing student population. Both the original school and the annex were replaced by a new building in 1946-7. Today, the school is designated M.S. 35 and named for Stephen Decatur, an early 19th century American Naval Officer. Chauncey, Bainbridge, Decatur, and MacDonough Streets are each named for naval officers who served in conflicts including the War of 1812 and the First Barbary War. Decatur was killed in an 1820 duel with former officer James Barron, stemming from Decatur’s role in an 1807 court martial in which Barron was stripped of his commission, and subsequent actions obstructing Barron’s reinstatement. Both men sustained gunshot wounds, but only Decatur’s proved fatal.

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.

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.

"Throop Avenue, south from Halsey Street, showing the east side of the avenue. At Macon Street is the Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of Victory,1941."