Clinton Avenue contains some of Brooklyn’s finest 19th century architecture, including the Gilded Age mansions that made it the borough’s most fashionable address. A walk down the length of the avenue tells the story of this transformation: from the provincial farming community shaped by a handful of prominent landowners to a “Gold Coast” boulevard of grand Renaissance Revival buildings, and later to the tension between wartime housing needs, development, and the nascent historic preservation movement.

Edward T. Bedford Mansion, ca. 1905. Bedford was a board member of Standard Oil and a colleague of Charles Pratt, whose family had several mansions on the next block south. Bedford’s stately Renaissance Revival home was designed by Montrose Morris and built around 1900. A 1902 New York Times report of a fire at Bedford’s home begins: “There was much excitement yesterday afternoon in the aristocratic neighborhood of Clinton and Willoughby Avenues, Brooklyn." Like many in the surrounding area, Bedford’s mansion was torn down during World War II, making room for the construction of housing for Navy personnel and families at the Clinton Hill Apartments (built 1941-1943, today the Clinton Hill Co-Ops).