1699: The original Old Stone House constructed
The Gowanus tidal marshes, bordered on both sides by farms and orchards, including the Old Stone House, was a rich resource for New York City markets. Post roads, turnpikes, and gentle country lanes led eastward through the six towns and rural countryside toward East River ferry landings, including what is now Fulton Landing. Over time, as New England settlers and New York City merchants expanded their commerce, Long Island’s bountiful central plain supplanted the Gowanus Valley as a resource. Yet the Old Stone House was still a farm at the time of the American Revolution, equidistant from the growing towns of Flatbush and Brooklyn.

1832: Brooklyn receives its charter as a city
A population and economic boom ensued in New York and Brooklyn following the end of the War of 1812, marked by the coming of steamboat commerce, laden barges from Western New York and beyond via the 1825 Erie Canal, opened 1825, and a vast coastal and transatlantic trade entering and leaving New York and Brooklyn ports. Mansions and row houses began to fill the land between the ferry and the hills lying east of the Old Stone House, and Fig. x shows an 1845 drawing with church steeples on the horizon. Other financial interests, including H. B. Pierrepont and others, purchased the hilly land farther south to establish the Green-Wood Cemetery, the third “rural” cemetery to be built in the United States. By the 1850’s the farm, variously known by the names of succeeding owners xx Vechte and Jaques Cortelyou, could no longer sustain its owners, and the land was sold to developers who waited for demand to grow.

1865 and after: The U.S. Civil War
The Civil War accelerated commercial development and Brooklyn’s population, already augmented by waves of 1840’s immigrants from Germany and Ireland, began to expand up the western slope of the great north-south terminal moraine that bisects Long Island and can be seen in Prospect Park. After the war, domestic architecture changed, showing a preference for “brownstone facades,” varying rooflines, interior layouts and windows, in contrast to the federal brick and “gothic revival” houses of Brooklyn Heights, South Brooklyn (Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens) and Fort Greene.

A leader in this transformation of what was to become Park Slope was Edwin Litchfield, who, in the late nineteenth century, bought up much of the land in on the slope of the eastern side of the Old Stone House, and also began to drain the marshes to the west into the narrow channels we now know as the Gowanus Canal. Litchfield’s grand manor house, looking west from the crest of the moraine, is now inside Prospect Park and serves as headquarters for the Brooklyn Division of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. Litchfield’s construction headquarters was the small, two-story Victorian building at the corner of Third Avenue and Third Street, protected by landmark designation as of 2006 and now scheduled to become the cornerstone of a modern supermarket. It was said that Third Street, which passes the north side of the park where the Old Stone House stands, was constructed as a grand boulevard to impress those who were coming to buy land for housing construction.

1880’s: Baseball, ice-skating, and Prospect Park: amusing the millions
The Old Stone House, at the bottom of the slope and at the edge of a tidal marsh, remained uninhabited, and began its second life as a comfortable clubhouse where ice skaters and baseball players could change and prepare for their exertions. By the end of the nineteenth century, the House had been buried in landfill, and the surrounding city blocks were filled with row houses. Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux, with the support of an impressive host of businessmen and political figures, had lovingly designed Prospect Park to grace the very top of the moraine, east of the House and north of Green-Wood Cemetery. And they designed Eastern Parkway and Ocean Parkway as grand boulevards leading far out into Brooklyn. Bay Ridge was already a well-established vacation community, so the next area to fill in to the south of the House was Sunset Park, and Clinton Hill to the north became the community of Brooklyn’s millionaires. It was only after the subways began to stretch out into the Flatlands on the ocean side of the island that housing began to be densely built there in the late nineteenth century. Many photographs of bleak farms can be found, with railroad tracks stretching to the Atlantic horizon. The Flatlands filled in rapidly as wave after wave of immigrants set down their stakes in the dynamic manufacturing center that was Brooklyn, home of beer, pharmaceuticals, furniture, railroads, and shipping, where one of every three inhabitants was foreign-born.

1898: the City of New York
Brooklyn, made up of all of Kings County by 1898, merged with New York City that year to form the largest metropolis in the United States, with a deep-water port and miles of commercial waterfront. The consolidation offered unified city fire and police services, including water from the Croton Reservoirs and Delaware River, though the rail lines continued as separate companies for many decades. The Great Depression severely impacted Brooklyn’s manufacturing and commercial trades and those who worked in them, while World War II brought full employment and new levels of urban mobility.

1933: The Old Stone House is Resurrected
Within a very short time after the house was buried (sometime between 1897 and 1910), efforts began to recognize the significance of the site. A petition was submitted to the newly created “Board of Estimate” by the TK arguing that the site should be set aside as a park. The petition came to nought, but two decades later then Parks Commissioner Robert Moses approved the reconstruction of the house in a newly designated J.J. Byrne park using the original stones. Since the footprint of the house could still be discerned, and there were existing drawings and photograph, it could be reproduced quite accurately. For recreational reasons, the site of the house was moved about 75 feet and reoriented to fit squarely in the center of the park. Click here to read a New York Times article about the discovery of the house's foundation.>

1957: Goodbye to the Dodgers
The 1950’s marked a quiet revolution as a substantial working-class populace migrated to metropolitan suburbs, the waterfront began its slow dance with container shipping, heavy manufacturing moved to Southern labor markets, and a new group of urban professionals began to reinvigorate the neighborhoods closest to lower Manhattan. The iconic Brooklyn Dodgers departed their native heath for West Coast sunshine and fans after winning the World Series only two years prior. The Dodgers played in their formative years on the very parkland on which the Old Stone House sits and earned their name from dodging the trolleys that ran along Fifth Avenue, where once the Gowanus Road wound between the Narrows and Fulton landing and is now traveled by the B61 bus. The Dodgers’ departure left behind an existential void for millions, literally, of Brooklyn residents.

Brooklyn’s post-war renaissance began in the late 1950’s as the children of immigrants moved to surburban locales while urban professionals with offices in Manhattan began to reclaim nearby brownstone neighborhoods as desirable residences, first Brooklyn Heights, then adjacent areas, which wound up with the created names by which we know them today: Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, Park Slope, Ft. Greene, Sunset Park, Prospect Heights, Windsor Terrace, Green-Wood Heights, Kensington, Crown Heights. Many have acquired, or are laboring to acquire, the treasured landmark status that will protect their areas from runaway commercial development. A few retained their ancient names while acquiring new character: Canarsie, Red Hook, Gravesend.

(Contributed by boardmember Marilyn H. Pettit, Ph.D)