Landmarks Preservation Commission April 24, 2001; Designation List 326 LP-2089 DUFFIELD STREET HOUSES, (formerly the Johnson Street Houses),182-188 Duffield Street (aka 182,184, 186, 188 Duffield Street), Brooklyn. No. 182 built c. 1839-40; No. 184 built 1847; No. 186 built c. 1835-38; No. 188 built c. 1835-38, remodeled c. 1881-83. Landmark Site: Borough of Brooklyn Tax Map Block 2058, Lot 40. On January 30, 2001, the Landmarks Preservation Commission held a public hearing on the proposed designation as a Landmark of the Duffield Street Houses (formerly the Johnson Street Houses) and the proposed designation of the related Landmark Site (Item No. 1). The hearing had been duly advertised in accordance with the provisions of law. Two witnesses spoke in support of the designation, including a representative of the Historic Districts Council. The Commission received one letter in support of the designation. At the time of designation the owner's representative expressed support for the designation. Summary Erected between c.1835 and 1847, these four houses are unusually intact survivors from the early nineteenth century residential neighborhood that once flourished on the blocks east ofB rooklyn's civic center. In contrast to wealthier Brooklyn Heights and the working class district near the Navy Yard, this neighborhood evolved between the late 1820s and 1840s as a upper middle-class enclave and remained downtown Brooklyn's leading middle-class neighborhood throughout the nineteenth century. Moved two blocks to their present site in 1990, these houses were originally located on Johnson Street between Bridge and Lawrence Streets on one of several blocks developed by Rev. Samuel Roosevelt Johnson, who had inherited a portion of his grandfather's colonial-era farm. Three of the houses were constructed by Johnson; No. 184 was erected in 1847 as an investment property by merchant Francis Chichester. Nos. 182, 184, and 186 display aspects of the Greek Revival style. No. 186 is especially noteworthy as one of the few surviving row houses in the city with a free-standing Greek Revival portico. No. 188, an 1830s house remodeled in the early 1880s, is ornamented with a combination of Queen Anne and Second Empire elements including an elaborate bracketed porch hood. During the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, these houses were occupied by merchants, lawyers, brokers, engineers, teachers, builders, and shipmasters. Residents included surveyor John S. Stoddard, credited with laying out the streets in many of the older sections of Brooklyn, who owned No. 188 in the 1850s and early 1860s, and teacher Helen Lawrence who conducted a private school in No. 182 from the mid-1850s through the mid-1870s. The houses remained in residential use through the 1980s. They were moved to their present site as part of the MetroTech redevelopment plan in 1990. Today they survive as a significant reminder of the history of downtown Brooklyn and of the evolution of Brooklyn's middle-class residential architecture.

DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Early Brooklyn and the Johnson Estate first, most of the new houses were concentrated in In the mid-eighteenth century the village of Brooklyn Heights and in the neighborhood around the Brooklyn was a small hamlet centered around the Navy Yard. In the late 1820s and 1830s, however, the highway (modern-day Fulton Street) and the ferry that heirs to the farms east of Fulton Street began to develop linked the farming communities of western Long Island their property. By 1834, Brooklyn had a population of with New York City. In 1755, Barent Johnson, a 24,310 and was incorporated as a city. In 1836, prosperous farmer of Dutch descent, purchased a pie construction began on the foundations for a magnificent shaped tract of land of about forty acres which city hall, located on a triangular site at the junction of extended from the highway to Wallabout Creek (near Court, Joralemon, and Fulton Streets, just opposite the pr

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