Description of Physical and Historical Qualities

Featuring generous lawns, tree-shaded streets, and landscaped street malls, the Fiske Terrace-Midwood Park Historic District consists of two early-twentieth-century suburbs distinguished by their large, freestanding houses constructed in the popular styles of the time and exhibiting an array of eclectic ornament. This district of approximately 250 well-preserved, well-maintained houses is largely the work of two locally prominent builders and developers who rapidly constructed most of its houses in the twentieth century’s first decade, using innovative industrial methods. Due in part to strict building covenants that remained in force in places until the 1940s, homes here remain cohesive in style and character. The district is a fine example of Brooklyn’s historic suburban architecture. All the homes here are contributing buildings in the historic district.

The primary developer of Fiske Terrace, which lies generally south of Glenwood Road, was the T.B. Ackerson Company. Recognized for its efficiency, Ackerson boasted of transforming Fiske Terrace “from woods into city in eighteen months.” About three-quarters of the houses in the Midwood Park portion of the district, north of Glenwood Road, were constructed by the John R. Corbin Company, which was an innovator in applying industrial-production techniques to home construction. Many of Midwood Park’s houses are Corbin models that were “planned and practically made” in Corbin’s factory by Jamaica Bay and shipped to Midwood Park for onsite assembly. 

Fiske Terrace-Midwood Park is located in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood which developed, over the last half of the nineteenth century, from an agricultural village into one of Greater New York’s major suburban areas. New transportation technologies of the time were transforming America’s old “walking cities” to places where it was possible to conveniently commute. 

Fueling Flatbush’s transformation was the 1878 opening of the Brooklyn, Flatbush & Coney Island Railroad— the forerunner of today’s Brighton subway line—which forms the western boundary of the Fiske Terrace-Midwood Park district. By 1901, service along the line was electrified and extended to the Brooklyn Bridge, and developers in the South Midwood area (which includes Midwood Park) were promoting a commute to Manhattan from Brooklyn that was “only 35 minutes from Park Row, without change, in commodious cars, running on a four-minute headway.” The opening in 1893 of the Ocean Avenue trolley line (one block to the east of the district’s boundary) complemented the rail line and enhanced the district’s suburban allure. 

Fiske Terrace and Midwood Park are remarkably well-preserved representative developments of their time that recall the brief suburban blossoming of this part of Brooklyn in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the 1920s, developers began to replace neighborhoods of large and decorative multi-story, freestanding residences, like those in this district, with apartment houses. The era of suburban home development in Flatbush was ending.

Fiske Terrace takes its name from George P. Fiske, an oil merchant who acquired several large parcels of land there in the early 1890s. In 1905, Fiske sold Fiske Terrace to the T.B. Ackerson Company, which paved its streets; installed sidewalks, utilities, and landscaping; and built approximately 50 houses within a matter of months. 

Midwood Park was originally part of a much-larger development known as South Midwood, which was the former farm of John A. Lott. The Lott farm was acquired in 1898 by the Germania Real Estate and Improvement Company, which subdivided the land into lots, instituted property restrictions, and sold off nearly all of South Midwood’s central section—later renamed Midwood Park—for development by the John R. Corbin Company. 

Founded in 1902, Corbin’s company appears to have been among the first American manufacturers to offer complete, pre-cut houses for onsite assembly. By 1908, Corbin’s firm employed a team of architects and engineers in a factory on Jamaica Bay that was able to produce the components for 1,000 houses per year in various standard models. By 1910, Corbin claimed to “operate the largest factory of its kind,” and to be “the largest builders of detached houses in the world.” Corbin promoted its mass-produced residences to homebuyers in Midwood Park as the modern way of building higher-quality homes at lower costs.

Most of the houses in the Fiske Terrace-Midwood Park Historic District are characteristic of suburban residences erected by builders, or from catalogs or plan-books, across the country between 1890 and 1930. These “builder houses” were often constructed in one of three forms: the box-like foursquare, crowned by a hipped or pyramidal roof; the temple-house, featuring a prominent front-facing gable; and the bungalow, with its low profile, deep porch with thick tapered columns, and broadly overhanging eaves. All three forms are strongly represented in Fiske Terrace-Midwood Park, often exhibiting a whimsical eclecticism, but adhering primarily to the popular architectural styles of the time, particularly the Arts and Crafts, Colonial Revival, and gambrel-roofed Dutch Colonial Revival. 

On March 18, 2008, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission unanimously approved the designation of the Fiske Terrace-Midwood Park Historic District.

Boundary Description and Justification

The Fiske Terrace-Midwood Park Historic District consists of properties bounded by the south side of Foster Avenue to the north; the New York City Transit System Brighton Beach subway line to the west; the east side of East 19th Street to the east; and the north side of Avenue H to the south.

Today, the Fiske Terrace-Midwood Park Historic District—sharply set off from the surrounding city by Foster and Ocean avenues, the Brighton subway line, and the old Manhattan Beach Railroad tracks south of Avenue H—is a quiet oasis in Flatbush. 

Although many of the house models in the Fiske Terrace-Midwood Park Historic District repeat themselves, its developers generally did not build identical houses next to each other, adding to the picturesque nature of its streetscapes. In addition to its residences, other components of Fiske Terrace-Midwood Park contribute to its enduring quality as a representative early-twentieth-century American suburb. Among these are its landscape, including old-growth trees and the street malls of Glenwood Road and East 17th Street; and the ornamental brick entrance posts erected around 1910 at the Foster Avenue entrances to Midwood Park and the Ocean Avenue entrances to Fiske Terrace. Also visible are early features associated with the automobile, including the district’s many historic concrete driveways with grass center strips and its free standing garages.  

More than a century after the construction of their first residences, the two neighborhoods of the district remain distinguished by their many large and well-preserved freestanding houses with large porches set behind generous lawns. They are a showcase for the work of the innovative John R. Corbin and Ackerson companies, and for the suburban architecture of their era. 

Application of National Register Criteria for Evaluation of Significance

The Fiske Terrace-Midwood Park district is locally significant under the first part of Criterion C in the area of Architecture for its distinctive, well-preserved development of early twentieth century freestanding homes, in the then-new, commuter suburb of Flatbush, Brooklyn. The period of significance in which its landscaped streets, building lots and residences were planned and largely built and completed spans from 1890 to 1930, with the majority of buildings occupied by 1914. 

Exhibiting the adaptation of romantic principles to the urban grid; dependent on the railroad and the electric trolley for their development; shaped by restrictive covenants; and constructed largely with builder houses, Fiske Terrace and Midwood Park are representative of one of the major trends of American architecture and planning of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: the development of landscaped suburbs built up with single-family houses that reflect an eclectic use of design forms and stylistic details made possible by new industrial methods of homebuilding.

The district is largely the work of two locally prominent builders and developers, the T.B. Ackerson Company in Fiske Terrace and the John R. Corbin Company in Midwood Park. The Ackerson Company was recognized for its efficiency and the Corbin Company was an innovator in applying industrial-production techniques to housing construction. The Fiske Terrace-Midwood Park Historic District provides a strong link to the period in which its Flatbush neighborhood was transformed from an agricultural village into one of Greater New York’s major areas of suburban development.