Results tagged “fillmoreplace”

The Landmark Preservation Commission voted unanimously yesterday to make Fillmore Place in Williamsburg a historic district. The one-block street holds 29 mid-19th-century rowhouses, including Henry Miller's boyhood home, which will now be protected from any major alterations. The LPC's chairman told the Brooklyn Paper they were “Constructed for working class-tenants, the architecture of the buildings in this district has more in common with fashionable middle- and upper-class single-family rowhouses than the tenements that were typically built to house them. The district is an evocative reminder of this period in Brooklyn’s history.” Last year there was a machete attack on the block, but hopefully this designation will shine a positive light on what Miller himself once called “the most enchanting street I have ever seen in all my life."

Last summer the Hubbard House, one of the last standing Dutch farmhouses in the city, appealed for designation once again to the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Now Brownstoner reports that tomorrow the LPC will meet, and along with the Hubbard House they'll "take the formal step of voting to calendar the Fillmore Historic District, a one block section on the North Side of Wiliamsburg between Driggs Avenue and Roebling Street. The street is notable because it was built as part of a middle-class housing plan and exhibits a strong architectural cohesiveness. It also gets a shout-out in Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer." (More recently, Fillmore is where one of the machete attacks took place!) Stay tuned for more on the fate of the could-be landmarks, history buffs.