Prospect Lefferts Gardens - Brooklyn
Better Far Than Jewels
Invariably, some Brooklynites will scoff at the mere mention of Prospect Lefferts Gardens, dismissing it as a real estate broker’s chimera, a fictional parsing of the legitimate neighborhood of Flatbush designed solely to justify higher rents. They’re not entirely wrong.
Historically, the name Flatbush applied to a much larger area, including today’s Windsor Terrace, Kensington, Midwood, and Crown Heights. Before that, the territory of the township of Flatbush, one of Brooklyn’s six original Dutch towns, stretched even farther. And even further back, the whole kettle of fish was known as Lenapehoking, the land of the Lenape.
A neighborhood once known as Melrose Park. Sometimes called Lefferts Gardens. Or Prospect-Lefferts Gardens. Or PLG. Or North Flatbush. Or Caledonia (west of Ocean). Or West Pigtown. Across From Park Slope. Under Crown Heights. Near Drummer's Grove. The Side of the Park With the McDonalds. Jackie Robinson Town. Home of Lefferts Manor. West Wingate. Near Kings County Hospital. Or if you're coming from the airport in taxi, maybe just Flatbush is best.
Prospect Lefferts Gardens emerged as a distinct neighborhood in the late 1960s, the brainchild of the newly formed Prospect Lefferts Gardens Neighborhood Association (PLGNA). The name references nearby Prospect Park, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and Lefferts Manor, the historic district at the neighborhood’s core.
Today, the neighborhood’s borders are roughly Prospect Park, Empire Boulevard, Nostrand Avenue, and Clarkson Avenue. Some maps push the eastern boundary one block farther, to New York Avenue, though I’ve already covered that stretch in my Pigtown dispatch. The neighborhood is adjacent to (or part of) the Little Caribbean district and is home to several West Indian businesses and restaurants.
It is one of Brooklyn’s most architecturally interesting and well-preserved neighborhoods, with long stretches of Renaissance Revival, Georgian Revival, and Romanesque-style homes.
There are Art Deco apartment buildings, rows of half-timbered Tudor townhouses and streets of grand freestanding houses, some showing their age, others freshly renovated complete with a new Cybertruck sitting in their driveway.
The neighborhood’s proximity to Prospect Park and several train lines have made it an attractive spot for developers, and recent projects like The Parkline, a 23 story rental building on Flatbush Avenue, may be a harbinger of things to come.
BETTER FAR THAN JEWELS
In 1660, Pieter Janse Hagewout, a cobbler from Holland, boarded the Spotted Cow and sailed from Amsterdam to New York with his wife and their four children. A year later, Pieter died, leaving his seventeen-year-old son, Leffert Pieterse, as head of the household. The Lefferts would go on to become some of the largest landowners (and slaveholders) in New Amsterdam, with property in Kings County, Queens County, Staten Island, and New Jersey.
By the end of the nineteenth century, as the borough rapidly developed around them, John Lefferts acknowledged “the absurdity of devoting lands so desirable, central, and valuable to raising corn and potatoes,” and began auctioning off portions of their holdings. An advertisement in an 1887 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Times touted the lots as “Better far than jewels” in “Lovely Peerless Flatbush.”
Based on the success of that auction, an additional 600 lots were put up for sale a few years later by John’s son, James. These lots would become Lefferts Manor.
LEFFERTS MANOR
While he had no qualms about selling off the family farm, James Lefferts had very specific ideas about how the new development should look and feel. To enforce them, he attached restrictive covenants to every lot. No pigpens, no glue factories, no buildings dedicated to the manufacture of dynamite. In fact, no “noxious, offensive, dangerous, unwholesome…business whatsoever.”
Lefferts, who appears to have been something of a control freak, also dictated how this new suburb should look. Houses had to be at least two stories tall, set back a minimum of fourteen feet from the street, with bay windows projecting no more than three inches beyond the building line. All structures had to be built of brick or stone, valued at no less than $5,000, and, to guarantee a modicum of civility, only occupied by a single family.
In 1919, five years after James Lefferts died, the Lefferts Manor Association was formed to ensure his suburban ideals remained intact. More than a century later, they largely have. The 667 houses of Lefferts Manor, spread across eight blocks bounded by Lincoln Road, Fenimore Street, Flatbush Avenue, and Rogers Avenue, remain single-family homes, with nary a pigpen or gratuitously projecting bay window in sight.
That isn’t to say it was easy. By 1939, the association had already been involved in more than twenty court cases, most of them involving homeowners who wanted to take in renters.
ANNA MORRIS
One of the most contentious of those cases involved Anna Morris, who lived at 54 Midwood Street. In 1929, when the names of two non-family members appeared on voter rolls listing her address, the association demanded their eviction. Morris insisted they were merely friends staying with her, though a Brooklyn Eagle classified ad I found from 1921 suggests otherwise.
The association wasn’t persuaded and ordered the boarders out. Morris responded by going nuclear. She put her entire house up for sale, but only to Black families. She listed it with a broker in Harlem and hung a large sign outside reading: “For sale or rent to colored people only,” marking what is most likely the only moment in city history when white residents found themselves excluded from housing on the basis of race.
Anna Morris was not, it should be noted, an early advocate for racial justice or fair housing. She simply wanted to stick it to her neighbors. In doing so, however, she inadvertently previewed the fearmongering tactics that blockbusting real estate agents would deploy decades later though, in Anna’s case, the motivation was vengeance not greed.
The house eventually sold, though records don't indicate to whom. Ironically, the neighborhood would later become one of the city's most successfully integrated communities.
As an aside, when I first went to see the house, I mistakenly photographed 55 Midwood, right across the street. I later found out that Alice Walker (author of The Color Purple) lived there in the 1970s.
FALSE ALARM
With the proliferation of new Brooklyn neighborhoods like Lefferts Manor, the city’s infrastructure struggled to keep pace. In 1911, after Manhattan’s tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Fire had taken the lives of 146 people, the city’s entire fire response system was under intense scrutiny. Brooklyn’s system had been deemed “dangerously unreliable and inadequate.”
In response, the FDNY built Fire Alarm Telegraph Stations in each borough to serve as a central dispatch. All the stations were built adjacent to parks to minimize the chance that they would burn down.
Designed by Frank J. Helmle (who also built the Prospect Park Boathouse), the station at 35 Empire boulevard served as the central dispatch for all Brooklyn fire alarms until operations moved to downtown Brooklyn in 2009.
In the late nineteenth century, fire companies were alerted to emergencies via a network of fireboxes connected by telegraph lines. When activated, each box transmitted a unique series of electrical pulses to the firehouse which would ring bells that revealed the box’s location.
To limit false alarms, the early fireboxes were locked, their keys entrusted to nearby shopkeepers or “respectable citizens” whose names were posted on each box. The system’s limitations quickly became apparent. Finding a key keeper during an emergency could waste precious minutes, assuming that, once located, they could even find their key. Meanwhile, fires spread unchecked.
The city finally decided to remove the locks. As any middle schooler can attest, few things are more tempting than the pent-up potential of a fire alarm, a literal siren song beckoning from these forbidden yet tantalizingly accessible red boxes.
Removing the locks unleashed a flood of false alarms and sent hundreds of firefighters off to fight non-existent flames. Proposed solutions included camera-equipped fire alarm boxes and coating the alarms with a special powder that would capture fingerprints.
By far the most sadistic and innovative solution was a large mechanical shackle that would clamp onto the wrist of anyone who pulled the alarm, releasing only when a fire officer arrived with a special key. Despite its ingenuity, this “guilty until proven innocent” deterrent never gained traction.
Since the advent of widespread cellphone use, multiple mayoral administrations have attempted to phase out the fireboxes, but they persist as a backup system. Recent data suggests that over 80 percent of the alarms generated by the city’s 15,000 fireboxes are false.
CHRISTIAN FRONT
It was the police, not the fire department, who were summoned to 283 Parkside Avenue on April 13, 1940.
Earlier that day, a handyman had discovered the body of 36 year old Claus Ernecke, clad in a light brown topcoat and brown suit, hanging from a ceiling pipe in the building’s basement.
Ernecke, who lived a few blocks away at 29 Hawthorne Street, had recently been arrested along with his roommate Macklin Boettger and 16 other men, and was awaiting trial for his role in a plot to violently overthrow the U.S. government.
In the late 1930s, the most listened-to man in America was a Catholic priest based in Royal Oak, Michigan, named Father Charles Coughlin. At the height of his popularity, his radio show, The Golden Hour of the Little Flower, had the largest audience in the world. At a time when the entire U.S. population was roughly 120 million, an estimated 30 million listeners tuned in to the weekly broadcasts. In a 1933 national poll, he was voted the “most useful citizen of the United States.”
Coughlin’s early sermons focused on religious issues and scripture, but after the market crash of 1929 he began leaning heavily into economic and political commentary, advocating for workers’ rights, nationalizing banks, and criticizing both capitalism and communism. Over time, his rhetoric became increasingly antisemitic and isolationist, embracing a politics of grievance. Coughlin encouraged his listeners to feel attacked and besieged by unseen forces, victims of a vast (mostly Jewish) conspiracy.
He exchanged letters with Mussolini and reprinted speeches by Joseph Goebbels in his publication Social Justice.
In 1938, Coughlin tasked his followers with taking concrete action to combat the spread of communism and confront what he called the “insidious enemy” within the United States. This call to action resulted in the creation of the Christian Front, a loose assemblage of militias that promoted Coughlin’s “Buy Christian” doctrine and assaulted Jews in the streets. Members, some of whom were National Guardsmen, sometimes referred to themselves as “Father Coughlin’s brownshirts.”
On January 13, 1940, eighty-six years ago this week, the FBI announced the arrest of eighteen members of the Brooklyn chapter of the Christian Front for allegedly plotting to blow up bridges, seize control of the Federal Reserve’s gold supply, assassinate twelve sitting members of Congress, and incite widespread panic and revolt aimed at toppling the Democratic government and replacing it with an authoritarian one.
The group, dubbed the “Brooklyn Boys” (despite an average age of thirty two) by a sympathetic press, had established a training center in Narrowsburg, New York, where they practiced military drills and target shooting. They built homemade bombs and stockpiled weapons stolen from government armories. Part of their strategy included bombing communist and Jewish institutions, such as the offices of the Jewish Daily Forward and the Daily Worker, to incite riots, provoke National Guard suppression, and ultimately seize power. If all of this is beginning to sound strangely familiar…
“The Christian Front is no longer a dream. It is a reality in America. A reality that grows stronger, more courageous, and more determined under the threat of your ideological invasion! Call it inflammatory, if you will. It is inflammatory! Every group, in every city, in every state must be marshaled. The Christian Front organization is not a debating society; it is an action society!”
Father Charles Coughlin
The trial, which seemed like a layup thanks to an FBI informant who had infiltrated the group and a massive pile of evidence, resulted in zero convictions. There were no Jews on the jury, and the first cousin of the Catholic priest advising the defendants served as jury foreman. When the trial ended in June 1940 without a single conviction, 2,000 Brooklynites threw a party to celebrate.
Coughlin, who had initially distanced himself from the Christian Front after the arrests, claimed victory, insisting the entire trial had been a hoax.
After the trial the Christian Front decided to stand back and stand by. By the time the US entered WWII, the country had significantly tempered its enthusiasm for nazi rhetoric. The Catholic Church eventually silenced Coughlin, and he retreated to his Michigan parish until his retirement in 1966.
PLGNA
Two years later, in 1968, the neighborhood became a model for integration and community organizing when the Prospect Lefferts Gardens Neighborhood Association (PLGNA) was founded by a far less odious man of the cloth, Robert Thomason.
Through grassroots community organizing, the group helped establish tenant and block associations, improving living conditions across the neighborhood. The PLGNA pushed back against banks and real estate interests that were driving white residents out through blockbusting and redlining, as well as against landlords who neglected their properties.
To foster a sense of shared identity and connection, the PLGNA also launched the annual Prospect Lefferts Gardens House Tour, which marked its 50th anniversary in 2024. By most measures, the organization’s goal of “promot[ing] the conviction that an integrated yet thriving community is possible” has been realized, though what impact the inexorable pressures of gentrification will have on the neighborhood in the coming years remains an open question.
SIGHTS AND SOUNDS
Today’s audio is pretty uneventful. Highlights include the sounds of tires on wet pavement, a tree full of house sparrows, and an out of order can redemption machine.
FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER
Here are five photos taken along a short, unrecognizable stretch of Flatbush Avenue by German born photographer Eugene L. Armbruster in the early 1920s. I included a map that shows the locations in what was then a considerably less populated neighborhood. Any guesses what the vendor is selling in that last photo?
ODDS AND ENDS
I got most of my info about the Christian Front and the Brooklyn Boys from this episode of Rachel Maddow’s podcast where she interviews Charles Gallagher, the author of Nazis of Copley Square.
Bar Bayeux on 1066 Nostrand Ave hosts some of the best jazz musicians in the city.
Scoops has been serving vegan ice cream and vegetarian food on Flatbush since 1984.
Photographs of a meticulously renovated and decorated Prospect Lefferts townhouse: Schoolteacher’s Coup: Seeking an Integrated Neighborhood, a Couple Restores an 1899 House
The 16-story Patio Gardens complex on Flatbush Avenue was built by Fred Trump in 1962. He entrusted management of the buildings to his son Donald, but it was one of his least profitable properties and, in 1992, Fred Trump donated Patio Gardens to the National Kidney Foundation of New York. According to his 1992 tax return, the property was appraised at $61.90 per square foot. A later appraisal, cited by the New York Times, found that Trump’s Beach Haven and Shore Haven properties together, containing five times as many apartments as Patio Gardens, were worth just $11.01 per square foot.
The Lefferts Manor Association and a little bit more about how deed restrictions shaped this part of Brooklyn.
In doing research on the history of false alarm prevention, I came across the 1977 film Gizmo!. This incredible film by Howard Smith is a compilation of footage mostly from the 1930s and 40s featuring bizarre inventions, insane stunts and people blowing up balloons with their ears. 5 Stars!
Wow that colorful house really stands out in all that beige. I want to meet the people who painted it! Maybe that has to be another CAFÉ ANNE newsletter subject.
The Gizmo documentary ate 15 minutes of my life before I could look away. I'm going to have to check that out, as it's exactly in one of my spheres of interest.
As for what dude is selling in that picture, I'm guessing it's salt.
As a former PLG-er, I've been waiting for this! Actually, I never quite knew how to answer what neighborhood I lived in, particularly because I lived one block south of Clarkson, on Lenox. Linden Blvd makes more sense as a boundary to me, but the NYT map suggests most of my former neighbors felt otherwise, and that Clarkson is the more commonly-accepted border. Sometimes I said I lived in Flatbush, sometimes I just said southeast of the Park. I miss it a lot, and loved reading about its fascinating history.