Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [772]
Now socially certified, the French Flat began to catch on. By the mid-1870s, with a dozen or so up or in the planning stages, especially around the lower border of Central Park, the New York City Buildings Department adopted “French Flat” as an official category. The term, like “apartment house,” implied a larger and better-quality edifice than “tenement,” and to underscore the class status of their residents, the new buildings took toney names like Osborne, Knickerbocker, Berkeley, and Saratoga.
The as yet limited number of apartment houses could shelter only a relative handful, however, and many middle-class home and status seekers, in pursuit of an immediate solution, decided to cross the East River. The wealthiest professionals took up quarters in Brooklyn Heights or Cobble Hill, mingling with old New England merchants and new-monied businessmen. Others settled in Fort Greene (particularly around Washington Park, where contractor William Kingsley built his home in 1867) or in Clinton Hill (where oil magnate Charles Pratt erected a mansion in 1875). Less costly accommodations could be found in Boerum Hill or in row houses with deep front gardens along the streets around Carroll Park, an area developed after 1869. The least-well-paid members of the middle class could turn to the lower Park Slope area, between Third and Sixth avenues, though it was unattractively interlaced with the light industrial establishments spreading outward from the Gowanus Canal.
Those willing to travel farther could settle in growing Bedford. Speculators and builders advertised the area as the “Garden of Brooklyn,” perfect for the “refined and select” middle class. Single-family Gothic-style frame houses with gas, hot and cold water, indoor plumbing, and, in some cases, gardens, grape arbors, and apple trees, could be had in South Bedford for between five and ten thousand dollars. These new homes were deliberately situated away from the LIRR stops on Atlantic Avenue and the horsecar line on Fulton Street, even though 50 percent of Bedfordites commuted all the way into Manhattan, a two-and-a-half-mile journey that took about an hour and cost thirteen cents. Catching a ride to the city entailed a long walk, but it seemed worth it to preserve, for the moment, the area’s bucolic character. To the north, by contrast, row houses and tenements clustered around the Flushing and Myrtle Avenue lines of the Brooklyn City Rail Road. Their cars transported native-born lower-middle-class clerical workers to Manhattan or to Brooklyn’s City Hall and Fulton Street commercial districts.
Some professionals were drawn to the Queens suburban frontier, to places like the new railroad community of Richmond Hill, named for a London suburb. New York attorney Albon Platt Man built it in 1869 along the wooded hills of the terminal moraine and ensured its class character by barring such “nuisances” as factories, warehouses, and tenements. But in the 1860s and 1870s, Kings seemed preferable to Queens, as residents could visit local analogues of New York City’s cultural institutions (Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn Club, Mercantile Library, Long Island Historical Society) and were close to Prospect Park, Green-Wood Cemetery, and more distant rural diversions. A Brooklyn Heights resident could leave his Manhattan office at three o’clock, return on the Wall Street ferry, dine at four, then take a leisurely drive to the outskirts of town. Residents and realtors began to boast that Brooklyn was a middleclass paradise, free from urban ills and evils, a complacency that required ignoring the tenements of detested “micks” on the flats south of the Navy Yard.
Brooklyn