Fiske Terrace, Brooklyn

Fiske Terrace is a planned community and neighborhood in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. Fiske Terrace is located in south central Brooklyn in the southern edge of the community of Flatbush and north of the community of Midwood. It is bounded by Glenwood Road on the north, Ocean Avenue on the east, the Bay Ridge Branch of the Long Island Rail Road/New York and Atlantic Railway right-of-way on the south, and the New York City Subway BMT Brighton Line subway line (B and ​Q trains) on the west.

Overview

Fiske Terrace was developed, along with Midwood Park with individually designed housing by the T.B. Ackerson Company in 1905;[1] after the T. B. Ackerson Company bought what was then a forest, it was razed within 18 months, giving way to about 150 custom-made houses as well as streets and utilities, and the Midwood Malls.[2] Prominent past residents included Richard Hellmann, creator and founder of "Hellmann's Mayonnaise",[3] and Charles Ebbets, owner of Ebbets Field Baseball Stadium and the Brooklyn Dodgers.[4] On March 18, 2008, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission unanimously approved designation of the Fiske Terrace-Midwood Park Historic District. 250 homes were designated.[5]

Avenue H station house

The community is served by the Avenue H (formerly Fiske Terrace) station of the BMT Brighton Line, whose century-old station house was declared a landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission on June 29, 2004. This allows renovations inside, but preserves the major structure and exterior. The contract to "restore the landmark station control house" as well as rehabilitation of the platforms and other stations structures was advertised for bids by the MTA for January 2007. The official designation report describes the building:

The Avenue H station on the BMT line [...] is the city’s only shingled wooden cottage turned transit station house. Often compared to a country train stop, it originally served as a real estate sales office for developer Thomas Benton Ackerson to sell property in the adjacent neighborhood of Fiske Terrace, an early twentieth century example of planned suburban development. The structure, with a hipped and flared roof and wraparound porch, evokes in miniature the area’s Colonial Revival and Queen Anne houses. After nearly a century of commuter traffic, the Avenue H station remains in service and retains much historic fabric, from a corbelled chimney to peeled log porch columns. It is one of a very small number of wood-frame station houses surviving in the modern subway system, the only station adapted from a structure built for another function, and the only surviving station from Brooklyn’s once-extensive network of surface train lines, which had originally attracted Ackerson and numerous other developers to the area.[6]

References
  1. Jennifer Bleyer (September 30, 2007). "Aging Beauties, Factory-Made". The New York Times. Retrieved June 3, 2014.
  2. Historic Districts Council—"FISKE TERRACE-MIDWOOD PARK HISTORIC DISTRICT"
  3. "Fiske Terrace". www.longislandexchange.com.
  4. McGee, Bob (April 6, 2013). "Ebbets, His Team and His Ballpark" – via NYTimes.com.
  5. "250 Houses in Brooklyn's Fiske Terrace-Midwood Park Earn Landmark Status" (PDF) (Press release). New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. 2008-03-18. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2010-03-02. Retrieved 2010-01-17.
  6. Landmarks Preservation Commission (2004-06-29). "Avenue H Station House" (PDF). Retrieved 2008-10-28.

40°37′45″N 73°57′40″W

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