Eastern Parkway runs through the middle of it, 210 feet wide with a service road on each side. The blocks north of the parkway are brownstone and limestone rows from the 1880s and 1890s.
What Crown Heights looks like
runs east from Grand Army Plaza and divides Crown Heights in two. Olmsted and Vaux planned it in 1866 and built it between 1870 and 1874. Between Washington Avenue and Ralph Avenue it is 210 feet across between the outer sidewalks. A main roadway runs down the middle, with a service road on each side and a planted mall between each service road and the roadway. The West Indian American Day Carnival parade runs along the parkway each Labor Day, from Utica Avenue to Grand Army Plaza.
The blocks north of the parkway are lined with Romanesque Revival and Queen Anne rowhouses in brownstone and limestone, with high stoops and round corner towers. Most of them date from the 1880s to the 1910s. Albert E. White designed twenty rowhouses on between Nostrand and New York Avenues in 1891 and 1892, in rough cut stone and brick with stained glass transoms and dog leg stoops. one block south has more of them. Montrose Morris designed the double house at 855 and 857 , with a tall corner turret under a bell shaped roof.
More than 1,000 of those buildings form the Crown Heights North Historic District, listed on the National Register in 2014. It covers just over 100 acres north of the parkway.
South of the parkway the Lubavitch movement has kept its headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway since 1940. beside it has the shops that serve that community.
and Franklin Avenue are the other commercial streets. Nostrand has terracotta fronts on some of the older buildings above the shops. east of Schenectady Avenue is a long run of four floor flats with fire escapes.
Shot in Crown Heights
High Maintenance shot an apartment building on St. Marks Avenue in 2019. BrainDead used a bar on St. John's Place for interior dialogue in 2016.
BrainDead, 2016
Played A bar interior
The city filming notices for the spring of 2016 put Robert and Michelle King's one season CBS series at an apartment at 1583 Pacific Street in March and at the bar at 618 St. John's Place on April 5, for interior dialogue. Across the street from the bar is Congregation Kol Israel, a fieldstone synagogue of 1928 by Tobias Goldstone. The open cut of the Franklin Avenue subway line runs behind it.
What Crown Heights can double for
Logan Circle in Washington, D.C.
Logan Circle's rowhouses are Romanesque Revival and Second Empire, built mostly in the 1870s and 1880s, with turrets and rough cut stone fronts close to Crown Heights' own scale. The district is listed on the National Register and keeps its high stoops and bay windows largely intact. The curved streets around the traffic circle and DC's own street signage need to stay out of a wide shot, and the Second Empire mansard roofs read differently from Crown Heights' flat cornice lines. Try searching rowhouses with turrets now.
Wicker Park's greystones are Romanesque in the same years as Crown Heights' own rows, cut from a pale limestone with round turrets and arched openings on the corner buildings. The two flat layout behind the facade is different, but the street face reads close. Chicago's rear alleys and wider lot spacing show up in any angle that includes a side yard, and the limestone here runs paler than Crown Heights' brownstone blocks. Try searching greystones with turrets now.
Bolton Hill keeps long rows of three story brick and brownstone houses from the same decades as Crown Heights' own blocks, with white marble steps in place of stone stoops. Tighter frames on a single row read close enough for a period match. The white marble stoops and Baltimore's diagonal street grid are the two details that give the city away in a wider shot. Try searching brick houses white marble steps now.
