Flatbush Avenue runs for miles past small shops and striped awnings, with freestanding Victorian houses on the side streets.
What Flatbush looks like
Flatbush Avenue runs for miles past roti shops, Caribbean bakeries and phone stores, under striped awnings and hand painted signs. Loew's stands mid block, a restored terra cotta movie palace with an arched marquee over the sidewalk. Erasmus Hall's Collegiate Gothic quadrangle faces the avenue a few blocks north, in buff brick with limestone trim and Tudor arched doorways. Its 1787 wood framed academy building sits inside the courtyard. The 1790s faces the school from across the avenue, its stone tower and belfry in grey Manhattan schist.
Off the avenue, Prospect Park South and Ditmas Park hold blocks of freestanding Victorian houses that date from the 1900s to the 1920s. Turrets and wraparound porches repeat from house to house, each one set back behind a lawn and a driveway wide enough for a single car. Some fronts carry a conical corner tower and shingled gables, others a gambrel roof with a dormer window over the porch.
Toward and Ocean Avenue, six storey prewar apartment buildings in patterned brick and limestone take the corners, fire escapes zigzagging up their curved facades. A columned portico marks the entrance on Cortelyou Road. A block away, a square brick bell tower with arched openings rises over the Baptist Church of the Redeemer.
Church Avenue crosses Coney Island Avenue in a lower run of two and three storey storefronts. A pizzeria and a yoga studio share the corner under stacked signs, with traffic signals slung on wires overhead.
Shot in Flatbush
Sophie's Choice used a real house in Prospect Park South as its boarding house exterior, one of several Brooklyn locations the production shot across the borough. Ditmas Park's Victorian streets a few blocks over have hosted Bridge of Spies and the Disney+ series Goosebumps, both using freestanding houses on East 17th and East 16th Streets as family homes.
Sophie's Choice, 1982
This house is what the production painted pink for the Pink Palace, the boarding house shared by Sophie, Nathan and Stingo in the story. Its corner tower, patterned wood shingles and wraparound porch are unchanged since filming, though the paint went back to grey and white once the crew left. Street View
What Flatbush can double for
Maplewood, New Jersey
Maplewood's streets carry the same freestanding Queen Anne and Colonial Revival houses as Prospect Park South, with deep porches and shingled gables set back behind lawns. Its scale and roofline repeat block after block the way Ditmas Park's do. Maplewood's streets are wider and its trees taller, so tighter porch level framing holds the match better than a full block view. Try searching Queen Anne porch houses now.
Fordham Road in the Bronx, New York
Fordham Road holds the same run of small storefronts, striped awnings and hand painted signs that Flatbush Avenue does. Phone shops, bakeries and discount stores sit side by side under the signs. Fordham University's Gothic stone wall runs along part of the block, so a wide shot needs to stay south of the campus gate to keep the frame purely commercial. Try searching small storefronts and awnings now.
Rockridge in Oakland, California
Rockridge's brown shingle houses share the turrets, dormers and wraparound porches of Flatbush's Victorian enclaves from the same decades. The lots run just as deep, with driveways cut between houses rather than alleys behind them. Palm trees and the hillier grade give California away in a wide shot, so keep the frame on the porch and the facade. Try searching brown shingle Victorian houses now.
