The ground falls away from Prospect Park to Fourth Avenue, and the side streets are rowhouses most of the way. The largest landmarked neighborhood in New York covers about forty blocks of it.
What Park Slope looks like
Park Slope takes its name from the ground. The land falls away from Prospect Park down to , and the side streets run across the slope.
The blocks above the park are brownstone and limestone rowhouses from the 1880s and 1890s, the largest of them along for the views. Most of that work is still standing.
The Park Slope Historic District covers about forty blocks and 2,575 buildings, the largest landmarked neighborhood in New York. A side street will hold four and five storey houses from corner to corner, with very little newer construction on it.
and are where the shops are, low buildings with storefronts under the apartments. between them is mostly houses, with a storefront at the odd corner. Fourth Avenue at the bottom of the slope is wide and lined with newer apartment buildings.
The stands on Third Street between Fourth and Fifth Avenues, a fieldstone farmhouse rebuilt in 1934 with a ball field beside it. At the southern edge the runs below street level in a concrete trench, and Fifth Avenue crosses it on a bridge with rowhouses along the top of the retaining walls.
Shot in Park Slope
Wes Anderson put Henry Sherman's house at 53 Prospect Park West in The Royal Tenenbaums. Noah Baumbach shot The Squid and the Whale on Sixth Avenue.
The Squid and the Whale, 2005
Sixth Avenue
Played the Berkman house, 1986
The Berkman house is 167 Sixth Avenue, on the block between St John's Place and Lincoln Place. Two years after the film came out it sold for 1.61 million dollars. The buyers renovated it and put it back on the market in 2012, so the rooms in the film are gone. The block is still four storey houses with stoops and a few storefronts at the corners.
War of the Worlds shot the grandparents' Boston scene at 787 Carroll Street in Park Slope, among brick and brownstone rowhouses near Eighth Avenue. Boston's South End is the closer match for that period, the largest Victorian brick rowhouse district in the country, with the same bowfront windows and brownstone trim over brick that Park Slope repeats block to block. South End's bowfronts curve out from the facade rather than sitting flat. Its squares like Union Park also put a fenced private garden at the center of the block, which Park Slope's straight stoop lines don't have. Try searching brick bowfront rowhouses now.
Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.
Capitol Hill is the largest residential historic district in Washington, and its blocks from the 1870s through the 1890s carry the same flat fronted Italianate rowhouses giving way to Romanesque Revival bays that Park Slope has. Both neighborhoods repeat high stoops and brick facades block after block, and Lincoln Park gives it the same tree cover Park Slope gets from its own street trees. Capitol Hill's houses run narrower and its cornices are plainer, so a tight frame on a single stoop reads closer than a wide block shot. Try searching Italianate brick rowhouses now.
Bolton Hill's rows of three storey brick rowhouses date from the same Victorian decades Park Slope was built in, and repeat in matching groups the same way down the block. The giveaway is underfoot, since Bolton Hill's stoops are white marble rather than the brownstone and limestone steps Park Slope has. Keep the stoop out of frame or shoot from an angle that hides the marble, since a white stoop against brick gives Baltimore away on screen. Try searching marble stoop rowhouses now.
