The white brick building at 237-241 Fourth Avenue was constructed as a public bathhouse and was finished in 1910. It was the last of seven public baths established in Brooklyn. The Neo-Renaissance style building was converted into a gymnasium in 1937. Public Bath No. 7 was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. The building became a municipal gymnasium in the 1940s and closed in the 1970s. A transmission repair business next used the structure, and it was abandoned for some time. It housed The Lyceum or Brooklyn Lyceum, an events venue and cafe, from the 1990s until 2012. The building now is a private gym, the Park Slope branch of Blink Fitness.
The massive red brick building on the southeast corner of Third St. and Third Ave. in the Gowanus neighborhood was built as the Somers Brothers Tinware Factory in 1884. The business later became the American Can Company. The factory was one of the largest decorated tinware manufacturing complexes in the country and operated here until 1950.The former factory building is a contributing part of the Gowanus Canal National Register Historic District. The rehabilitated building is now called the Old American Can Factory and is a mecca for artists, filmmakers, publishers, and craftspeople. It is the venue for the annual Rooftop Films series.
The two-story building with a raised basement at the corner of Third Avenue and Third Street, next to Whole Foods Market in the Gowanus neighborhood, was built from 1872 to 1873. The building was constructed for the Coignet Agglomerate Company, the first U.S. company to produce a type of concrete patented by Frenchman Francois Coignet in the 1850s. Using molds filled with cement to form building parts was much cheaper than carving them from stone by hand with a chisel. This is the last remaining building from the company's factory that once covered 5 acres along the Gowanus Canal; the company closed in 1882. The building became a New York City landmark in 2006 and is a contributing building in the National Register Gowanus Canal Historic District. The building was restored from 2014 to 2016, in conjunction with construction of the adjacent Whole Foods supermarket and was offered for sale in 2021. The building may be the only surviving early cast concrete building in New York City, and perhaps the only surviving example of the use of European Portland cement in America.
The Old Stone house, also known as the Vechte-Courtelyou House, is a former Dutch farmhouse that was central to the Battle of Brooklyn. It was originally built in 1699 by Claes Arentson Vechte, a Dutch immigrant. It was destroyed in 1897, rebuilt in 1933, and finished nearly a year later. Currently, it is open to the public as a museum dedicated to persevering the house's past through exhibits, programs and school and public events. Currently, it is a Historic Interpretive Center and is operated by the First Battle Revival Alliance, which is named in honor of that "first battle" of the newly formed country against Great Britain.
Located next to the American Legion building in Brooklyn, this site is the location where 256 of 400 colonial troops from Maryland were buried in a mass grave after losing the Battle of Brooklyn on August 27, 1776. The soldiers from Maryland were part of the retreat after George Washington lost the Battle of Brooklyn. They guarded Washington's retreat but were all killed in the process. The location of these soldiers was largely unknown until recently, and the City of New York plans to dig the site up before building a school there.
Well before brownstones took over Brooklyn, William B. Cronyn built a free-standing French Second Empire home in what would become Park Slope. The home was built between 1856 and 1857. A unique structure in Park Slope, the Cronyn House is a three-story building with a mansard roof. The home is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Interference Archive explores the relationship between cultural production and social movements. It is housed in an open floor-plan storefront space, filled to the ceiling. The collection includes a number of different kinds of media artifacts (pamphlets, posters, etc.), which provide information and illustration about the histories of radical political movements around the world, with 40 percent of the archive coming from outside the United States. In addition to its primary purpose as an archive and library, Interference Archive also functions as a multipurpose community center, gallery, and events space. Past events and exhibitions have covered prison reform, the Asian American movement in New York, underground newspapers, the anti-nuclear movement, and Art+Feminism edit-a-thons.
Public School 39 has stood on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn since 1876. The three-story red brick building with stone trim combines Italianate and French Second Empire architectural styles. The school was named in honor of Henry Bristow in 1916 as part of an effort to name schools after city leaders. P.S. 39 was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The school is part of the New York City Department of Education and has an enrollment of about 400 in grades Kindergarten through Fifth.
This Tour is a Walking Tour.
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Start at a former public bathhouse (now a gym) on Union Ave. and walk through the Gowanus and Park Slope neighborhoods to historical industrial & residential buildings, a Revolutionary War museum & site, a political activism archive, and a 19th-century school building.
