BOUQUET COPO DE LEITE

Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, New York City, New York, United States

Summary

The Prospect Heights Historic District includes approximately 850 buildings, predominately single-family row houses and apartment buildings, constructed, for the most part, between the middle of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. The Prospect Heights neighborhood is located immediately north of Prospect Park and is bounded by Atlantic Avenue to the north, Eastern Parkway to the south, Flatbush Avenue to the west, and Washington Avenue to the east.

The area was occupied by the Lenape Indians at the time of European contact. During the eighteenth century the land came into possession of a number of different owners, several of whom were slave owners. It was still predominately farm and wood lands until the middle of the nineteenth century.

The two most important factors in the growth of Prospect Heights were transportation improvements and the development of Prospect Park. These transportation improvements included new links between Prospect Heights and the ferries along Brooklyn’s waterfront. Construction began on Prospect Park in 1866 and the park opened to the public in 1871, although it was not yet complete. The land in the southeast part of the district was taken for the park but was not included in the final design and after years of litigation was sold and developed starting in the 1890s.

The earliest houses were built in the Italianate style of architecture, popular from about 1840 to 1870. The two frame houses at 578 and 580 Carlton Avenue appear to date from the 1850s and are the oldest buildings in the district. They still retain some of their Italianate style details. Row houses began to be designed in two variations of the Italianate style, the Anglo-Italianate, popular from about 1865 to 1870 and the Italianate style with Second Empire elements, popular from 1870 to 1885. By the mid-1870s the simpler neo-Grec style supplanted the rounded, ornate Italianate, Anglo-Italianate and Second Empire styles. Prospect Heights has houses dating from the second half of the 1870s and the 1880s designed in the neo-Grec style by prominent Brooklyn architects such as the Parfitt Brothers, John H. Doherty, Nelson Whipple, Jeremiah J. Gilligan, Eastman & Daus and Marshall J. Morrill.

The Romanesque Revival style was very popular in Prospect Heights and there are many excellent examples dating from the late 1880s and 1890s. Classically-inspired styles gained in popularity in America as a reaction to the picturesque Romanesque Revival and Queen Anne styles. The restrained Renaissance Revival style, popular from about 1880 to 1910, is also well represented in the district. Many of the residences designed by Benjamin Driesler, Axel Hedman and Magnus Dahlander, major Brooklyn architects of the time, combined elements from both the Romanesque Revival and Renaissance Revival styles.

The multiple dwellings built in Prospect Heights during the nineteenth century were designed in all of the popular residential styles, including the Italianate, neo-Grec, Queen Anne, Romanesque and Renaissance Revivals styles. These buildings were typically four-story walk-ups. The earliest multiple dwellings in the district appear on Vanderbilt Avenue, in the early 1870s. Vanderbilt Avenue and Flatbush Avenue, two of the major thoroughfares in Brooklyn, are characterized by multi-family residential buildings with ground floor commercial spaces in Prospect Heights.

The Prospect Heights Historic District has some important institutional buildings, including the former Public School 9 Annex, the Duryea Presbyterian Church and the former Mount Prospect Laboratory. Although the district was substantially built prior to 1910, it does have some fine examples of styles popular in the early twentieth century including the Colonial Revival, neo-classical, Arts and Crafts, Art Deco and Moderne styles.

The Prospect Heights Historic District remains among Brooklyn’s most architecturally distinguished areas, retaining some of the borough’s most beautiful and well-preserved residential streets, and featuring a broad array of outstanding residential architecture in popular styles of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The area continues to retain its cohesion due to its tree-lined streets, scale, predominant residential character and its architectural integrity.

The Prospect Heights Historic District includes approximately 850 buildings, predominately single-family row houses and apartment houses, constructed, for the most part, between the middle of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. The Prospect Heights neighborhood is located immediately north of Prospect Park and is bounded by Atlantic Avenue to the north, Eastern Parkway to the south, Flatbush Avenue to the west, and Washington Avenue to the east.1 The name Prospect Heights appears to have come into popular use in the 1880s but was

Wintering monarchs in Santa Cruz, California.Monarchs are especially noted for their lengthy annual migration. In North America they make massive southward migrations starting in August until the first frost. A northward migration takes place in the spring. (In Australia, they make limited migrations in cooler areas,but the Blue Tiger butterfly is better known in Australia for its lengthy migration.Female monarchs deposit eggs for the next generation during these migrations. By the end of October, the population east of the Rocky Mountains migrates to the sanctuaries of the Mariposa Monarca Biosphere Reserve in the Mexican states of Michoacan and Mexico. The western population overwinters in various sites in central coastal and southern California, United States, notably in Pacific Grove and Santa Cruz.

The length of these journeys exceeds the normal lifespan of most monarchs, which is less than two months for butterflies born in early summer. The last generation of the summer enters into a non-reproductive phase known as diapause and may live seven months or more.During diapause, butterflies fly to one of many overwintering sites. The generation that overwinters generally does not reproduce until it leaves the overwintering site sometime in February and March. It is thought that the overwinter population of those east of the Rockies may reach as far north as Texas and Oklahoma during the spring migration. It is the second, third and fourth generations that return to their northern locations in the United States and Canada in the spring. How the species manages to return to the same overwintering spots over a gap of several generations is still a subject of research; the flight patterns appear to be inherited, based on a combination of circadian rhythm and the position of the sun in the sky.

Monarch butterflies are one of the few insects capable of making transatlantic crossings. They are becoming more common in Bermuda due to increased usage of milkweed as an ornamental plant in flower gardens. Monarch butterflies born in Bermuda remain year round due to the island's mild climate.

A few monarchs turn up in the far southwest of Great Britain in years when the wind conditions are right, and have been sighted as far east as Long Bennington. Monarchs can also be found in New Zealand. On the islands of Hawaii no migrations have been noted.

Monarch butterflies are poisonous or distasteful to birds because of milkweed poison stored by the caterpillar stage; their bright colors are warning colors. During hibernation monarch butterflies sometimes suffer losses because hungry birds pick through them looking for the butterflies with the least amount of poison, but in the process killing those that they reject