Perhaps the handsomest building in Brooklyn Heights, the Herman Behr House at Pierrepont and Clinton Streets is an exquisite Romanesque Revival mansion designed in 1890 by Frank Freeman. The massive style was popularized by Boston architect H.H. Richardson in the 1880s and is characterized by heavy masonry walls, a fortresslike design, terra cotta ornamentation, tile or slate roofs with gables and chimneys, and a pleasantly asymmetric composition.
In 1919 this was turned into the Hotel Palm and was later owned by nearby St. Francis College, my alma mater, as a home for novitiates when nuns were the only females admitted (the policy changed beginning in 1969).
2/23/15