COBBLE HILL HOUSE

MANY think I have nothing good to say about new architecture. Nonsense. Here’s a new building I like, at #78 Amity Street, on the corner of Hicks. It employs classic brickwork and large, rectangular windows to hark back to a classic brick building esthetic. Though the Cobble Hill House, as it’s called, doesn’t permit copying the text on its website (I won’t link to it as this is not a plug for the condo), there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

The building, constructed in 2018, brings back the old practice of showing the cross streets on the building corner. The nly drawback is the thrumming traffic of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, in an open cut on Hicks.

Amity Street (the name means “peace”) runs three blocks between Court and Hicks Streets a block south of Pacific. Possibly its greatest claim to fame is #197, where Jennie Jerome was born. Who was Jennie Jerome? Her father was financier Leonard Jerome, who organized the American Jockey Club and built the Jerome Park Racetrack in Kingsbridge Heights in the Bronx in 1865. Jennie Jerome worked as a magazine editor in an age when few “respectable” women worked and wedded three times; her first marriage, to Lord Randolph Spencer Churchill in 1874, whom she met on a visit to Britain, produced Winston Churchill, who became the wartime Prime Minister of England, and his brother John.

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7/2/24