GRACE COURT ALLEY

GRACE Court Alley proceeds east to a dead end from the east side of Hicks Street south of Remsen. It is not exactly on the same line as Grace Court and the two may have developed independently of each other. I’m not sure when it acquired its awkward name, but there are a couple of other Brooklyn streets that follow the same pattern: Shore Road Lane, on Shore Road just south of Ft. Hamilton High School in Bay Ridge, and Shore Road Drive, built in about 1940 to connect 4th Avenue and 66th Street with the Belt Parkway (it does not intersect Shore Road, and I’m not sure if it ever did).

Like Manhattan’s Washington Mews and Macdougal Alley, it was a lane that originally held stables serving buildings on parallelling streets. Long ago the stables were converted into carriage houses, and today fetch prices unimaginable to the artisans who built them in the 19th Century. Most of Grace Court Alley’s north side and all of its south side are given over to these carriage houses.

Oddly the term “mews” originally had nothing to do with horses:

The term mews is plural in form but singular in construction. It arose from “mews” in the sense of a building where birds used for falconry are kept, which in turn comes from birds’ cyclical loss of feathers known as ‘mewing’ or moulting.

Though the term originated in London, its use has spread to parts of Canada, Australia and the United States (see, for example, Washington Mews in Greenwich Village, New York City).

From 1377 onwards the king’s falconry birds were kept in the King’s Mews at Charing Cross. The name remained when it became the royal stables starting in 1537 during the reign of King Henry VIII.  It was demolished in the early 19th century and Trafalgar Square was built on the site. The present Royal Mews was then built in the grounds of Buckingham Palace. The stables of St James’s Palace, which occupied the site where Lancaster House was later built, were also referred to as the “Royal Mews” on occasion, including on John Rocque’s 1740s map of London. wikipedia

The AIA Guide to NYC (White and Leadon, 2010) makes note of the “crisp, contrasting brownstone quoins” on #2 and 4 on the south side of the alley. Even for stables, great care was given to detail and workmanship in the 19th Century. Note that Grace Court Alley has no sidewalks and owners walk in directly from the roadbed.

Here’s a detailed look at Grace Court and Grace Court Alley.

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12/9/24