20 March 2008

Welcome to Carroll Gardens' Pastel District


Most blocks in South Brooklyn stick to the usual variations of brownstone and red brick buildings. On Summit Street, between Henry and Hicks, however, you'll find a veritable Easter egg basket of pastel paint jobs. Baby blue, pale yellow, light green, lavender, candy-apple red—they're all here (along, of course, with plenty of plain red brick).

You won't find this assortment of house colors anywhere else in Carroll Gardens. Not sure what brought it about. It reminds me of a trip I once took to the Isle of Skye in the Scottish Highlands. The houses facing the harbor in the port town of Portree were similarly colored. (See below.)

Anyway, it will make for an appropriate array of Easter season colors as people stroll down the block this Sunday on their way to Sacred Heart/St. Stephen's Church, which sit next to the BQE.




This is Portree:

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I like the way this looks. Reminds me of houses i seen on the Almafi coast. Kind of cool. I looked at a brownstone for sale on this block it sold for 2.1mill .

Anonymous said...

When I moved to my block in Cobble Hill in the mid-1980s, there were many painted brick houses in the neighborhood. On our block, one was white, another was green and another was (and still is) pale yellow. Someone who's been here even longer told me that many houses were built of a brick inferior to that of the grander houses, with the intention (and ultimately the practice) of their being painted.