The Municipal Art Society of New York

The Landmarks Preservation Commission is scheduled tomorrow to calendar the proposed Fillmore Place Historic District in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (calendaring is the first step in the designation process). MAS is particularly pleased to see this proposed historic district coming down the pipeline. In 2005, we, in partnership with the Waterfront Preservation Alliance of Greenpoint and Williamsburg, identified and nominated this collection of residences as part of our Williamsburg and Greenpoint historic resources survey. Read more about the history of Fillmore Place below.

Fillmore Place is a particularly narrow street, just one block in length.  The charming district is bounded by Driggs Avenue to the west and Roebling Street to the east and is made up of approximately 20 buildings, primarily 3-story brick row houses designed for multi-family use. The largely intact block was planned and developed in the mid-19th century, in the midst of the area’s first real estate boom, for the middle and working class families who settled close to the shipyards and docks of the industrial waterfront. The proposed district also includes the childhood home of the writer Henry Miller, who lived at 662 Driggs Avenue until 1901. The calendaring is the result of a long-term preservation effort toward protecting this unusually intact example of a pre-Civil war development and may give us the first residential historic district in Williamsburg.