61
Garfield Building on the corner of Court and Remsen and
started looking for work.
Like many other fledgling firms, the Parfitts started out
designing row houses. Some of their earliest, dating from
the 1870s, can be found at 100-110 Park Place in Park
Slope, 12-16 Clifton Place in Bedford Stuyvesant, and 331-
335 Washington Avenue in Clinton Hill. They are all in a
late Neo-Grec style, and the Park Slope houses especially
show creativity within the narrow confines of speculative
housing designs. With their angled bays, elegant brackets
and delicate ornamentation, they are a cut above the
average speculative Neo-Grec row house.
In 1879, the youngest Parfitt, Albert, joined his brothers in
America. At 18, he was already a talented draftsman and
was soon hard at work in their offices. Albert augmented
his talents with classes at Cooper Union, according to
A brick row house
on 4th Street in
Park Slope. Photo
by Susan De Vries.
Tom Parfitt, Albert’s great-grandson. Albert brought the
freshness of the British Arts and Crafts Movement to
Brooklyn, making Parfitt Brothers’ designs unique among
the city’s firms.
Grace Methodist Church on Seventh Avenue in Park
Slope was surely influenced by Albert’s familiarity with
English Gothic style and is one of the firm’s finest churches.
Some architects specialized in houses, commercial
buildings, or churches. The Parfitts did it all. The mid to
late 1880s ushered in the Romanesque Revival and Queen
Anne styles of architecture, and some of their best work
was in these modes.
In 1885, they were commissioned to design a new kind
of building for Brooklyn: the apartment flat. Brooklyn
Heights had long been a desirable neighborhood for those
working in Manhattan. The firm designed three apart