84
Colonial Revival
details on a Midwood
Street block. Photo
by Susan De Vries.
It is thought that Bull gave the duo the commission after
seeing the brick Colonial group they had recently finished
not far away in Lefferts Manor, a grand row of 14 Colonial
houses at 23-49 Midwood Street, which were built in 1915.
Both groups are modeled on the architects’ first row of
this kind, which were built in 1913 and can still be found
at 1329-1337 Carroll Street, in what is now Crown Heights
South. A much smaller group of similar houses can also
be found on St. Marks Avenue in Crown Heights North.
They were built in 1919.
Slee & Bryson also designed one-offs and smaller groups
of houses in other neighborhoods.
THEY WERE EVERYWHERE
In fact, Slee & Bryson were ubiquitous, making them
more prolific than almost all of their predecessors, even
men like Amzi Hall and Axel Hedman, both of whom
each designed hundreds of buildings in the late nineteenth
century. The Real Estate Record and Builder’s
Guide was a weekly trade periodical that listed most of the
building going on in New York and surrounding areas,
primarily in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Between 1905 and
1922, when it ceased publication, there are 495 entries
for Slee & Bryson, plus more for each individually or
with someone else. Many of those entries are for multiple
buildings in one permit.
The duo was just hitting their stride in 1922, so it would
not be surprising if they were responsible for at least
a thousand separate buildings in their careers. A look
through this list as well as entries in the Brooklyn Eagle
reveals that in addition to single or two-family homes, Slee
& Bryson were also responsible for many of the six-story
elevator apartment buildings that went up in almost every
Brooklyn neighborhood in the years between about 1910
and 1925. Slee & Bryson apartment buildings can also be
found in Riverdale, Manhattan and Staten Island.
Many of these buildings are not works of genius or great
beauty. They were sturdy, brick apartment buildings, most
vaguely Colonial Revival, built to house a growing middle
class population. Some are so plain as to go unnoticed,
like 450 Clinton Avenue. Others, like 1144 Bergen Street
in Crown Heights North have some Flemish Revival
panache. In Brooklyn Heights, 8 Remsen Street, with very
little Georgian detail left today, was originally only four
stories tall, and was specifically designed for its owner,
Bruce Duncan, who wanted only four luxury apartments
in his building, all with magnificent harbor views.
As the lifestyles of people in Brooklyn changed in the
twentieth century, Slee & Bryson were most adaptable.
Both men were very active in Brooklyn’s clubby architecture
world. Both served as president of the Brooklyn
chapter of the American Institute of Architects, and Slee
also served as treasurer in 1915.
Bryson married Charlotte Stoddard in 1915. John Slee
was his best man. The Brysons would go on to have two
children and eventually settled in Bay Ridge. The company
became quite active in home design in the area. Bryson
and Slee also designed a new country house for the Crescent
Athletic Club located along Shore Road in Bay Ridge.
Slee never married. He settled in Brooklyn Heights, and
lived at 102 Pierrepont Street, a rather unassuming row
house that he shared with his sister Leticia until her death
in 1922. Around this time, Slee became a vocal proponent
and authority on the adaption of traditional one-family
row houses into small apartment buildings. He wasn’t
alone in this; his contemporary J. Sarsfield Kennedy was
also advocating turning “old fashioned” nineteenth-cen