Flatbush

BACKDATED BROOKLYN The local Sears is an Art Deco throwback; the Flatbush Reformed Church, left, is home to ancient gravestones.

Plus:

• Endangered zones: Brooklyn

Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope and Clinton Hill are justifiably celebrated for their diverse and beautiful architecture, but the relatively unsung streets of Prospect Park South—especially along Albemarle and Buckingham Roads—rival anything in BK. Slow your New -Yorker’s gait to a leisurely pace and marvel at the top-notch Queen Anne, Shingle Style, -Classical -Revival and even Japanese-influenced buildings.

Brooklyn is the borough of churches, and it was the Flatbush Reformed Church(Flatbush Ave at Church Ave) in particular that gave Church Avenue its name. The original house of worship on this site went up in 1654 on a mandate from Peter Stuyvesant; the present building, dating to 1799, is a hefty schist edifice with an unusual octagonal tower. In the adjoining cemetery, most of the stones are -engraved in Dutch; this anomaly, along with the quietude of the churchyard, provides a striking contrast with this very busy corner at the heart of Flatbush.

The block of nearby East 21st Street between Church Avenue and Beverley Road is a rather nondescript one in a neighborhood full of handsome stretches, but it’s also the site of the landmarked cul-de-sacs known as Albemarle and Kenmore Terraces, built between 1918 and 1919. Albemarle is lined on each side, and Kenmore on one, by attached Georgian-style brick buildings; Kenmore’s were among the first homes in the country to feature indi-vidual garages. Albemarle and Kenmore are said to have been developed for the movie stars who worked at nearby Vitagraph Studios during Brooklyn’s brief heyday as a film-mak-ing center, before the industry decamped to Hollywood in the late 1910s.

The name Sears has outlasted the name Vitagraph—and though modern-day readers will probably think of big-box stores in the vast malls of suburbia, Brooklyn does Sears a little differently. Our Sears(Bedford Ave and Beverley Rd) is a bruising, three-story Art Deco monolith that looks like a set piece from the old sci-fi flick Things to Come. No less than Eleanor Roosevelt showed up for the store’s opening in 1932.

For a last collision with the borough’s past, head down Snyder Avenue (not named for the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Duke of Flatbush, but for a Dutch landowning family); at No. 35 you’ll -encounter the exuberant Flatbush Town Hall, a relic of Flatbush’s independent status before it was absorbed into the city of Brooklyn in 1894 (and, of course, the city of New York in 1898). It was built by John Y. Culyer in 1875, in a style known as Ruskinian Gothic; few others of its ilk have survived, but this, Flushing’s and the one in Stapleton, Staten Island, remain to -remind us that New York City is really just an amalgamation of small towns.

Subway: B, Q to Church Ave. Bus: B41 on Flatbush Ave, B35 on Church Ave.