John Hirsch, Builder

Sometimes it's easy to discover when an early Park Slope building was erected. Sometimes a building will announce its birth year!

Consider the "flat house" pictured below, so called because families were housed in "flats", or what we would call apartments. This building stands on the west side of 6th Avenue between 11th and 12th Streets in the South Slope:

480 Sixth Avenue - unprotected

A close inspection of the facade reveals the date "1890" in the medallions between the second and third floors:



A bit of research in the online Brooklyn Daily Eagle yields the following note concerning this building's construction:

Brooklyn Eagle, June 14, 1890, p. 1 ("New Buildings")

The owner/builder, John Hirsch, "signed" his work by placing his initials in the cornice: