What is a brownstone? The stone, the stoop, the row house of New York and Brooklyn, why it crumbles, the parlor floor and the garden level, and how it became the most wanted house in the city

Architecture · 4 September 2026

A brownstone is a row house, or the terrace house of the British, built in the American cities of the East Coast between about 1840 and 1900 and faced on its street front with brownstone, a soft brown sandstone quarried in Connecticut and New Jersey and laid as a skin 10 to 15 cm thick over a house of brick; the word is used for the stone, for the house, and by extension for any old row house in New York, Brooklyn and Boston with a stoop, though many of those are brick or limestone. The typical brownstone is 6 m wide and 15 to 20 m deep, four or five storeys on a raised basement, with a high stoop of a dozen steps to the front door on the parlor floor, a garden entrance under the stoop, two rooms to a floor, and an Italianate or neo-Grec front of the same stone with a heavy cornice; there are about 100,000 in New York, most in Brooklyn's Park Slope, Fort Greene, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Heights and in Manhattan's Upper West Side and Harlem, and they have been the city's most desired houses since the 1970s, after a century in which they were carved into rooming houses and the stone fell off in sheets. Below: the stone, the house and its plan, the stoop and the floors, the fronts by decade, why the stone fails, the fall and rise of the brownstone, the prices, and the myths, with the era's styles in Victorian architecture and the American house in American house styles.

The stone

Brownstone is a sandstone of the Triassic, about 200 million years old, laid down as river sand in the rift valleys of the Connecticut and Newark basins and coloured brown by iron, soft enough to cut with a saw when fresh and hardening in the air; the quarries at Portland, Connecticut, on the Connecticut River, opened in the 1690s and by 1850 shipped blocks by schooner down the river and the Sound to New York, and the quarries at Little Falls and Belleville, New Jersey, on the Passaic, supplied the rest, with a pink variety from Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, for Philadelphia and Washington. The stone was cheap, half the price of granite or limestone, easy to carve into the mouldings the Victorian taste wanted, and, laid as a veneer of thin slabs in front of a brick wall, it made a builder's row house look like a mansion; between 1850 and 1890 the Portland quarries employed 1,500 men and were the largest in the world, and a flood of 1936 filled them and closed them, so that the stone for repairs now comes from a small quarry reopened in 1993 or from cast concrete. Brownstone.

The house and its plan

• The lot. New York's grid of 1811 cut Manhattan into blocks 200 feet deep, and the row house took a lot 20 or 25 feet wide and 100 deep, with the house 45 to 60 feet of it and a yard behind; Brooklyn's lots are the same, and the houses were built in rows of five to twenty by a speculator, identical, and sold or rented.
• The floors. The basement or garden level, half below the street, with the kitchen at the back and the family dining room at the front, entered by a door under the stoop; the parlor floor, up the stoop, with the front parlor for company and the back parlor or dining room, the tallest ceilings, 3.5 to 4 m, and the best plaster and marble; the second floor with the master bedroom in front and a bedroom behind; the third floor for children and guests; and the top floor, low, for the servants, with the roof flat and tarred. A dumbwaiter ran from the kitchen to the dining room, and one stair served all.
• The structure. Brick party walls shared with the neighbours, timber joists spanning between them, so that the house is a brick box with wooden floors; the front is the brownstone veneer, the back plain brick with a wooden extension for the bathroom added in the 1880s.
• The stoop. The flight of steps from the sidewalk to the parlor floor, from the Dutch stoep, a small porch, which the Dutch of New Amsterdam built against the canals and which New York kept when the ground floor was sunk to make a basement; the stoop lifted the family above the street's mud and horses, gave the basement light, and became the front porch of the city, where people sat on summer nights and children played, and it is the brownstone's social institution. Many were removed in the 1920s to make a ground-floor entrance for apartments, and are being put back.

The fronts, decade by decade

• Greek Revival, 1830s–40s. Brick fronts with brownstone stoops and lintels, plain, with a doorway of pilasters; the oldest row houses of Brooklyn Heights and Greenwich Village, before the stone took over.
• Italianate, 1850s–70s. The classic brownstone: the whole front in stone, round-arched doorway with a heavy hood on brackets, tall windows with moulded surrounds, a bracketed cornice of wood or metal at the roof, and the high stoop with a cast-iron railing; Park Slope, Fort Greene and the Upper West Side are full of them.
• Neo-Grec, 1870s–80s. The same front with the ornament cut flat and incised in lines, angular, cheaper to carve, with stylised leaves and stars; the mass-production brownstone of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Harlem.
• Queen Anne and Romanesque, 1880s–90s. Fronts of brownstone mixed with brick, terracotta and rough-faced stone, bay windows, gables and turrets, round Romanesque arches after H.H. Richardson, the stoop sometimes sideways; the last brownstones, and the finest, in Park Slope and Harlem.
• After 1890. Limestone and light brick replaced the brown, in the Renaissance Revival, and the "brownstone" of 1900 is white; the row house ended in Manhattan by 1910 and in Brooklyn by 1930, when the apartment house and the subway suburb took over.

Why the stone crumbles

Brownstone is layered like a book, and the builders, to save money and stone, laid the slabs "face-bedded", with the layers vertical and parallel to the wall, so that water gets between them and freezes, and the face peels off in sheets, a process that began within twenty years of building and gave the brownstone fronts of the 1880s their scabbed look by 1920; stone laid the right way, with the beds horizontal, lasts, and the lintels and stoops laid that way are mostly sound. The remedy since the 1930s has been to cut back the failed face and rebuild it in a coloured cement stucco, "brownstone restoration", which is what nearly every brownstone front now is, a coat of tinted cement over the old stone, redone every thirty years; the good work is indistinguishable, the bad is flat and the wrong brown, and a real stone facade, from the reopened Portland quarry, costs several times as much. The stoops, of solid blocks, survive; the cornices, of galvanised iron, rust.

The fall and the rise

By 1900 the brownstone was out of fashion, Edith Wharton in "The Age of Innocence" calling New York "cursed with its universal chocolate-coloured coating of the most hideous stone ever quarried", and the rich moved to apartments and limestone; through the Depression and the wars the houses were cut into rooming houses and single-room apartments, the stoops removed, the parlors partitioned, the woodwork painted, and by 1960 the brownstone neighbourhoods of Brooklyn and Harlem were poor, redlined and, in the plans of Robert Moses, slated for clearance. The revival began in Brooklyn Heights, protected as the city's first historic district in 1965, and in Park Slope, Boerum Hill and Fort Greene in the late 1960s, where young families bought whole houses for 20,000 to 40,000 dollars, stripped the paint, put back the stoops and fought the banks, the "brownstoners", with the Brownstone Revival Committee of 1968 and the Landmarks law behind them; Harlem's brownstones followed in the 1990s. The house that Wharton despised is the one New Yorkers now want most, for its size, its light from front and back, its garden and its wood, and the word brownstone has come to mean the good life in Brooklyn.

The market

A brownstone in Park Slope or Brooklyn Heights sells for 4 to 10 million dollars, in Bedford-Stuyvesant or Harlem for 2 to 4, in Boston's South End and Back Bay for 5 to 15, and the Manhattan brownstones of the Upper West Side and the Village for 10 to 30; most are divided into two to four apartments, the owner on the parlor and garden floors and tenants above, which is how the houses pay for themselves, and a "single-family brownstone" is the trophy. The costs are the facade, at 50,000 to 200,000 dollars for a restoration, the roof, the cornice, the plumbing of 1885, and the stairs; the rewards are 300 to 400 square metres of house on four floors with a garden in the middle of the city, and the details, the marble mantels, the plaster medallions, the pocket doors and the pier mirrors that the rooming-house years covered rather than removed.

Versions and theories

• Every row house with a stoop is a brownstone. Only the ones faced with brownstone; the rest are brick, limestone or "brownstone" in the estate agent's sense, which is the loose one.
• Brownstones are solid stone. A veneer of 10 to 15 cm on a brick house; the party walls and the back are brick, the floors wood.
• The stoop keeps the house dry. It kept the family above the street and gave the basement its own door; the dryness was the raised basement's.
• The stone was quarried in Manhattan. Manhattan's rock is schist; the brownstone came by ship from Connecticut and New Jersey.
• Brownstones were built for the rich. The first, on Fifth Avenue and in Brooklyn Heights, were; most were built by speculators for the middle class of clerks and merchants, three or four to a builder's row, and rented.
• Sesame Street is set on a brownstone stoop. The stoop of 123 Sesame Street is a brownstone stoop, and the show has taught the world the word.

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