Street in Vanderveer Park
Germania Real Estate and Improvement Company started to develop South Midwood, purchasing, developing, and selling farms. This included the farms of Vanderveer-Cortelyou, Antonides, Lott and Hubbard, Bay View Heights, Wyckoff and Voorhies, Lincoln Park, Kouwenhoven, and John A. Lott. In 1892, South Midwood became a very restricted residential area known as Vanderveer Park. This first section included Amersfort, Mansfield, Delmere, Elmore Place, Kenmore Place, Bedford Avenue, and Ocean Avenue. The “streets have been macadamized and curbed and rows of maple and poplar trees planted on side of the cosmocrete sidewalks. Flowers and shrubs giving a continuous bloom during the warmer months, with attractive evergreens for the entire year, are a feature in this as well as in others of the residential park improves in Flatbush.”[i]
In 1896, the Lefferts Estate developed the property to include Midwood Street, Maple Street, and Rutland Road. Because of its location in a now densely populated area, it included quality urban improvements such as the eight brick-and-stone houses that were built by William A. Brown on Midwood and neighboring streets. The farm of John and Henry S. Ditmas was developed at Ditmas Park to be a restricted district with wide parking strips, asphalt, and macadam streets. These characteristics were becoming recognized as necessary aspects of the suburban enterprise being created in that part of Flatbush In 1898 Dean Alvord purchased part of the John C. Bergen farm from the estate of Luther C. Voorhies and a tract from the Dutch Reformed Church. The forty-acre area, known as Prospect Park South, would include streets carrying the very British names of Buckingham, Marlborough, Rugby, Argyle, Stratford, Westminster, Albemarle, and Beverly Road. Albemarle and Buckingham Roads were asphalted and had “wide parking strips set with ornamental trees, shrubs and plants-the spruce, fir, and hemlock, the magnolia, rhododendron and azalea, or the holly, spirea and barberry. Many thousand bulbs are planted in various parts of the park, which assist in carrying out the plan of having something from early spring until late fall.”[ii]
[i] Edmund D. Fisher, Flatbush Past and Present (Brooklyn, NY: Flatbush Trust Company, 1901)., 85.
[ii] Edmund D. Fisher, Flatbush Past and Present (Brooklyn, NY: Flatbush Trust Company, 1901)., 82.
