In April 2018, a Queen Anne and Romanesque Revival mansion at 669 St. Marks Avenue sold for $3.25 million to Massimo Cocco, president of Masmark LLC. The house dated to 1888, carried a rare surviving carriage house on its oversized lot, and stood a short walk from some of the best-known brownstone blocks in Brooklyn. By January 2019 a demolition permit application was on file with the Department of Buildings. By 2021, the house was gone, and renderings from Cycle Architecture + Planning showed a passive house apartment building going up in its place.
The strange part is not that a Victorian mansion got torn down in a fast-changing corner of Brooklyn. It is where this happened. The house sat close enough to the Crown Heights North Historic District that most buyers would assume it carried the same protections as its landmarked neighbors. It didn't. According to the Historic Districts Council, 669 St. Marks sat "just outside the historic district on an oversize lot."
That line, the one separating a protected block from an unprotected one, is not finished being drawn. It was supposed to be. And understanding why it still isn't is the single most useful thing a buyer looking at property in this part of Crown Heights can know before making an offer.
A District Built in Three Pieces, With a Fourth Still Missing
The Crown Heights North Historic District was never meant to be one designation. The Landmarks Preservation Commission planned it in four phases, based on a survey the agency conducted back in 1976. Three of those phases happened. The fourth still has not, according to Landmark Crow Hill.
| Phase | Status | Buildings Protected |
|---|---|---|
| Crown Heights North (Phase I) | Designated April 24, 2007, per Village Preservation | 461 |
| Crown Heights North II (Phase II) | Approved by LPC in 2011, according to CrownHeights.info | 610 |
| Crown Heights North III (Phase III) | Designated March 24, 2015, per Village Preservation | 679 |
| Crown Heights North IV / Crow Hill | Not yet calendared | Not yet determined |
When the LPC designated the first phase, running from Pacific Street to Dean Street and Prospect Place to St. Mark's Avenue, between Bedford and Kingston Avenues, then-Chairman Robert Tierney called it a streetscape that "is unlike any other in New York City," as reported by Gothamist. The second phase, approved in 2011, filled in the blocks bounded by Bergen Street, Brooklyn Avenue, Eastern Parkway, and Nostrand Avenue, pushing the district's southern edge down to the parkway itself. The third, designated in 2015, pushed the total number of protected buildings across the three phases past 1,700.
Then the momentum stopped. The fourth phase, the one meant to complete the district, would have covered the area known as Crow Hill: St. Marks Avenue, Dean, Bergen and Pacific Streets, and the small enclaves of St. Francis and St. Charles Places, running between Bedford and Franklin Avenues. It has been on the list since the 1976 survey. It is still there.
The Campaign That Won't Let It Go
Nobody forgot about Crow Hill. The Crow Hill Neighborhood Association began pushing for its own protection as early as 2012. In October 2022, the Crown Heights North Association relaunched the effort under a new name, Landmark Crow Hill, working with the Historic Districts Council and executive director Frampton Tolbert to build support for finally calendaring Phase IV.
The Landmark Crow Hill site lays out the case plainly: in the years since the third phase was designated in 2015, Crown Heights North and Crow Hill have absorbed heavy development pressure, and the combination of avenue up-zoning and the area's rising popularity between Nostrand and Washington Avenues is described as threatening the architectural character the earlier phases were designed to preserve.
Public LPC designation records, tracked by Village Preservation through mid-2025, show no fourth Crown Heights North phase on the books. Nearly two decades after the first phase went through, the neighborhood's landmark map still has an unfinished edge, and that edge runs directly through blocks buyers are touring today.
What Sitting Outside the Line Actually Does to a Lot
Landmark designation in New York City affects what an owner can do with a property. Outside the line, those landmark rules do not apply.
The lot was oversized relative to the modest three-story house sitting on it. The same report that documented the loss of 669 St. Marks noted that its neighbor at 673 St. Marks was endangered too, through a zoning lot merger that would have combined the two parcels into a single, larger development site. In response, HDC filed a request with the LPC to create a standalone historic district for that one block, naming it after architect George Poole Chappell, who designed his own residence there along with several others nearby.
This is not just background history. A rowhouse sitting on a full-size, fully built lot inside the Phase I through III boundary may present different considerations than a similar house on an oversized lot in the Crow Hill pocket. That distinction is worth keeping in mind when comparing properties.
What to Check Before You Make an Offer in This Pocket
If a property you're considering falls between Nostrand and Franklin Avenues, in the Crow Hill area specifically, a few questions are worth answering before anything else about the house itself:
- Does the address fall inside the mapped boundary of Phase I, II, or III, or is it in the area proposed for Phase IV that has not been calendared
- How does the lot's built square footage compare to what current zoning would allow, since a large gap is exactly what made 669 St. Marks attractive to redevelop
- Has a neighboring lot changed hands recently to an LLC, since zoning lot mergers are how adjacent parcels get assembled for larger projects
- Is the block part of the active Landmark Crow Hill campaign?
None of this makes Crow Hill a place to avoid. It makes it a place where the ground rules are still being negotiated in public meetings rather than settled by a 2007 designation report. That's a different kind of Brooklyn brownstone purchase than one in an already-landmarked block, and the difference is worth pricing into a decision rather than discovering after closing.
For a broader look at how landmark boundaries and building fundamentals shape value across the neighborhood, our Crown Heights guide and buyer's guide cover the basics of what to check before touring. If a townhouse or brownstone purchase is on your list this year, our guide to buying a brownstone in Crown Heights walks through the rest of the process.
If you're weighing a specific address in the Crow Hill area and want to know exactly where it sits relative to these boundaries, The Dima Lysius Team can pull the block's designation status and FAR position before you write an offer. Contact us and we'll walk through what the map actually says about the house you're looking at.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
