Brooklyn Green Historic District is a historic district on Route 169, Route 205, U.S. Route 6, Wolf Den, Brown, Prince Hill, and Hyde Roads in the town of Brooklyn, Connecticut. The district is notable for its Greek Revival, Colonial, and Federal architecture. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.
The district has significance as an illustration of certain broad patterns of development in Connecticut, for its collection of architecture, and for its association with historically important individuals.
The centerpiece of the district is the Brooklyn Green, a 1.75-acre (7,100 m2) village green in the center of the town. The Green is roughly a square bounded on four sides by streets. There are also two streets cutting across diagonally, resulting in four separate triangular sections. The eastern triangle contains the Brooklyn Meeting House. The area around the Green contains various important town buildings, including the town hall, town library, two churches (Trinity Episcopal and Federated Church of Christ), and several historic residences dating from the mid-18th century. The roads around the Green are Route 169 on the east, Putnam Place on the north and west, Brooklyn Common on the south. The diagonal streets are Wolf Den Road (northwest to southeast) and U.S. Route 6 (northeast to southwest).
The Green's adjacent buildings were photographed in the Historic American Buildings Survey program. A HABS summary is:
Little altered since the mid-nineteenth century, Brooklyn Green is significant as a small, rural area that still retains much of its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century material heritage. The physical organization of the area reflects the historical development of the town and the region, including its growth in the first half of the nineteenth century and decline in the decades that followed. Many of the buildings and structures located near the Brooklyn Green are architecturally significant, exemplifying the styles that were popular between 1750 and 1850, the area's period of greatest significance. Finally, some of the buildings and structures are associated with the lives of prominent individuals in Brooklyn history, including Israel Putnam (1718-1790) and Daniel Tyler, Jr. (ca. 1700-1800).
Famous quotes containing the words brooklyn, green, historic and/or district:
“I know that I will always be expected to have extra insight into black textsespecially texts by black women. A working-class Jewish woman from Brooklyn could become an expert on Shakespeare or Baudelaire, my students seemed to believe, if she mastered the language, the texts, and the critical literature. But they would not grant that a middle-class white man could ever be a trusted authority on Toni Morrison.”
—Claire Oberon Garcia, African American scholar and educator. Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B2 (July 27, 1994)
“Annihilating all thats made
To a green thought in a green shade.”
—Andrew Marvell (16211678)
“If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.”
—Rebecca West (18921983)