CROWN HEIGHTS — Put on your walking shoes this weekend and head to Crown Heights.
For the seventh year, the preservation group Crown Heights North Association is hosting its annual house tour of the area’s historic homes and buildings on Saturday.
This year, eight residences, two churches and a community garden are on the schedule for the tour, said Suzanne Spellen, a CHNA member and architectural historian who helped put the event together.
“Often people walk past houses and go, ‘I always wanted to see what it looked like in there,’” she said. “This is their chance.”
The tour will begin at 10:45 a.m. with a short opening ceremony at St. Gregory the Great church on St. John's Place and Brooklyn Avenue, Spellen said, which is “a gorgeous, Byzantine-looking church with every surface covered with decorations,” built in 1915.
The rest of the tour is self-guided and will likely take about three hours to complete, she said. Other stops on the tour are the Bedford Central Presbyterian Church, a “classic, Victorian-style church with big stained glass windows and beautiful woodwork,” Spellen said, the Bergen Street Community Garden and an original “Kinko”-style home, one of the first examples of a two-family duplex home, built by the Kings and Westchester Land Company in the early 20th century.
At least one home on the tour is in the middle of restoration, Spellen said, to give an inside look to those interested in historic reconstruction.
Tickets for the tour cost $25 per person on the day of the event, but are available for $20 on the association’s website or at the home goods store Yanatiba on Washington Avenue and Prospect Place or Barbara’s Flowers on Bergen Street and Nostrand Avenue.
Funds from the ticket sales for the tour will support the CHNA’s general fund, Spellen said, which will be used for community development projects and to lobby for landmarking status in the area.
“It’s just a classic Brooklyn brownstone neighborhood,” she said. “I never get tired of it.”
The Crown Heights North Association 7th Annual House Tour will take place between 10:45 a.m. and 4 p.m. on Saturday, October 4. Tickets can be purchased through the CHNA website.
