Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn: Covenanted Blocks and Nostrand Avenue

Development here was spurred by the completion of Prospect Park, the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge and the arrival of mass transit in the late 19th century. The first residents were overwhelmingly middle-class professionals, businessmen, doctors, lawyers, brokers and clerks, many of them with domestic servants. The Lefferts Manor Association was founded in 1919, and still enforces the one-family-dwelling covenant and organises neighborhood events; it runs an annual self-guided house and garden tour through the district's blocks in late May, billed in 2026 as its 52nd.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated Prospect-Lefferts Gardens a historic district on October 9, 1979. Two smaller adjacent districts followed, Ocean on the Park in 2009 and Chester Court in 2014. The Lefferts Manor Historic District, 667 contributing rowhouses and freestanding houses built between 1896 and 1952, was added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 18, 1992, with a boundary increase listed on November 9, 2017; a broader Prospect Lefferts Gardens Historic District was added to the National Register on June 30, 2023.

Chester Court is the smallest and strangest of them: eighteen Tudor Revival rowhouses built in 1911 and 1912 by the Brooklyn architect and developer Peter J. Collins, arranged around a private cul-de-sac closed off from the Brighton subway line by an original brick wall, and styled after the black-and-white buildings of Chester in England.

One house is missing from all of this. The Lefferts family homestead, an 18th-century Flatbush farmhouse, originally stood at 563 Flatbush Avenue near Maple Street, inside what is now the neighborhood. It was moved into Prospect Park in 1918 and is preserved there as the Lefferts Historic House museum, which the Prospect Park Alliance lists as open in July and August, Wednesday to Sunday and holidays.

Since the 1960s Caribbean immigrants have substantially shaped the neighborhood, which overlaps with the area branded Little Caribbean along the Nostrand Avenue corridor. Allans Bakery, Aunts et Uncles and Caribbean Vibes all sit on that stretch of Nostrand.

Two subway lines reach the neighborhood from opposite sides.

On the IRT Nostrand Avenue Line, along the eastern commercial spine, Sterling Street at Sterling Street and Nostrand Avenue and Winthrop Street at Winthrop Street and Nostrand Avenue are both in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, and both are served by the 2 at all times and the 5 on weekdays.

On the BMT Brighton Line to the west, Parkside Avenue at Parkside and Ocean Avenues serves Prospect Lefferts Gardens and Flatbush, and is served by the Q. Prospect Park station, at Empire Boulevard and Flatbush Avenue, is served by the B, the Q and the Franklin Avenue Shuttle; its source describes it as serving Flatbush, Prospect Lefferts Gardens and Crown Heights, and places it near the border of Crown Heights.