There's a popular swimming hole in the town of Portland, Connecticut, that used to be a quarry where people today scuba dive past old cut faces and jump off the cliffs into the water. It's also where most of the brown stone on the front of a New York brownstone came from. The quarries at Portland sat right on the bank of the Connecticut River, so the heavy stone could be floated downstream cheaply on shallow-draft schooners the crews nicknamed brownstoners. By one 1880 tally, Connecticut brownstone faced close to 80 percent of the stone-fronted buildings going up across the city.
What surprises people who grew up around these houses is that the famous brown stone isn't really holding much up. Behind the facade sits a plain brick house, the floor plan repeats from one to the next as if it were stamped out (it nearly was), and even the beloved stoop is a flood defense the Dutch brought over. The stone gets all the attention, but the rest of the building is the part worth understanding.
What a brownstone actually is
The word names a rock before it names a building. Brownstone is a brown sandstone, and a New York brownstone is a row house wearing sandstone across its front. The stone is a facing only, a few inches of carved skin tied to a brick wall. The house behind it is brick.
That makes a brownstone a particular kind of townhouse, which is the broader name for a narrow multistory house joined to its neighbors on both sides. A townhouse can wear a face of brick, limestone, or brownstone. When the face is brown sandstone, New Yorkers call the whole thing a brownstone, and in everyday talk plenty of red-brick row houses get folded into the category too. Architects keep the line cleaner, reserving brownstone for the brown front and row house for the building type underneath it.
Why so many are still standing
New York knocks things down for sport, yet brownstones survive by the tens of thousands. A few reasons for that.
The structure is simple and stubborn. Each house shares thick brick walls with the neighbors on either side, and the wooden floor joists run from one shared wall to the other. The ends of those joists were bricked straight into the masonry, and in most houses they have carried their floors for more than a century without complaint. There is not much to go wrong in a box of brick and timber that was overbuilt to begin with.
There were also a staggering number of them to start with. Brownstones were speculative housing, put up in long matching rows by builders chasing a growing middle class. When you make them by the thousand, plenty will still be around five generations later.
They also bend to whatever the moment wants. A single-family brownstone becomes a stack of floor-through apartments when the neighborhood needs rooms, then gets stitched back into one grand house when the money returns. The ground floor turns into a shop and back into a parlor. That flexibility is part of why they get saved rather than scrapped, though the plainest reason is the simplest one. Beginning with the 1965 landmarks law, the city wrapped whole blocks of them in historic-district protection, which turns knocking one down into a long and usually losing fight.
How the thing is built
Strip off the stone and a brownstone is a masonry party-wall house, a type builders repeated so often they barely bothered to draw it. The structural walls are brick. The front wall carries a brownstone facing held on with metal ties. The side and rear walls are brick as well, and the foundation is rough local stone. The brown sandstone does almost no structural work. It is there to be seen and to be carved.
The walls that matter are the party walls, the brick dividers a house shares with the neighbor on each side. The floor joists, usually a nominal three-inch timber somewhere between eight and twelve inches deep, span straight across from one party wall to the other. The staircase runs along one of those walls. In a narrow house, around sixteen feet wide, the joists make the full span on their own, with no interior wall holding the floor. In a wider house, twenty to twenty-five feet, the span runs too long for the timber, so a wall down the middle catches the joists partway across.
That detail matters the moment anyone wants to open up the parlor floor, because the wall they want gone is often the wall holding the floor up. More on that at the end.
The plan almost every brownstone shares
Brownstones sit on narrow, deep lots, commonly sixteen to twenty-five feet wide and running forty-five to fifty-five feet back into the block. Stack that footprint three to five stories high and you get the tall, slim profile of the row.
The signature is the stoop, and the stoop is older than the brownstone by two centuries. The word comes from the Dutch stoep, and the raised front steps arrived with the settlers of New Amsterdam, who lifted their doors above a street that flooded and filled with the filth of a city run on horses. The brownstone builders inherited the idea and made it grand. The stoop carries you up and over the muck to the parlor floor, the principal floor of the house, with its tall windows and its big front and rear rooms meant for receiving people. Half a flight down, at the garden level beneath the stoop, sat the kitchen and the everyday door, the entrance the family and the household staff used while guests swept up the steps above.
Inside, the layout barely changes from house to house. A hall and staircase hug one party wall, and the rooms line up front to back along the other. Most brownstones were built for a single family. As the city packed in, owners sliced them into floor-throughs, apartments that take a whole floor from front to back, and that is still how a large share of them are divided today.
The styles, decade by decade
Brownstone is a building material, and several styles wore it in turn over the decades, so a block from the 1850s and a block from the 1890s can both be brownstones and look almost nothing alike. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission's rowhouse style guide is the standard key for telling them apart, and the quick version runs like this.
| Style | Roughly when | What gives it away |
|---|---|---|
| Greek Revival | 1830s to 1840s | Restrained and boxy, flat lintels, simple classical trim, a low stoop |
| Italianate | late 1840s to 1870s | The classic brownstone look, tall arched parlor windows, a heavy bracketed cornice, a high stoop |
| Second Empire | 1860s to 1870s | Italianate detailing tucked under a steep mansard roof borrowed from Paris |
| Neo-Grec | 1870s to 1880s | Crisp, almost machine-cut incised ornament and blocky stone lintels |
| Queen Anne | 1880s to 1890s | Deliberate asymmetry, bay windows, colored glass, a mix of materials and textures |
| Romanesque Revival | 1880s to 1890s | Rough rusticated stone and round arches, heavy and fortress-like |
| Renaissance Revival and Beaux-Arts | 1890s to 1900s | Formal and symmetrical, limestone trim, grander and more academic |
The stone itself
Builders reached for brownstone because it was easy and it was cheap. The sandstone is soft, so a mason could carve it into cornices, window hoods, and door surrounds without much fight, and it cost far less than marble or granite while sitting in quarries a short barge ride away. The brown comes from iron oxide in the rock. Geologically it is a Triassic and Jurassic sandstone from the rift basins that run through New Jersey and the Connecticut River valley, with the Portland quarries the best known source.
The softness that made it cheap to carve is also why it fails. Sandstone is porous, so it drinks water, and New York hands it freeze-thaw winters and acidic rain that drive the moisture into the rock and pop the surface off. The damage was often made worse by a mistake in how the stone was set. Sandstone forms in flat layers and holds up best laid the way it grew, with those layers running horizontally. Masons frequently set the blocks with the layers facing outward instead, because the grain looked better that way, which turned the weak direction of the stone toward the weather. The result is the flaking and sheeting you find on so many fronts, where the brown face peels away like the cover off a paperback. It is why a walk down almost any brownstone block turns up patched faces, painted-over stone, and cement coatings troweled on to imitate the sandstone that crumbled away.
Thinking of renovating one?
Everything above shapes what a brownstone renovation can and cannot do. The brick-and-timber structure decides which walls can move, the narrow plan sets what a floor can become, the soft stone governs the facade work, and a spot inside a historic district hands the Landmarks Preservation Commission a say over the front of the house. A brownstone rewards understanding before the first wall comes down. Get the structure, the plan, the stone, and the landmark rules right, and the work goes with the house instead of against it, which is the difference between a renovation that lets the place stand another hundred years and one that fights you the whole way through.
