You all look great today!

And that’s why we’re thrilled to be on this picture-perfect strip of Bergen Street that’s polished and has lots of character.

Today, it’s mostly residential, with some boutiques thrown in, but this was once a pretty noisy part of town. After ferry service between Atlantic Avenue and Manhattan arrived in the 1830s, the farmland here developed quickly, according to the Cobble Hill Association. By the Civil War, many of these streets were filled in with rowhouses, workshops, small factories, and stables also serving the nearby South Brooklyn waterfront. Old records show some of these buildings cranking out things like mattresses, putty, chemicals, and paint.

But obviously those uses gave way to high-end residential and brick-bound coziness that we know the neighborhood for today.

What’s unique here is that this block sits between two busy commercial corridors, Smith and Court, which bring plenty of energy. But with the exception of a few boutiques and a large school, it’s mostly homes and apartments. And as you’ll see, it’s still in a bit of a transitional moment as it awaits some new tenants and neighbors.

These photos were taken in January 2026, before it got too cold. Unfortunately, detail in this post is a little sparse in most places, but the hodgepodge of different buildings still makes for a nice exploration.

Streetview

Blue on Bergen

The south side of Bergen features a few blue wood-framed houses that are all very cozy in their own way.

Numbers 30-34 are a nice run of clapboard wood-framed buildings that seem to date from the mid-19th century.

Number 34, on the left, sold for $5.4 million last year. Just look at that backyard and sunny kitchen. You shoulda snapped that one up, huh? Bet you’re feeling foolish now.

Take a look inside the “robin’s-egg-blue woodframe” at 62 Bergen.

17 Bergen Street | 2009

This five-story limestone and brick condo was built to buffer the smaller townhouse to the east and the large school building on the other side, according to the architects behind this. The penthouse sold earlier this year for $6.9 million.

Urban Archive dug up a photo of a fire here in 1954.

Vinnie’s Iron Works

Halfway down the block is one of the most interesting remnants of the neighborhood’s past. Since 1963, Vincent Pampillonia has spent decades restoring and fabricating ornate ironwork, according to Patch.

Things were different back then. The street was still lined with cobblestones, there were gunshots at night, and prostitution operated out of a nearby building. “…you had to watch because if you had something out somebody would steal it from you one, two, three,” Pampillonia told Patch. “There was a lot of problems and there was a lot of danger, but everybody respected me because everybody knew me.”

As brownstone Brooklyn gentrified, Pampillonia was in the right place to fix railings, stoops, gates, and fire escapes of many of these historic properties.

Perched on top of the main building is a glass-enclosed statue of St. Joseph given to Pampillonia in 1974 by nearby St. Paul’s Church around the corner on Court Street.

Unfortunately, Pampillonia died last October at 89 years old and the building is now available for rent.

The Invisible Dog at 53-51 Bergen Street | 1863

For more than a hundred years through the 1990s, this brick loft was used for manufacturing. Over the years, that included carriages, musical instrument cases—sometimes making more than 600 trumpet and clarinet cases a week—and chemicals courtesy of the Huron Chemical Company.

But by the time French theater producer Lucien Zayan toured the place in 2008, many of these former tenants had walked away, leaving decades of industrial debris. As he told Culturebot:

“Each former tenant seemed to have simply locked the door when the business shut down, leaving layer upon layer of office furniture, boxes of old-new-stock, outdated machinery, what have you. More than a hundred pigeons called the upper floors home, space they shared with the makeshift custom auto shop one of the owners ran. Part of the roof was missing and papered over with plastic tarps.”

It was perfect. He rented the building and began to clear it out, partly by staging a flea market. The biggest accumulation left behind was all the dog leashes. Invisible dog leashes.

These were a novelty item that made it seem like you were walking a dog that didn’t exist, a gimmick that even had a brief association with Walt Disney World. And there were a ton of them. Remember Improv Everywhere? They helped put many of these novelty leashes to use across Brooklyn in a 2009 stunt. Zayan sold off many of these for $20 a bundle, he told the New York Times in 2010.

The newspaper recounted that while his friends thought calling the budding artspace The Invisible Dog was stupid, “He’s glad it stuck: ‘It’s the history, and history is never stupid.’”

From there, the place came to life with artists’ studios—including the photographer whose image appeared on the Arcade Fire’s Suburbs album—a performance space, a chandelier salvaged with belt buckles and beads found in the building, and a 162-foot cardboard worm. They even hosted an apple tasting which I would like to have gone to.

But Brooklyn real estate is a dog-eat-dog world and the center closed last March when the owners planned to turn the property over to retail, according to Zayan’s newsletter. And the projects have scattered to residencies and spaces elsewhere, or as he put it: the Invisible Dog went for a walk.

60 Bergen Street

During World War 2, the Trio Chemical Works was operating here.

Not long afterward Frank “Funzi” Tieri ran the Ria Rosa Cheese Company out of the building for a few years, according to a declassified government document. That venture fell apart in 1948 after a bad winter made it hard to move their product from their upstate dairy. After that, he started a glove business in Bay Ridge. But his career eventually took him elsewhere.

About 35 years later, he was ultimately convicted of being “the boss of a family of La Cosa Nostra” and was tied to the murder of a crime boss in Philly.

134 Boerum Place | 1916

Boerum Place intersects Bergen here in the middle. This four-story condo here has some nice medallions at the top there.

Got nothing else here, so let’s keep ‘er movin’.

48 Bergen Street

Looks like a former stable or carriage-house with some Italianate touches, later converted to homes. There’s some evidence this was a stable as far back as 1872, but it’s hard to know much more than that. Nice though!

What’s Good: This block has a variety of old and new that keeps things interesting. There’s a ton of history here. And as the main says, history is never stupid.

What’s Not: I really wanted to do an apple tasting. RIP.

Block Rating: 8/10