Clinton Hill
Neighborhood Intelligence

Clinton Hill is a neighborhood of brownstones, brick rowhouses, apartment buildings, and the mansions that wealthy families built along Clinton Avenue in the 1870s and 1880s, when the area became known as Brooklyn's Gold Coast. Charles Pratt, an oil-industry businessman who settled here, founded the Pratt Institute in 1887, and its campus remains a focus of the neighborhood. The Clinton Hill Historic District, which includes the mansions of Clinton Avenue, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985.

Pratt's campus, with its sculpture park, fills much of the northern part of the neighborhood. The Emmanuel Baptist Church and the Church of St. Luke and St. Matthew are notable nineteenth-century churches, and the Brooklyn Masonic Temple at Clermont and Lafayette Avenues is a landmark of the neighborhood's western edge. St. Joseph's University's Brooklyn campus on Clinton Avenue and Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School are other long-established institutions. DeKalb Avenue is the main thoroughfare, and Myrtle Avenue carries much of the commercial activity.