Before & After: Their Brooklyn Limestone Was Trapped in the ’90s, so They Set It Free

By 1919, William M. Calder had built so many houses in the neighborhoods near Prospect Park that the area was dubbed Calderville. A Brooklyn Daily Eagle article from that year numbered Calder’s homes at 700, and lauded the area’s "wide, clean streets lined with beautiful shade trees" as being "on top of Brooklyn." By the time of Calder’s death in 1945, his New York Times obituary put that number at 3,500 homes, which often lined entire city blocks in the neighborhoods of Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Flatbush and Sheepshead Bay. By that point, notes the story, Calder was "credited as having done more during the last 30 years for the growth of his home borough than anyone else."