Has anyone on Third Avenue asked why the fence went up around the church at the corner of Schermerhorn Street?
It is not the only change on that stretch of blocks this year. A few streets over, on Bond Street, a corner that had sat dark since late summer 2025 filled back up with people this spring. One of those changes is the kind of news that makes a neighborhood feel alive. The other is the kind that makes longtime residents do the math on how many historic buildings this particular pocket of Brooklyn has lost the same way, and realize the answer is not one.
Bond and Pacific Has Its Corner Back
Lonnies opened at 112 Bond Street on May 20, 2026, in the space that Café Kitsuné vacated the previous summer. It is the second restaurant from Sean Rembold and Caron Callahan, the husband-and-wife team behind Ingas Bar in Brooklyn Heights, and the menu tells you exactly what kind of place they were going for: chicken under a brick, a dry-aged double-patty burger, a daily prime rib special, and Basque cheesecake, all cooked on an induction kitchen with no gas line at all.
Rembold built his career in Williamsburg kitchens, working under Andrew Tarlow at Diner, Marlow & Sons, and Reynard before opening Ingas in 2022 in the old Jack the Horse space in the Heights. Callahan designed Lonnies herself, down to vintage Czech Republic light fixtures chosen to glow like an old streetlamp rather than an LED. The two of them live nearby with their kids, and by their own account the decision to open a second restaurant in Boerum Hill was not a calculated expansion so much as a corner that felt right when they walked into it.
That kind of restaurant, the kind built by people who already live three blocks from the front door, tends to become a fixture rather than a phase. Ingas took four years to become the sort of place regulars ask about by name. Lonnies has the benefit of a spring opening and a team that already knows what a neighborhood restaurant is supposed to do on a Tuesday versus a Saturday.
A Different Kind of Opening, Two Blocks Away
The building at 360 Schermerhorn Street, on the corner of Third Avenue, has commanded that intersection since 1893, when the congregation of the First Baptist Church of Brooklyn, the oldest Baptist congregation in the borough, finished construction on a Romanesque Revival sanctuary designed by the Ohio firm of Weary and Kramer. It was not their first building lost to fire, and it would not be their last: a 1917 blaze forced a rebuild the following year, and in 2010 an electrical fire tore through the roof and sanctuary again, damage the congregation, by then known as Next Step Community Church, never fully repaired.
The church kept working through it. Documented outreach in the years after the 2010 fire included a weekly food pantry, diaper and formula distribution, recovery meetings, and a physical mailing address for homeless neighbors who had nowhere else to receive mail. In 2022 the New York Landmarks Conservancy awarded the building $25,000 through its Sacred Sites program, one of two Brooklyn church grants that year, to help with repairs.
It was not enough. A structural report commissioned by the church put the cost of a full repair north of $33.9 million, a figure the congregation's own court petition described as an insurmountable hardship. This August, a Kings County court approved the sale of the property to Brooklyn developers Tankhouse and Lonicera for $28.25 million. Court filings show the buyers intend to demolish the fire-damaged structure and build residential housing on the site. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but it was never individually landmarked by the city and sits outside any local historic district, which means the Landmarks Preservation Commission has no say in whether it comes down.
The 1995 National Register nomination for the building described it in terms that make the coming demolition feel like more than a paperwork transaction. It called out the structure's
impressive gabled pavilions and is anchored by three corner towers
which is not the language usually reserved for a building about to become a construction site. The church's rose window, corbelled brickwork, and Spanish tile roof will go the way of the vestibule that already had to come down after the 2010 fire.
This Has Happened Before
If the shape of this story feels familiar to anyone who has lived in Boerum Hill for more than a decade, that is because it is. Around ten years ago, a mid-19th century church on Fourth Avenue, the Church of the Redeemer, met the same fate. It was not city landmarked either. Before demolition, an architectural salvage company auctioned off the building's contents, stained glass windows, hand-cut granite detailing, neo-Gothic light fixtures, entire runs of Victorian encaustic tile, to anyone who wanted a piece of it before the wrecking crew arrived.
Two churches, two different corners of the same small neighborhood, two buildings that predate almost everything else standing near them, and neither one protected by the designation that supposedly defines what makes Boerum Hill Boerum Hill. The Boerum Hill Historic District, designated by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1973, is bounded by Schermerhorn Street on its northern edge. The church at 360 Schermerhorn sits directly on that boundary line. Proximity to the district was never the same thing as membership in it, and the building that anchored one corner of that boundary for 132 years is about to prove the distinction in the most permanent way possible.
It does not happen in a vacuum. Directly across the street from the church stands Alloy Block, the two-tower development formerly known as 80 Flatbush that already drew organized opposition from residents who argued the scale was wrong for a neighborhood of historic row houses. The corner of Third and Schermerhorn has been contested ground for a while. It is simply losing its oldest occupant now.
Two Corners, One Season
None of this requires anyone to be shopping for a house to matter. If you live within walking distance of Bond and Pacific, you now have a burger worth defending in an argument about the best one in the neighborhood, and a Basque cheesecake that did not exist in May. If you live within walking distance of Third and Schermerhorn, you are going to watch a building older than almost every brownstone around it disappear behind a fence sometime in the next year, and nothing in the city's landmark process was ever going to stop it.
Boerum Hill has always sold itself on continuity, tree canopy, row houses from the 1840s, the same restaurants on Smith Street for a generation. The truer version is a neighborhood that fills in and empties out on parallel tracks, sometimes on the same afternoon walk. Knowing which corners are which, and why one kind of building gets saved while another one does not, is the difference between being surprised by the fence and expecting it.
If you are watching either of these corners for reasons that go beyond dinner plans, The Kantha Team tracks how blocks like these actually trade, not just how they read on a map. Schedule a consultation when you are ready to talk specifics.
