1867- 1884, Richard Upjohn & Son, Architects
A brownstone Gothic church on the northeast corner of Clinton and Carroll Streets was designed by the Richard Michell Upjohn, the son of one of America's most important architects, Richard Upjohn, who was the architect for Trinity Church. Although notably influenced by his father and the aesthetic ideas of John Ruskin, some of Richard Michell Upjohn's designs, such as the state capitol at Hartford, Connecticut, were brilliant solutions to the problems of reconciling new materials with the Victorian love for the bizarre effect.
Francis Morrone, in the Carroll Gardens section of An Architectural Guidebook to Brooklyn, says the church’s best feature by far is its projecting triple portal of light sandstone, with clustered columns and trefoil arches. The arches are of polychrome stonework, possibly once more-pronounced than now. The portal is sandwiched by three-stage buttresses with gabled and stepped sloping setoffs. To the south of the portal, at the corner, is a massive square base for a tower that was never built. The corner tower base has a fine entrance recess behind a trefoil arch on Carroll Street, and anchors the corner well. The Carroll Street façade has three aisle bays with a series of clerestory windows above and behind them, followed by a shallow transept and then a five-sided apse that expresses the well-defined space of the chancel.
Excerpts from, An Architectural Guidebook to Brooklyn, by Francis Morrone, published in 2001 by Gibbs Smith. Used with the author's permission