This magnificent structure was designed, sometime between the 1860s and 1880s, by Montrose W. Morris, the Brooklyn based architect best known for designing some of the earliest multi-unit apartment buildings in New York City. The design of the Montrose is very similar in style to the Alhambra, another larger apartment building in Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood, also designed by Morris.

The Montrose stood on the corner of State Street and Hoyt Street in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Boreum Hill. It was a five-story building with fifteen apartments and seemingly quite fancy for the time. Each apartment included its own private reception hall in which you could exit through two sets of sliding doors leading into a dining room and parlor on one side and a library on the other.

Although the exact year when the Montrose became the Sharon Hall Hotel is unknown, based on John D. Morrell’s photograph above, we do know it was already a hotel in the year 1960. The building seems to have been demolished soon after Morrell photographed it, sometime in the 1960s or 1970s. A more modern townhouse now resides on the corner of State and Hoyt.

Thankfully not suffering the same fate as the Sharon Hall Hotel, the city designated the Alhambra a historic landmark in 1986. I suggest if one wants to travel back in time for a glimpse of the Sharon Hall Hotel, all one has to do is visit the Alhambra and admire the beauty of a time past.