HITLER’S BROOKLYN BROWNSTONE (1940)
Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes.
The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations.
Do you know the history of YOUR house?
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I know. I know. So dramatic, right?
You must be thinking that we’re using a figure of speech in a misguided attempt to characterize a Brooklyn slumlord, right? I mean, he’d have to be a really nasty landlord to get the Hitler comparison. Takes your deposit and keeps the heat off in the winter? Goes into your place when you’re not there? Charges you part of the common area bill?
What a dictator!
But hold on, because there’s actually a story behind this. A good one…
WHAT TO DO WITH A “CRUMMY BUILDING”?
Once upon a time, in the City of Churches, two Manhattan attorneys – who had allowed the mortgage payments to lapse on a certain “crummy building” they owned – were discussing legal strategy.
These two gentlemen, Julius Freilicher and Martin Auslander of 1 Park Place, had a $3,300 mortgage on their tenement – 541 Clinton Street in Carroll Gardens – with the Dime Savings Bank.
The two advocates had determined that it was not in their best interests to pay the mortgage, but they also did not like the idea of losing. They were attorneys, you know.
So, they opted for a scheme that would be the next best thing.
One day when the bank was about to foreclose, the two attorneys hampered the foreclosure proceedings considerably when they filed a deed of gift with the city that would throw a certain preposterous, albeit figurative, spanner into its works.
Freilicher and Auslander’s deed of gift was exactly what it sounded like – they were giving their mortgaged property away. And since it was unlikely that this would have stopped a bank getting at a property in a foreclosure suit anyway, the two attorneys figured on having a lark and sticking it to the monied interests, but good.
And for added good measure they made sure that the receivers of the properties were some real pitbulls, infamous – and downright mean.
They were Mssrs. Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
CAN I GIVE A GIFT TO HITLER?
“This procedure, though eccentric, was legally airtight,” said the New Yorker. “The law permits you to give a man something without his knowing anything about it.”
This placed the bank, of course, in a tight space. Since there was still a mortgage, the bank had to now make what the law refers to as a reasonable effort to locate the new owners to attempt to determine their ability and interest in paying the mortgage.
So, the bank did then what banks do even to this day with thorny issues involving money – they gave the case over to a law firm, Hutton & Holahan of Brooklyn.
Hutton, who took the case on personally, wrote first to the Soviet and German Consulates in New York, asking if the addressees knew anything about Stalin’s and Hitler’s having been left a tenement in Brooklyn.
After receiving no real answer from either consulate, the attorney sent out “his most relentless process-server, with a summons and complaint to be served on Stalin and Hitler.” (Would that it were so easy, right?)
The process-server “went first to 541 Clinton Street, where he found the door broken in by neighborhood toughs, but neither Hitler nor Stalin inside.”
Then the process-server “made a little tour of the neighborhood the way all process-servers do, asking for his men.”
(Mind you, this was 1940.)
“The neighbors just stared.
“Hutton’s next move was to ask the State Supreme Court if it would be satisfactory, the attempt to serve Hitler and Stalin personally having failed, to notify them by letter and advertisements.”
The Court answered in the affirmative.
After having done so, the Dime Savings Bank was left to wait on an answer from the dictators. If one was not forthcoming within three weeks of the last appearance of the advertisements, then the bank would be free to foreclose.
Which they did.
As for Auslander and Freilicher, their game cost them $439.53 – but, o what fun they had…..
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Brownstone Detectives is an historic property research agency. Our mission is to document and save the histories of our clients’ homes. From our research, we produce our celebrated House History Books and House History Reports. Contact us today to begin discovering the history of your home.
