THE CHANGING FACE OF MACON STREET (1908)
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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While researching the history a local brownstone, we located an old postcard of a street in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The sepia paper photograph gives an idea of the innate promise of the neighborhood back in 1908 as it was still being built up with new brownstones, limestones, and rowhouses.
That picture postcard, featured above, shows a stretch of Macon Street – replete with newly built rowhouses – that starts at the back of the Saratoga Library on Thomas S. Boyland Street (then, it was Hopkinson Avenue), and ends about halfway down the block before reaching a row of barrel-fronted 2-family houses and the one-time parking garage at the corner of Saratoga Avenue (now the Shirley Chisholm Day Care Center).
Interestingly, this part of Macon Street still had its dirt (mud on rainy days) street as late as 1908. Residents of the area had been complaining to the City of Brooklyn (by 1908, the borough of Brooklyn) since the 1890s about the slow pace of street paving in the district. Home building had gone on at such a fast clip during this period that the city had struggled to keep up with the builders.
The houses that are the focal point of the snapshot were the first put up on the block – what appears to be either a temporary building (a remaining contractor’s shack or a storage shed of some sort for the library) sits against the side of the last in the row of these buildings. Much of the iron work of the gates surprisingly seems to have survived.
On the side of the apartment buildings a sign is visible for Shellas & Chesnutt, a furniture and carpet store that had opened a branch at the corner of Broadway and Greene Avenue about 12 years earlier. The existence of this ad tells us that either it was visible from the windows of the elevated train along Broadway or that this stretch of Macon Street was a 2-way corridor at the time – or both.
It appears that the two men in the picture looking east down Macon Street were standing on planks of wood. While curbstones seem to have already been set into place, the bluestone is probably yet to be delivered. Regarding other services provided by the city, a single gas lamp sits as a solitary beacon in the middle of the block (there is no lamp on this side of the block today.) The only other figures in the picture seem to be a number of tenants lounging on the low stoops of the apartment houses.
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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.
