THE JAPANESE GILT OF 150 HANCOCK ST (1887)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** Much of the design selections made by designers in the last part of the 19th century are comprised of a coterie of materials, patterns, and tools either no longer available today or much changed in their appearance. Although most builders used simple materials that did not require the knowledge or training of a master designer, some of the more high-end brownstone constructors utilized the services of those who would tailor their interiors toward the more affluent members of society. In the late 1880s, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle started a series of articles which described – in great length and detail – the interiors of individual newly-built or renovated houses. These houses were usually brownstones belonging to those affluent or upper-middle-class members of society. Not only did such articles describing the interiors of neighbors’ homes sell newspapers, but the articles also served as advertising directed at those in the market for a townhouse to have a home of their own. These advertisement-articles were placed, likely at the expense of the designers responsible for the “interior decorations” being described, as each piece ended with what readers wanted to know. “Who did the work?” THE WORK WAS DONE BY HALBERT In 1886, a row of Queen Anne style 3-story and basement “brown stone houses” […]
THE BOY AUTHOR OF 224 MONROE ST (1914)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** In 1914, Gilbert P. Simons was being lauded for his first book. Simons, however, was no typical writer – he was a 13-year-old Brooklyn boy who had just written and published his very own book. “Shadorok Tales,” Simons’ work, was a foundational “collection of stories by him and his cousins and friends, none of whom is a great deal older than he.” WRITING THE BOOK ON MONROE STREET The entire affair began when Simons, who “in the winter lived at 224 Monroe street (near the corner of Nostrand Avenue), and in the summer at Blauvelt, N.Y.,” was given “a printing press and type by his father on Christmas of 1912,” noted the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Little Simons appears to have had a leg up in his young publishing career by a father who worked for the Daily Eagle, which was Brooklyn’s newspaper of record. Simons started at first printing invitations, cards, circulars, billheads, &c., but then “the big idea of the book took hold of Gilbert and his father. “Everyone who was asked to contribute did so,” noted the Daily Eagle of the compilation volume of stories, “and soon there was enough ‘copy’ on hand to begin ‘setting it up.’” In 1915, the book was finished and printed up by the Shadorok […]
BROOKLYN’S PLAN TO SAVE DAYLIGHT (1917)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** It’s difficult to believe that just over 100 years ago there was opposition to Brooklyn’s plan to “save daylight.” But in 1917, when Brooklyn State Senator Calder was talking up his “Daylight Saving” idea, many future-opponents started, at that time, to smell (and prepare for) a fight. As such, when the bill was actually lodged the following year, these opponents of sunlight came out from the dark in full force with every reason NOT to have daylight saving – under the sun: (1.) The theaters would go out of business, as no one wants to attend while the sun is still shining. (2.) The Bible is opposed to it – read Joshua, chapter 10, where he fought the Amorites – during the battle of which God held the sun from going down for one hour – long enough for Joshua to win his battle. (3.) Too much sun is bad for us, claimed some doctors. (4.) Steamship and railway lines would suffer, as their adjusted timetables would confuse passengers. (5.) It violated Home Rule, said Governor Al Smith. The reasons were as endless as they were interesting. But just as the sun will rise tomorrow, so was it eventual that Daylight Saving would come. In the end, the measure won the […]
THE “WET SPECIMEN” OF HALSEY STREET (1899)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** When a body was discovered in the cellar of a brownstone on Brooklyn’s Halsey Street, the police were immediately notified and the “owner” hunted down… The medical profession, like most other professions, was much less regulated in the 19th century than it is today. Those who worked within the medical studies of the period – involving the dissection of corpses, the experimentation on recently live human organs, or the display of exoskeletal remains – were just as similarly unregulated. There was a medical practice, however, which was associated with the medical profession but which also appeared more morbid – it provided for education of medical students through the preservation (and display) of certain organs, animals, or tissue specimens. This practice appears to have fallen, however, into an altogether different grouping of practices – at least as regarded the general public. This was the practice – long important to the preservation of biological specimens for observation and continued study – of the preservation of biological tissue within alcohol-filled jars – otherwise known as “wet specimens.” While these specimens were a common site within a laboratory, hospital, or teaching school, such specimens were rarely known to disappear from these locations and, more rarely so, to find themselves upon the cellar shelves of a […]
A STUDY IN DISMEMBERMENT (1914)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** When the pieces of a dismembered body started showing up in different locations in Brooklyn around Christmas of 1914, it didn’t take long before Brooklyn Detectives traced those body parts to a block on Macon Street in the Stuyvesant section of town. “The two pieces of torso which were found on Friday by boy skaters embedded in ice in a pond between Coney Island and Ulmer’s Park were identified yesterday afternoon as parts of the body of Rufus Dunham, 61 years old, of 752 Macon Street, Brooklyn.” So began the article that was to create a great sensation on Bedford-Stuyvesant’s Macon Street between Ralph and Howard avenues. DREDGING UP THE PAST When we uncovered this story a few years back, we had been researching a house on this block of Macon Street (near to Howard Avenue) for our first House History Book. We had thought it would be interesting to see who else had lived on the block over the past 125 years. During our historical research, up popped this gruesome and sensational story which must have created quite a stir on the block at the time. SEARCHING FOR THE KILLER The murder case, described as “one of the most disturbing that police of the city have had to cope with […]
HALLOWEEN ON THE SUBWAY (1922)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** Those of you who live in New York might have seen costumers on the subway during your commute today. It is less likely, though, that you saw straphangers bobbing for apples. At the time of this cartoon’s publication in the October 29th, 1922 edition of the New York Tribune, the subway was a mere 18-year-old. And the term “straphanger” was not much older – it derived from the (at first leather, and later metal) straps which hung from the ceiling of a street or subway car. “Why not play ‘bite the apple’ in the subway Halloween?”, shows two New Yorkers, a “dudish” man and an “artsy” woman (two typical subway riders of the day?) “bobbing” for apples from those straps. When was the last time you played this game??? Follow @BrownstoneDetec Share ———————————————————————————————————————– The Brownstone Detectives 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.
