A TREE FALLS ON PROSPECT PLACE (1901)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** On the night of July 11, 1901, Brooklyn experienced a “Wind Storm” that knocked down a number of trees. One of those fallen trees crossed Prospect Place between 5th and 6th Avenues. One man “barely escaped the fallen tree, with the outer limbs grazing his body.” The storm must not have done much damage, though, as this picture – in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle – was the only reference to it. Just a little over a week earlier, though, trees were falling faster than Brooklyn home prices in 2009, when a wind storm killed two men at Coney Island and caused extensive damage at Parkville (a suburb then just west of Kensington). “Great trees, four and five feet in circumference, were uprooted and hurled across fences and into yards where gardens were the pride of the household,” noted the Eagle. “When the strong winds swept across the open fields between Coney Island avenue and the Ocean Parkway between Franklin avenue and Avenue D,” the Eagle continued, “it carried away with it four frame cottages being erected by the Morris Construction Company.” When the skies had finally cleared, the locals would view the distruction – the suburb was “full of wreckage. Every street was full of fallen trees…” Follow @BrownstoneDetec Share ———————————————————————————————————————– […]
PVT. BUDD SOMERS (A BEDSTUY HERO) (1918)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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 2014, The Brownstone Detectives partnered with the New York City Parks Department to help celebrate the lives of the servicemembers of Bedford-Stuyvesant Heights who made the ultimate sacrifice during the Great War. We researched these heroes to locate pictures, stories, and their descendants to be brought together for a ceremony that dedicated a new “Victory and Peace” war memorial at Saratoga Park. This biography tells the story of one of those servicemembers. PVT. BUDD RUSSELL SOMERS “Budd” Russell Somers was born in Owego, New York, near Binghamton, on 3 March 1891. His family moved to Pennsylvania at some point before the century was out. But, Somers would find himself back in Brooklyn sometime after 1910. A “tool maker” at the John Johnson & Company – at 37th Street and 3rd Avenue – Somers was a tall and slender man with grey eyes and chestnut hair. He had been courting Daisy Elizabeth Saxby when American involvement in the Great War became a reality, and so he did what many other young single men going off to war did – he married her. His marriage was the classic pre-war wedding, taking place less than five months before being “called up” in the draft. When that event occurred, on 10 October, Somers boarded […]
PVT. ARTHUR HOLDSWORTH (A BEDSTUY HERO)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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 2014, The Brownstone Detectives partnered with the New York City Parks Department to help celebrate the lives of the servicemembers of Bedford-Stuyvesant Heights who made the ultimate sacrifice during the Great War. We researched these heroes to locate pictures, stories, and their descendants to be brought together for a ceremony that dedicated a new “Victory and Peace” war memorial at Saratoga Park. This biography tells the story of one of those servicemembers. PVT. ARTHUR VINCENT HOLDSWORTH Arthur Vincent Holdsworth looked for all the world like a little boy. Even after he had joined the Army and went to training at Camp Upton on Long Island, he could not escape the blush of youth. In the picture (right), Pvt. Holdsworth displays that youth, all too surely, along with his inexperience, and maybe just a bit of his great uncertainty for the future. He stands awkwardly erect outside of a barracks, proud in his new uniform, but looking like a schoolboy in his first set of Sunday clothes. Truth be told, he was still a boy yet – still an innocent. But he would mature quickly and, in a war that defined his age, die just as quickly. THE WAR In the grand scheme of things, Pvt. Arthur V. Holdsworth drew the […]
A BROOKLYN FIREBUG’S REIGN OF FURY (1899)
In February and March of 1899, someone was setting fires in crowded tenement houses in the eastern section of Stuyvesant Heights and Williamsburg. They started around the time that the Fire Department had classed the neighborhood of Broadway and Gates Avenue as “highly flammable.” In little more than a month, 14 suspicious fires were reported and, subsequently, doused by the department. The Brooklyn public was both fascinated and horrified by the story. Brooklynites began to watch their houses more closely and found themselves more discriminating regarding people on their street whom they did not know. Firebugs were not an unknown quantity, but this one was putting a good number of fires under his belt and fear into the heart of Brooklyn. DETECTIVE BECKER ON THE CASE! When Brooklyn Police tried to wrap their heads around the spate of arsons, wondering who could possibly be starting them and why, Detective Becker recalled a strange incident where a young Abraham & Straus delivery boy had, one day, bound and gagged himself and pretended to have been knocked unconscious by 12 thieves and had his weekly wages stolen. The boy had eventually admitted his act, but would not say why he had done it. As Brooklyn Police had nothing else really to go on, Capt. Ennis of the Ralph Avenue station detailed Becker to watch the youngster, Irving Taylor, Jr., to determine if he were somehow involved. Detective Becker knew that the 15-year-old was a smoker. He consumed eight to ten packs daily. […]
THE “GOODFELLAS” OF CUMBERLAND STREET
One of the Brownstone Detectives’ first House History Books, No. 231 Cumberland Street: The Story of a House, tells the story of an 1852 antebellum frame home just steps from Fort Greene Park. It’s an action-packed tome, replete with treachery, “poudrette,” “small art,” SROs, and the gangland figures from “Goodfellas.” Here is a brief timeline of the history of this single landmarked property, matched up with “spreads” from the book: THE HISTORY OF A BROOKLYN HOUSE The land beneath which No. 231 would someday rise, started out as a tobacco farm owned by the first Italian immigrant to New York, Pietre Cesare Alberti. The farmland would eventually be built upon in 1851-2, when builder John Ross constructed a row of three homes there. First owned by a woman with a tragic history, a melodrama involving treachery, another man, and an infant daughter – which became the gossip of the newspapers of the time – No. 231 was rented out throughout the the 1850s and 1860s, in addition to many returning Civil War veterans, to merchants and their small families. One of those merchants featured prominently in the founding of the Lafayette Avenue Presbytery Church. Before this, however, he had begun his interesting career as a Night Soil Man – starting a company which, amongst other “agricultural” endeavors, collected human excrement from the backyard privvies of Brooklyn, selling this “compost” to Long Island farmers as the appropriately – if euphemistically – named “poudrette.” The property was then owned by an immigrant, […]
MATTHEW FOGARTY’S LAST DRINK (1885)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** For some, there is no better way to die than while asleep or drunk. For Matthew Fogarty, it was the latter. Leaving a saloon on the corner of Manhattan avenue and India Street on 31 September, 1885, a “Wednesday morning,” Fogarty “fell to the sidewalk and struck his head against a projecting stone, fracturing his skull.” And the papers back then were pretty blunt about the information and its presentation – the headline reads like the title of a poem or popular story. It is difficult to imagine such a piece being published in today’s papers – or a paper taking such a playful tone in the presentation of such a tragic event. But this was what sold back then and people loved to read it. Fogarty was taken to St. Catherine’s Hospital at the corner of Bushwick Avenue and Maujer Street, a distance of some two miles. Had the horse-drawn ambulance been waiting outside the saloon for Fogarty, and had it moved at a good clip of 15 miles per hour, it would have taken about 8-10 minutes for Fogarty to get help. It was likely, though, that it took some time for the ambulance to arrive, then calculating in the 10-minute trip to the hospital, and other factors such […]
