THE FIRE AT NO. 382 PARK PLACE (1903)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** All new homeowners begin their “home” journey with a blank slate. This is especially true in the case of owners of very old properties. They have very little information about the history of the structure they will be living in and nothing at all about the people who once lived there. When we meet with clients for the first time and reveal an important historical event involving their house, they begin to realize a very important historical tenet: Each house has a history. For one house, that history may include a tale about a runaway child. For another it could be a bankruptcy that led to a foreclosure on the home, followed by the family’s ignominious departure in the wee hours. For yet another, it may be a fire that almost destroyed the entire house that they had just purchased. For No. 382 Park Place, it was the flames. “THE FIRE CAUSED MUCH EXCITEMENT…” In a newspaper article accompanied by a picture of the firemen fighting the conflagration, the known details were spelled out – from the person who was home to how the fire was reported and what damage was done. “Fire broke out late yesterday afternoon in the house at 382 Park place and the work of the firemen […]
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 WILLIAMSBURG FIRE DEPT (1920)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** From about the early 1920s, comes this black & white Throwback Thursday photograph of the “Men of Hook and Ladder 104 with a hook and ladder, 161-163 South Second Street,” superimposed on the top of a Google Map (courtesy Department of Records and Google Maps). The second pic shows the same men in front of their engine house. The firehouse was established at this exact location in 1885 and exists to this day there. 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.
COULD COLORED MEN PUT OUT FIRES? (1898)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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 1898, a Brooklyn – and New York City – “first” occurred when Fire Commissioner John Jay Scannell assigned the first black man to serve in the Fire Department in Brooklyn. William H. Nicholson, of No. 200 Myrtle Avenue, was a 29-year-old former cement tester who had been born in Virginia. He would become, in a number of ways, the precursor to the many first blacks to be “allowed” to integrate society’s historically “white” institutions in the century to follow. While, in 1891, Wiley G. Overton, another “colored man,” had been the first to be appointed as a patrolman on the Brooklyn police force, Nicholson, as a fireman, was still entering into a conflagration of his own. Patrolman Overton had found his existence on the force to be terminally difficult. Assigned to patrol the Brooklyn “colored district,” he had been transferred around to several precincts because no white officer would sleep in the same dormitory with him. His very presence in every station house had “caused trouble.” Finally, after being subjected to all sorts of “annoyances,” Overton had been “practically hounded from the force” a few years after his appointment. And it was likely that Nicholson knew this. Now, Nicholson had become the Fire Department’s unofficial test case for “colored integration.” […]
ROASTING CORK IN A “HEIGHTS” FIRE (1907)
The Jehovah’s Witness complex in Downtown Brooklyn was once the scene of a roaring early morning 4-alarm fire that threatened to destroy the vast warehouse district that existed there in 1907. Sitting along the waterfront at the location of the fire – on both Columbia Heights and Furman Street – was a cork company, a coffee roasting factory, and an ice plant. SAVING THE WAREHOUSES It is not known where exactly within the complex the fire broke out, but it was determined by many of the residents of the district that the aroma of burnt coffee and cork did not make for a attractive combination that morning. The “oily reek of cork” was in the smell of the smoke throughout the morning, while roasted coffee – roasted twice over – brought residents to realize which warehouses were caught within the conflagration. The buildings in the picture above sat on what is now the Jehovah’s Witness compound and comprised a number of private homes that were still existent within the old warehouse district. Among them was “a frame house of the old style sort, two stories in height, with a mansard roof for an attic.” And in that building Catherine O’Neill, 50, and her bedridden sister, Agnes O’Neill, 65, both former “schoolma’rms,” feared for their lives. SAVING THE SCHOOLMARMS Patrolman Keating, who sounded the alarm, grew concerned as their building was shrouded in black smoke. No one had seen the two women that morning, and he “feared that something had happened to them.” So, […]
