THE “WEIRFIELD” HOUSE ON THE HILL (1850)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** If Bushwick Avenue were a family, it would likely be an entertainingly and curiously dysfunctional clan. It would maybe be something akin to that harmless uncle who comes to Thanksgiving dinner, doesn’t talk about politics, but engages in witty banter and sips a few too many vermouths. Some houses on the avenue present as mindlessly conforming rowhouses — lined up at attention like toy soldiers. Squeezed within some of those rows, however, we sometimes find structures that seem oh-so-slightly out-of-place – as though they were built in – and transported from – another time and galaxy. One such structure is a 172-year-old house that appears as though it should be sitting alone upon a hill with a view to unfolding valleys of pastureland. THE HOUSE ON THE HILL In the mid-1800s, No. 1250 Bushwick Avenue was the only house on the south side of Bushwick Avenue between Weirfield and Margaretta (Halsey) Streets. The house was erected in approximately 1850 and, in its day of glory, stood on a knoll about six feet above street level, flanked on either side by immense maple trees. The grounds sloped gently down to a stone wall, five feet above the grade of the street, which extended along the street frontage from Weirfield street to Margaretta […]
MR. DINKINS’ BULGING FACADE (1977)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** Have you ever wondered what once filled those large lots at the corners of Halsey Street and Ralph Avenue? Every house has a history. You know it is there, but the clouds of the past work to obfuscate the present. Uncovering that history takes some detective work, but with a little time and some gumshoe sleuthing, the answers can be discovered. With regard to 774 Halsey Street – what do we know happened? A fire? Decay? Gas explosion? What do we know about the life of the building? What was it used for? Who owned the building and who lived there? We looked to clues from newspaper archives, fire insurance maps, and physical evidence to unravel that history. This is our report: WHAT HAPPENED to 774? A 4-story brick apartment building – 774 Halsey Street – sat on the southeast corner of the Halsey/Ralph intersection. It had a commercial space on the ground floor facing Halsey Street and one at the rear of the building at 153 Ralph Avenue. The building housed a number of apartments the addresses/entrances of which were on the Ralph side of the building at 149 Ralph Avenue. The apartments of the Ralph-facing side of the building had stacked bay windows, one on each floor. South of […]
“SHAKESPEARE’S GHOST” AT 437 HALSEY (1889)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** The Brownstone Detectives investigates the histories of our clients’ old houses. In the process, we have come across no small number of incredibly juicy stories featuring the houses and their lineage of occupants. Every once in a while, those stories – as stories sometimes do – feature a topic we rarely wade into – the paranormal. While most properties we investigate do not involve the supernatural, it is even rarer still to find an old brownstone that comes with a thoroughly debunked ghost story. No. 437 Halsey Street – in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn – is one of those houses… ***************************************************************************************************** In late 1889, during a strong snowstorm in the City of Brooklyn, word began to get around about the “haunting” of an apartment house at the corner of Halsey Street and Lewis Avenue, along with its complement of frightened and fleeing former residents… “…the snow was blowing everybody in doors yesterday,” started the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, setting the scene for its readers of “an ambitious little ghost story-started out on its career of making trouble. The “trouble” mentioned in this story was the reaction that the rumor of ghosts in the apartment house had engendered. It brought to the sole remaining occupant of the structure a whole host […]
RISE & FALL OF THE STUYVESANT CLOWN (1895)
******************************************************************************************************************************* 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? ******************************************************************************************************************************* Back in the early 1890s, in Stuyvesant Heights, there were clowns everywhere. Roaming and squeezing their little horns, making sad, droopy faces, and generally miming mischief. And everyone came to see them at Halsey Street and Saratoga where they paid a nickel a person to get in. Life for the clowns existed there for at least 20 years, until one day it all came to a halt. The developers had arrived and were threatening the home of the clown, threatening his very existence. BROOKLYN EXPANDS TO BUSHWICK By the mid-1890s, three blocks in the furthest reaches of the Eastern District’s Stuyvesant Heights had surprisingly remained untouched by speculative progress. While feverish land purchasing and selling had gone on all around this valuable real estate for the previous ten or so years, these dusty plots of land would continue to sit like the vestiges of the past that they were – unused farm land. Eventually, though, this land would be put to use by a bunch of clowns – the lots would begin, in 1891, to be referred to as the “circus grounds,” as traveling circuses and shows would begin annually to rent the land for their high profile extravaganzas. But the reign of the Stuyvesant Clown would be relatively short as, […]
SUNSETTING ON A BED-STUY BOULEVARD (1909)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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 1909, a landmark was about to be destroyed. It was quite common, though, at the time for owners to tear down the antiquated wood-frame mansions that dotted Brooklyn’s lamdscape. Since the new brownstone houses had become all the rage in the 1880s, these tinder “firetraps” had become redundant, difficult to sell, and simply unstylish to live in. By the late 19th century, they were being sold, in many cases, for the value of their land as building lots. And with the demise of these historical artifacts, went some truly beautiful examples of mid-19th century architecture, few of which remain with us to this day. THE DE MILLE HOUSE The De Mille house was built around the middle of the 19th century for the family of that name, “and it has been a landmark in that region since the days when it was surrounded by open fields.” Yes, even Bedford-Stuyvesant – today chockablock with brownstone and masonry homes – was once – even before the advent of wood-frame homes – forested land alongside open virgin fields. As a matter of fact, the corner of Quincy and Patchen, in the 1850s, was little more than hills, dales, dirt lanes, and the vague promise of a future suburban city. “Broadway, which is nearby, […]
A JUNGLE MARCHED THRU BED-STUY (1900)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** The grey mastodons pounded threateningly down Howard Avenue past the gloomy darkness of Saratoga Square Park. Lumbering slowly around the corner onto Macon Street, they let forth a great trumpeting roar, swaying rhythmically to and fro. As their long, great shadows danced menacingly on the canopy of the park’s trees, cast vaguely by the faint light of the omnipresent red and green flickering colored torches, they presented a terrifying and foreign spectacle. Hundreds of small boys darted in and out of the gathering throngs to view the intimidating beasts, instilling in the air a noticeably heightened excitement which spread further and further down the block, as the presence of these creatures became known. As these majestic monsters moved towards 738 Macon Street, they let out their crushing roar which now could be felt more by the bones than by the ears. A great moan of excited joy leapt, in a synchronized response, from the lips of the visually excited crowd as each and every person lining the Macon Street parade route viewed the very first elephants. As the grey forms, dabbled in red and green light, diminished in size on their trek towards Ralph Avenue, they were replaced by the great humpbacked dromedaries with their inartful steps and studied looks of […]
THE “OLD LADY OF HALSEY STREET” (1935)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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 the type of story that modern-day house-hunters dream of – a brownstone that, since it was built, has been occupied by the same elderly lady who rarely left the house and never “modernized” it. The gas fittings were original. The details were untouched. Even the furniture was from the 19th century. Its nickname was the “Treasure House,” and it was owned by the “Old Lady of Halsey Street.” THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MARY V. WELSH When Mary V. Welsh died in April of 1935, she had been known as the “Old Lady of Halsey St.” She got the name because little was known about her other than the fact that none of her neighbors was old enough or had lived on the block long enough to have remembered her moving into her house at 425 Halsey Street. The neighbors always remembered her simply being there. She dressed in a style of 50 years previous, never spoke to anyone on the street, and had cats – 9 or 10 of them, as far as they were counted. A relic of another time, the neighbors took notice of her only as the anachronism that she was to them – a connection with a time long forgotten. After her body was found, […]
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 […]
THE BOY HOODLUMS OF HANCOCK 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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** If you were a boy hoodlum in “Bed-Stuy” back in 1899, then it is a good bet that you conducted your “outrages” along that stretch of Howard Avenue between Halsey and Hancock Streets. For it was there that a “small reign of terror” was “inaugurated” during this period, as small gangs of boys “armed with sticks and stones” prowled about the area with determined mal intent. A NEIGHBORHOOD COMPLAINS – THE EAGLE RAILS “The irrepressible and unregenerate young generation of boys in the vicinity of Howard avenue and Halsey street are making existence a heavy load to the law abiding population of that community,” railed the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. “The choicest lot of hoodlums in the city have banded themselves together,” the paper continued “and use that block as a fixed center, from which they conduct a campaign of well planned outrages for a radius of many blocks around.” A CASE IN POINT Two boys, in particular, were reported to the police after having assaulted a “little 10 year old boy who was going to the grocery store for his mother.” The boys, a 14-year-old member of the Earle family living at at 73 Howard Avenue and a boy named Goldstein, living at 96 Howard Avenue, “led the charge upon the […]
THE DAY RIOTERS STORMED BROOKLYN (1895)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** (The above picture shows the New York State militia shooting a man on Halsey Street, near the corner of Broadway. You can see the recently erected elevated train line at the end of the block.) In 1895, Halsey Street near Saratoga Park had become a war zone. The Brooklyn Streetcar strike had begun on 15 January, and before the week was over the agitation would be in full force. The strike, which began with a walkout, would quickly devolve into a pitched battle between the Knights of Labor and streetcar workers on one side and the streetcar line owners, the police and the New York State Militia on the other. The main focus of much of the strikers’ attention in this part of Brooklyn, though, was the Halsey Street Rail Road Barns. These, located near the corner of Halsey Street and Broadway, were where the streetcar line stored its cars, quartered its horses, and from whence the line’s streetcars were dispatched. After the workers had called the strike, 5,500 of them would walk off the job for better conditions. The streetcar line owners (the lines were privately owned and operated at the time) countered this strike by calling in scabs who would attempt to operate the streetcars in the workers’ absence. […]
