PARK SLOPE URNS vs. BASEBALL BATS (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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** On a still warm September morning in 1914, residents of the homes along the first block of Prospect Park Southwest woke to find something out in front of their houses distinctly off-kilter. As they exited their limestone rowhouses, several of them were shocked to see what appeared to be concrete rubble strewn up and down the block along the sidewalks and within their gates. Leaving their doors and approaching their gates, they began to realize the inanity of the cause – many of their decorative concrete urns, which had been perched peacefully upon the short columns flanking their front gates, had been destroyed overnight. As neighbored surveyed the block, there seemed to be no method to the madness of the demolition of these pieces of architectural ornamentation. Simply put, some neighbors had theirs undisturbed, while others’ urns were a pile of concrete on the sidewalk. The blame was quickly laid squarely at the feet of the local youth – toughs, rowdies, gangs, hoodlums. HOODLUMS It was a common story of the day. Gangs of loafers gathered on corners assaulting women verbally as they passed into the park. Roughs fighting along certain streets at odd hours of the mornings. Rowdies, after drunken trips to Coney Island, ending their nights on a high […]
A BROOKLYN GENTRIFICATION STORY (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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** (ABOVE: “Haying In Brooklyn Borough” shows farmers haying in the foreground while a row of new brownstones interlope in the background.) Chances are, if you are sitting anywhere within Brooklyn at this very moment, then you are sitting on what had once been a farm. Brooklyn began existing as farmland in the 1600s and it began to end that existence in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It was around this time that, in July of 1900, an intrepid Brooklyn Daily Eagle reporter took a trip out to the furthest reaches of Brownstone Brooklyn to see where the confluence of brownstones and farm horses collided. What he found made great copy. And it showed a more rustic world that had very recently existed in such neighborhoods as Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, and other sections of the Eastern District (before houses were built there). The rural district that he trekked was the one that we now refer to as East New York. HAYING IN EAST NEW YORK As our reporter walked further and further south along Pennsylvania Avenue, he saw a district filled with streets and lots as far as the eye could see – which ran in this manner all the way down to Jamaica Bay. Those streets and […]
