MAD DOGS & BROOKLYN MAYORS (1844)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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 Brooklyn in 1843, there was a dog problem. A MAD dog problem. The people of Brooklyn – in what makes up Brooklyn Heights and the Downtown Brooklyn area today – were getting fed up with the number of strays, a good number of which were exhibiting “mad” tendencies, biting Brooklynites from time to time. A newspaper of the period complained of how “our streets are filled with miserable, half-starved curs whose dismal howlings make night hideous.” They demanded, thus, that a law be enacted to “shield us from that frightful malady – hydrophobia.” A FEAR OF WATER Back in the day, the disease that we know today as rabies was called hydrophobia. The disease was labeled hydrophobia – or a fear of water – because its subjects were not only unable to swallow water, but they had such a fear of it that it sent them into spasms or running from its very presence. And, of course, there was no cure for hydrophobia. Although, there was no shortage of quacks who sold “instant cures” to the masses through the mails or in their offices – such as the goodly Dr. S. Bachelder, across the East River at 343 Broome Street on Manhattan. Bachelder offered “Thompsonian and other Botanic Medicines” for […]
A CURE FOR WEALTH ON CLINTON AVE (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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** Along an avenue shaded with tall oaks and plane trees once sat the home of a rich old recluse who’d been swindled of nearly all of her life’s savings in her declining years. A “tumble down” and “badly dilapidated old three story frame house,” the structure “stood forlornly upon the lot at 439 Clinton Avenue in Fort Greene,” noted the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The roof of the house was “surmounted by a queer little cupola, and the whole structure looks as if it might fall in at any moment.” In short, the Eagle sardonically noted, the house looked as if the owner, Mrs. Caroline Barry, had lived in it ever since the death of her husband “without either painting it or repairing it in any way.” The Eagle was likely going a bit over the top with regards to the house’s condition, as it seemed much out of place situated between stately structures of brick and brownstone all along Clinton Avenue. But as the house has been gone for more than 100 years now, it is impossible to know what its actual state was for certain. What we do know, though, is what it looked like from a drawing done by the newspaper and from Sanborn Fire Insurance maps. From the […]
THE HERO OF THE HALSEY STREET FIRE (1911)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** Late in 1911, on a brisk early November morning, a fire broke out in the ground floor store of a 4-story corner apartment building across the street from Saratoga Square Park. It quickly spread, engulfing the entire building. Smoke pouring out of the store on the ground floor of 801 Halsey Street was first seen by a streetcar motorman, William Coffey, who, thinking quickly, began to clang his streetcar gong to arouse the sleeping inhabitants of the building. Coffey and his conductor, along with their six passengers, descended from the car and rushed to the building to do what they could do to assist in evacuating the residents. The fire had apparently started on the ground floor on the Halsey side of the building in a stationery store run by Wolf Bialik. Next door was a grocery store operated by Ernest Seemeyer. The flames then quickly “shot up the dumb waiter shaft to the roof, mushrooming out on each floor.” DETECTIVE O’HARA TO THE RESCUE Across the street, at No. 98 Howard Avenue, a 37-year-old police detective, Irving A. O’Hara, upon hearing the street car gong, had begun dressing quickly and rushed across the street to assist. By this point, the three families living in the building had made it out […]
