BEECHER’S BROWNSTONE GETS A RENO (1940)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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 1940, Nora Sullivan embarked upon a renovation of 66 Cranberry Street. It was an historic brownstone built in the mid-1800s, at some point being occupied by the Joel Osteen of his day, the great abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher. Beecher probably selected the house to be close to his job next door, as the phenomenally popular preacher at Plymouth Church. Before the house had been built, like many other structures in old Brooklyn Heights, two wood frame buildings had graced the spot. These particular structures had been used as a school for boys. Later in the 1840s, though, a “foundling,” deposited on the building’s stoop “in a basket,” was “discovered in the front yard of Mr. Henry Ruggle,” the owner at the time of 66 Cranberry in its previous iteration. The scandal, though, lay in the fact that, upon the baby’s arrival at the mayor’s office – where abandoned babies were apparently brought back then – it was discovered that when the “habilments” were examined, they were “found to be of fine quality and of elaborate workmanship” which were indicative that “its late possessors are an unworthy portion of the ‘upper ten.’” Amongst the other discoveries in the baby’s basket was a “fine cambric handkerchief marked ‘E,’” which was “the […]
DITCHING YOUR HOME’S OUTDATED GAS (1916)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** Every winter, old house owners hear the same old conversations that they heard the winter previous: “I’m thinking about making the switch from oil to gas.” “O, man, you’re going to love it. We did it and it saved us a ton on energy last winter.” “But it’s so expensive.” “But so worth it – you’ll see.” Back in the 1910s, though, no one was converting TO gas – they were converting AWAY from it. NO HOUSE TOO OLD TO BE ELECTRIFIED There is an irony to a 1916 ad which claims that no home was “too old to be electrified.” It begs the question: “How old is too old?” Did people believe that only new homes could be electrified? Did they think that if theirs had not been wired for electricity when it was built that it could not be electrified after the fact? Or maybe they just thought that the house would not be standing long enough for the owner to get any enjoyment out of getting it wired. All good questions. Perhaps they lead to misconceptions that the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of Brooklyn (a forerunner to “ConEd”) was trying to correct – so that they could sell more homeowners their services. WHEN WERE HOUSES ELECTRIFED? If your […]
THE HISTORY IN YOUR BATHROOM WALL (1950)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** Olga Roswell managed to receive “very poor” marks in her French class. She was “interested,” though, in Shakespeare, was “fair” in history, and she performed “fairly good” in mathematics. All of this academic patchiness, came to us from the St. Michael’s Girls’ School in Bridgetown, Barbados, via Olga’s “Christmas Term, 1950” report card. And this report card Olga managed to “conveniently” leave behind while she was visiting her Aunt Caroline in Brooklyn the following year. The report card, actually, fell out of the 2d floor bathroom wall during our extensive home renovations, and its discovery and associated story is now local lore and has become a treasured part of the history of our house at 738 Macon Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant. As such, the story has been featured in one of our Brownstone Detectives House History Books in the chapter about the family that owned the house. And Aunt Caroline’s former profession, unknown to us at the time, would soon become the missing piece of the puzzle that – once realized – caused everything to make sense. FINDING STACEY MAUPIN TORRES. Almost a year ago, as part of the work the Brownstone Detectives does in locating and interviewing former home owners and their descendants, we tracked down a descendant of James and […]
