Old Brooklyn Heights

Sometimes I do a deep dive “beyond the borders” of Brooklyn Heights. Here’s one of those stories.

A Twitter contact asked me if I knew the back-story of the four Park Slope streets that dog-leg across Fifth Avenue.

Take a look:

Sure enough, these four streets – Warren, Baltic, Butler and Douglass – each have a 30-to-40 foot northward jump as they cross Fifth Avenue from the west side to the east side. All of the other streets in the area’s grid are continuous when they cross Fifth Ave.

In 2022, this building became the home of the Asia Art Archive in America. The non-profit archive is the latest use in the richly varied history of this site.

The current building has been an art studio & residence, a car garage and a private carriage house. And before this building even went up, one or more wood-frame houses were on the site.

After I read this great BKReader piece about landmarking Jacob Dangler’s house at 441 Willoughby Avenue (northeast corner of Nostrand Avenue), I started digging into its history. Surprisingly, no one seems to know its exact age or the architect, despite some good guesses. I found the deets!

This relic of Brooklyn Rapid Transit elevated trains has been hiding in plain sight for decades on Sands Street in Downtown Brooklyn.

Oh, McKenny Street! What a tiny little street that no one talks about anymore. Until a few years ago, you wouldn’t even find it on any street sign. But it has lived on official city maps for over 200 years.

McKenny Street is (mostly) parallel to, and one block to the west of, Hicks Street, in the oldest part of Brooklyn Heights that grew out of the Fulton Ferry Landing area. McKenny originally ran 2 short blocks from Doughty to Poplar Streets. Since the 1950s when the BQE obliterated several blocks around Squibb Hill in the far northwestern corner of the Heights, McKenny has run only from Doughty to Vine Streets.

Ephemeral New York wrote an intriguing post about a 1941 painting by Brooklyn Heights resident Miklos Suba. This is the artwork, titled “York Street/Flint Street Corner (House in Shadow)” –

York Street is easy to find on a DUMBO map, but you can’t find Flint Street today. So the query was: What happened to Flint Street?

(Original post March 6, 2017; updated 2020)

These two houses, 38 Hicks Street and 40 Hicks Street, built very close in time together around 1810, are the oldest houses still standing on Brooklyn Heights.

The full range of available source data I’ve researched all point to the 1810 date, which is backed up with earlier, partial research done by the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Brooklyn Historical Society. The case for 1810 is as convincing as you’ll ever see for a 200-year-old-plus Brooklyn home. While Clay Lancaster’s belief that the houses dated to 1830 has been widely cited, it turns out that he didn’t review all of the data. (And as a result, his “Joseph Bennett House” moniker for 38 Hicks Street is arbitrary…the “Van Cleef House” name would be more accurate, if you’re the type who thinks a vernacular clapboard house needs a name!)

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(adapted from the 2019 Brooklyn Heights Designer Showhouse journal, published by the Brooklyn Heights Association)

Without question, the house dates to the neighborhood’s early days, when only the North Heights was developed and this location would have been at its southern outskirts. The exact date, however, is less certain. Many old houses like this one have an origin story – 13 Pineapple Street is blessed to have three.

(with M. M. Cooper – adapted from the 2017 Brooklyn Heights Designer Showhouse journal, published by the Brooklyn Heights Association)

This area of Brooklyn Heights was once part of the forty-acre country estate of Philip Livingston, a New York delegate to the Continental Congress and signer of the Declaration of Independence. In 1804, a portion of the land was purchased by Teunis Joralemon, a local judge. Livingston Street first appears on the village map of Brooklyn in 1819, but it isn’t until after Joralemon’s death in 1840, when the property was subdivided, that this southern part of Brooklyn Heights began to be developed.