68 Hicks Street is another surviving frame house built before 1820. Like many of the earliest houses in the north Heights, the original deed transferring ownership of the lot from the Hicks brothers was not recorded. The first mention of the lot in land records is a spring 1819 transfer to Elijah Raynor, for the relatively high sum of $1,000, which must have reflected the fact that the conveyance included both the lot “and the buildings thereon” (a fortunate notation in the documentary record, because normally the early land transfers did not definitively state whether or not a piece of property had already been improved). A transfer in that early season of 1819 implies that the house on this lot was built no later than 1818.
Elijah Raynor was a grocer who ran his original store, connected to a tavern, on Fulton Street, according to the 1822 village directory. A certain Jacob Hubbs is shown operating a grocery at 68 Hicks Street in 1822, but presumably under contract to Raynor, who then shows up himself as the grocer of 68 Hicks Street in the 1825 directory. A brother, Ezekiel Raynor, ran a grocery one corner down the hill on Hicks Street, at the corner of Middagh (in a wood-frame building, since replaced by a brick building, located at 46 Hicks Street).
The Dutch-style double-gabled roof is easily visible on this corner house, and like 24 Middagh Street, typifies the building form of many of the houses constructed in the first 10 to 15 years of development on the Heights.
Old Brooklyn Heights 