Interesting tidbit (I assume about 184 Kent) in a piece on the sale of Paul Manafort’s Soho condo:
“I think there are buyers who wouldn’t buy it or would be less interested because of it,” Harkov says, citing difficulties with selling off a Williamsburg, Brooklyn, property owned by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Several prospective buyers said they didn’t want to be a party to putting money in the family’s pocket.
Author Henry Miller spent the first decade of his life living at 662 Driggs Avenue. Geoff Cobb, writing in Greenpointers, recently took a look at an article Miller wrote in 1971 about his childhood home:
Though he had been away for five decades, Miller had a crystal clear memory, recalling many fascinating stories from that vanished world of his childhood.
Actually, Miller’s memory about Williamsburg was pretty shitty. He might have sent Pastor John Wells, a “rather pompous and aristocratic minister one of my first pieces of writing from Paris”, but Wells – who died in 1903 – certainly didn’t get it. Wells’ son, who inherited his father’s pastorate at the South Third Street Presbyterian Church, also wasn’t the recipient (Wells fils died in 1929, a year before Miller went to Paris).
The Wells’ church also never became a synagogue (the congregation exists to this day).
And Miller is certainly confused about where he went to high school – “I decided that I would go to Eastern District High School, which at that time was situated in McCaddin Hall on Berry Street or Wythe AVenue, I forget which. There was an Annex to it Situated on Driggs Avenue and South Third Street, just opposite the old Presbyterian Church”.
Eastern District High School was on Division Avenue back then (the building still stands, and is now a yeshiva). The “annex” that he refers to is probably John D. Wells Elementary School, at South 3rd and Driggs.
For more eloquent reminiscences, Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn yields this snippet about Fillmore Place:
It was the most enchanting street I have ever seen in all my life. It was the ideal street – for a boy, a lover, a maniac, a drunkard, a crook, a lecher, a thug, an astronomer, a musician, a poet, a tailor, a shoemaker, a politician. In fact this is just the sort of street it was, containing just such representative of the human race, each one a world unto himself and all living together harmoniously and inharmoniously, but together, a solid corporation, a close knit human spore which would not disintegrate unless the street itself disintegrated.
“MarieBelle’s flagship store [is] in New York’s famous Soho District […and it] has a rustic-style Cacao Market in trendy Greenpoint, Brooklyn”.
Based on this press release, I think that we can put February 19, 2019 down in the calendar as the date that Greenpoint officially jumped the gentrification shark.
“We have not figured out exactly how to handle that” is a quote from MTA Managing Director Ronnie Hakim about overcrowding on the First Avenue and Third Avenue platforms specifically, but it might as well be the mantra of MTA and City DOT when it comes to the new plan to fix the L train tunnel. Most of the surface transit mitigation that was in place for the L train shutdown is off the table (read: the City isn’t doing anything) and the MTA doesn’t really know what additional service it will run for the down times. Service will start to get reduced around 8 p.m. on weeknights, and trains will run with (minimum) 20-minute weekends.
Luckily, very few people go to north Brooklyn on nights and weekends, so it should all work out just fine.
From the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1910:
“The man was Andrew Yankowsky, 22 years old, an iron worker, who occupied a furnished room at 81 Grand street, with Andrew Yankowsky. The two are no relation.”
I’ve always been curious about 335 Grand Street – one of the buildings involved in a partial collapse that I linked to earlier today. It’s design is – odd. Clearly Italianate in design, but the unibrow swag lintels are unique, and the relationship of the lintels to the undersized windows is awkward at best.
Looking at the 1940s tax photo, it does appear that something changed on the facade. The brickwork at the front appears to be toothed in, and the windows have a brick enframement, all of which may be an indication of alterations.
335 Grand Street
(NYC Municipal Archives)
Domino Sugar Refinery, 1905
In 2006, Williamsburg Greenpoint Preservation Association did a very in-depth report on the history and architecture of the Domino Sugar Refinery, parts of which were incorporated into the Landmarks designation report for the Processing House and into the very detailed and comprehensive report that was prepared for the Historic American Engineering Record. Novelty Theater has recently updated the 2006 WGPA report with new information and has collected a host of images, historical and more recent.
At a public hearing yesterday, the Landmarks Preservation Commission took another step toward landmark designation for the Dime Savings Bank of Williamsburgh. Among those speaking in favor of designation were the building’s owner and the Historic Districts Council.
The bank building on Havemeyer Street was constructed in 1908 and design by the architecture firm Helmle & Huberty. The building is the second home to Dime (originally they were on Broadway and Wythe). After the construction of the Williamsburg Bridge in 1903, many of Williamsburg’s banks moved from lower Broadway and Grand Street to the newly-created Williamsburg Bridge Plaza. The plaza itself never became the grand public space that one would expect for this era of the City Beautiful and Beaux Arts era, but did become home to a number of monumental buildings, including the Williamsburgh Trust Company, the Dime Savings Bank, Northside Savings Bank and the First National Bank.
It is nice to see Williamsburg get a bit more attention from LPC, but as one of the oldest and most richly layered neighborhoods in New York, we definitely get short shrift. Meanwhile, Manhattan continues to be carpeted with historic district designations.
Dime Savings Bank of Williamsburgh (1908, Helmle & Huberty architects)
[Photo: Matthew X. Kiernan, via Flickr]
Noticed something odd on the CB1 public hearing agenda for next week [link is to a non-searchable PDF]: three applications for the same address, 103 North 3rd Street. Odd, huh? Unless it is a food court, which it turns out it is. The North 3rd Street Food Market is apparently a thing. And it looks like Carnal, one of Smorgasburg’s regular vendors, will have a stall there. The other two applications are from “Jaja Brooklyn” and “LJ North 3 LLC”, neither of which are up on the SLA website.
Lovely podcast from the Brooklyn Historical Society looking at Francis Morrell’s genealogy of old Williamsburgh, historical geography, African-American history and Puerto Rican migration.
