I walked around a tight enclave of streets located between Bushwick and Varick Aves. on the east and west and Johnson and Flushing Aves. on the north and south, in the area known as East Williamsburg. The region should have its own moniker, but within these bounds only a few streets such as Grattan have any longstanding residences, with the rest of the buildings given over to manufacturing and warehousing in the old days and so it never really required a name. Many of these loft buildings are now populated by residents, so the area retains a fascinating mix of industrial and residential. Culturally this area seems to be what the western region of Williamsburg was in the 1990s, a recently industrial area now populated by students and artists; today, Williamsburg proper has turned into a ritzy region as a 2005 zoning change allowed large luxury towers to be built along the waterfront.
I enjoy taking the L train out to this realm, as its station mosaics are among the best found anywhere. The L, or the Canarsie BMT as it was known, was built between 14th St. in Manhattan and East New York in stages between 1924 and 1928 and was the last lengthy BMT line to see any major construction; in fact the new IND was already under construction in 1928. Knowing perhaps that the BMT-IRT mosaic tile sign plaques were going to be a part of the new IRT, designer/architect Squire Vickers went “all out” and expanded the palate from the earth tones favored on previous BMT/IRT stations and the Canarsie Line got riotous color, with robin’s egg blue and pink added to the palette.
The first of a number of concrete plants I encountered on this trip was Kings Ready Mix, on Johnson Ave. and Bushwick Pl. Brooklyn is coterminous with Kings County, established in the 1670s; formerly, Kings County consisted of six separate towns that eventually coalesced into the City of Brooklyn before it joined NYC in 1898.
Bushwick Pl., just east of Bushwick Ave. between Meserole and Boerum Sts., is an orphaned band in the road that, in the post-colonial era, became Bushwick Ave. Here, we can see the brick tower belonging to the Hittleman Brewery. The Hittleman Brewing complex is still more or less intact along Meserole St. and Bushwick Pl. The building dates to about 1885 and was originally the Otto Huber brewery, one of Brooklyn’s largest, which at its peak turned out 10,000 bottles of beer per day. Huber had purchased the Hoerger brewery in 1866. Huber passed away in 1890 and in the 1920s, the Huber family sold to Hittleman, who operated the brewery until 1951. More recently, this building was where one of Williamsburg’s only remaining beer production plants and one of Brooklyn’s prime tourist attractions, the Brooklyn Brewery, was founded in 1988 before later moving operations to their present building on N. 11th St. near Wythe Ave. In the recent past the building has been used as a ginger ale bottling plant and currently hosts a gymnasium as well as a food wholesaler.
This massive rock on Varick Ave. north of Jefferson Ave., according to Greater Astoria Historical Society director Bob Singleton, is more of a candidate as the famed colonial-era “Arbitration Rock” placed at the border of Kings and Queens County than the one that’s generally accepted to be the actual rock. Some historians believe the rock in the back yard of the Onderdonk House on Flushing and Onderdonk Aves/, seat of the Greater Ridgewood Historical Society, is the real rock.
These nearly embedded tracks behind a chain link fence at Varick and Johnson Aves., as well as a few fenced-off rights-of-way, are all that remain of the Long Island Rail Road’s Evergreen Branch, which at its longest in the 1880s ran from the waterfront in Greenpoint to a connection with the LIRR Bay Ridge Line several miles to the southeast. Originally a passenger line, it survived as a freight conduit until the 1980s. As late as 1998, there were several Evergreen trackways remaining as well as a few RR crossing crossbuck signs.
I still have hundreds of vinyl recordings and a turntable to spin them on but I haven’t done so in years, what with my hundreds of thousands of MP3s I’ve collected on various drives. But vinyl still racks up sales. The days of Sam Goody and Tower Records are gone but here, on the outskirts of the outskirts at #599 Johnson between Gardner and Scott, is the Brooklyn Record Exchange and the selection looked interesting. I saw a 12″ by Hugh Cornwell. Hugh who? The former Stranglers singer, that’s Hugh.
I detoured up Scott Ave. Here at Randolph St. and Scott Ave. is a pair of metal Quonset huts, one housing the New Yorker Cheese Company, and the other, one of the area’s myriad auto repair shops. The Quonset hut by definition is a lightweight structure made of corrugated steel built with a semicircular cross section. It was developed during WWII at Quonset Point, in a naval construction area near Kings Point, Rhode Island; it’s a variant of the Nissen Hut first used during World War I.
I’d no idea the remote Scott Ave. footbridge over the LIRR freight-only Bushwick Branch was recently replaced with a new one. I first spotted the older bridge it had replaced back in… I don’t remember the year; it could’ve been on bicycle forays to the area back in the 1970s. That original 1952 bridge was difficult to navigate because the stairs were steep and unforgiving. This new version somewhat addressed that flaw and it’s easier to ascend. The neighborhood youth have already gotten busy with their inevitable, vandalistic work. The walkway has been completely canopied, no doubt to make it difficult for neighborhood youth to throw objects on passing freights.
Some of the rare residential buildings in East Williamsburg can be found on Grattan St., west of Varick. According to Benardo and Weiss’ Brooklyn By Name, Grattan was named for a 18th-century Irish Parliamentarian, Henry Grattan (1746-1820), who argued for Irish independence and the civil and political rights of Catholics. In the short run, he was unsuccessful, as the 1800 Act of Union merged the kingdoms of Ireland and Great Britain. The Irish Free State would not come into being until 1921.
#92-96 Knickerbocker Avenue, NW corner of Thames, is another of the area’s many massive brick, many-windowed buildings that was probably used for manufacturing but now is populated by many small businesses and perhaps some artists’ lofts, that include Knickerbocker BBQ Bar, Stems Florist and Standard Grooming. When I was coming up, the trend was, grow your hair and beard as long as possible, and while some now grow their beards, many would never leave the loft without looking fastidiously styled, hence the plethora of “grooming studios,” i.e. barbers.
No two firehouses of the old Brooklyn Fire Department seem to be the same and since most were built in the early part of the 20th century, they’re architecturally interesting. The Fire Department of New York has a website entry on all engines and H&Ls (here is Engine 237’s page), but is resolute about not talking about the buildings or architects, preferring instead to concentrate on the important work conducted from them. Engine 37, #43 Morgan Ave. just south of Grattan, was established in the Brooklyn Fire Department in 1895, became part of FDNY in 1898, and was renamed Engine 237 in 1913.
Especially in northern Brooklyn, many firehouses bear evidence of their former membership in the BFD. Engine 237 has this marvelous concrete trigraph with an amazing letter “B.” I challenge designers to run up a typeface based on these three letters. The BFD was established in 1869 and continued until 1898, when Brooklyn became part of Greater New York and the BFD was absorbed into the FDNY.
Roberta’s, on Moore St. near Bogart, doesn’t look like much from the exterior, but inside, there’s a gourmet pizzeria, outdoor picnic tables, and, surprisingly a radio station where I was interviewed by Mike Edison and Judy McGuire on their Arts & Seizures show on Sunday, July 17, 2011. Here’s my show.
—Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)