The hastily-erased words “Consumers Park Brewery” could still be found on the recently razed massive brick building along Franklin Ave. south of Montgomery in the south end of Crown Heights. According to the Food Museum website, “A large group of hotel and saloon-keepers established this Brooklyn brewery in 1897 (for the purpose of sharing profits from brewing and selling beer). The brewery featured a recreation-like décor that included a hotel, a beer garden, and concert facilities. The company merged with the New York and Brooklyn Brewing Company and formed the Interborough Brewing Company in 1913. Subsequently, the company sold out during the 1920s (perhaps due to prohibition). The primary organizer and first president was Herman Raub. After a dispute with the directors, he returned to the hotel business in 1907, and died in 1915 at the age of forty-six.”
This 1912 BMT map shows a Consumer’s Park station once located here, indicating the importance the brewery once had in the neighborhood.
The old Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Island Railroad (which evolved into today’s Brighton Line, the Band Q trains) Consumers Park station was at the still-existing Consumers Park Brewery building at Montgomery St., not the current site of Brooklyn Botanic Garden station. The original Consumers Park station was renamed “Botanic Garden” some time after the Malbone St. wreck. In 1928 the station was closed and replaced by the current Botanic Garden station at Eastern Parkway. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden was constructed on the site of an old ash dump across Flatbush Ave. from Prospect Park in 1910.
The station was again rebuilt in 1998 with a drastically shortened platform accommodating just two 75-ft. subway cars. The renovations also exposed the brick interior of the barrel-vaulted tunnel that takes the line under Eastern Parkway, and the renovations also relocated an old Transit Police precinct to allow a transfer between the Shuttle and the IRT under Eastern Parkway. Very handily, a transfer to the IRT Seventh Avenue Line, which runs under Eastern Parkway, was also built.
Notice on the map that the Franklin Shuttle directly connected to the Fulton Street El, which operated in this neighborhood until 1942. It was only later, in 1920, that a BMT subway connection to the Manhattan Bridge was built under Flatbush Ave.
Meanwhile, the Franklin Shuttle is a handy connector from the Brighton line to the Fulton St. line (in Manhattan terms, the 6th Ave. line/Broadway line to the 8th Ave. line) that the MTA neglected for decades, but finally rebuilt in the late-1990s.
Photo: anywhen.com
The brewery stood near the spot where the Malbone Street subway wreck happened on November 1, 1918. Subway motormen on the BRT had gone out on strike on Nov. 1st, 1918. Dispatchers and supervisors were pressed into service as replacement workers. That day, dispatcher Antonio Luciano was assigned as motorman on the Brighton Line that ran at that time from Park Row over the Brooklyn Bridge (which had train traffic at the time) and Fulton St. to the current Franklin Shuttle. He’d never before operated elevated trains in passenger service.
Luciano had to navigate an S-shaped curve on what would later be called the Franklin Shuttle at Malbone St. The speed limit at the location was posted as six MPH, but those on the scene later reported that he roared through at what must have been 50 MPH. The first car held the rails, suffering only minor damage, but the second and third cars derailed, the second demolished and the third nearly so. About 100 passengers lost their lives, though Luciano was spared.
Soon after, Malbone St.’s name was changed to Empire Boulevard (although a portion of it remains at Montgomery St. and Nostrand Ave.).
Since that time, a signal system has been installed that helps prevent such wrecks. It trips a brake if downhill trains exceed a prescribed limit. The S-curve is still there, but shuttle trains no longer have to negotiate it.
The BRT was reorganized as Brooklyn-Manhattan-Transit—the BMT—soon after the accident, and continued as an independent entity until 1940, when the BMT, IRT and IND subway divisions came under the oversight of New York City board of transportation, the present-day MTA. The new Flatbush Ave. tunnel under Prospect Park began service in 1920, and while the connection with the Fulton St. El was severed and the el itself out of service by 1942, the line, now called the Franklin Ave. shuttle, continued to run some trains all the way to Coney Island as late as 1963.
The tallest object in the general area is the tower associated with the FDNY telegraph station on Empire Blvd. between Franklin and Washington Aves. It’s a gorgeous Italian Renaissance building (1913, Frank Helmle, arch.). Fire calls from local alarm boxes were dispatched from this building until 2008, when those operations were transferred to the MetroTech campus in downtown Brooklyn. I’m not sure what the FDNY has planned for the landmarked building at present. In any case, it’s Landmarks-protected.
Helmle’s fingerprints are all over Brooklyn, including the Prospect Park Tennis House and the colonnade pavilion in Greenpoint’s McGolrick (formerly Winthrop) Park.
I vaguely remember Bond Bread when I was a kid. The Silvercup plant in Hunters Point has become famed for its huge neon sign and as the bakery’s successor business, the TV studios where The Sopranos and many other TV shows were filmed and produced.
But Bond Bread should be remembered as well, as much for this hulking building with a huge clock (1925), on Flatbush Ave. south of Empire Blvd. Perhaps the name is too associated with the longtime clothing store near Manhattan’s Duffy Square which became a concert venue in its final days. Bond, in its day, was also famed for its ryes and the slogan “Bond Makes Good Bread.” No doubt the bouquet of baking bread once permeated the general area. You can’t get more basic than that. In 1997, after several years of idleness, it became the Phat Albert Warehouse and is also home to a gym chain. I hope it won’t become luxury housing, but it’d be nice if that clock could be restored.
This is a former Childs’ restaurant branch on the NW corner of Flatbush Ave. and Lincoln Rd. in Lefferts Gardens. The former chain can always be recognized by something ichthyic on the building facades, like wiggling fish or seahorses. Founded by Samuel and William Childs in downtown Manhattan in 1889, the eatery became one of America’s first restaurant chains until 1961, when its remaining outposts were sold to the Riese Organization (which today runs TGI Fridays outlets, among others). Why Childs’ featured fish on the facades isn’t apparent to me, since it didn’t specialize in seafood.
Lincoln Rd., meanwhile, is the second thoroughfare in Brooklyn named for the 16th President; Lincoln Pl. runs from Park Slope to Brownsville, interrupted only by Grand Army Plaza. Lincoln Rd. begins at East Dr. in Prospect Park and runs east (though it’s one way facing west) as far as New York Ave., where it gains some width and becomes East New York Ave. There’s been some variation in street names in Lefferts Gardens since the early-20th century; Tulip St. became Rutland Rd. and Robinson St. was changed to an eastern extension of Parkside Ave.
There’s a little grid of streets east of the Parade Grounds and south of Prospect Park that have nothing to do with the overall southern Brooklyn nomenclature of numbered and lettered (or at least alphabetically-ordered) streets, St. Paul’s Pl., Woodruff Ave., Caton Ave., Crooke Ave. Philip Schuyler Crooke (1808-1891), a one-term Republican congressman, was married to Margaret Caton of a longstanding Dutch local family, the Martenses. Timothy Woodruff was a Republican congressman and Teddy Roosevelt’s lieutenant governor.
The old Caledonian Hospital complex on Parkside Ave. and St. Paul’s Pl. was converted to upscale residences. It’s now known as 123 On The Park. The hospital closed its doors in 2003 after 90 years. There must’ve originally been a Scottish connection, since Caledonia is the Latin term for Scotland.
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)