Category Archives: Brooklyn

Brooklyn

The Montague

The Montague is one of three Queen Anne style apartment buildings designed by Parfitt Brothers on Montague Street; the other two, a joined set of near twins, are just three doors up the street.

The eight-story Montague started out as elevatorless(!) apartments, but were converted at the turn of the century into an apartment hotel (see New York Sun advertisement).

Apartment hotels competed with “bachelor flats” of the era: Daily maid service was included, but there were no kitchens – residents could take their meals in a ground floor cafe on the European Plan.

As the neighborhood changed, so did the building – becoming a welfare hotel, and returning to an apartment building. It’s now a 25-unit co-op, with one- and two-bedroom apartments listing for $750,000 and up.

The Montague Vital Statistics
The Montague Recommended Reading

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The Berkeley / The Grosvenor

The Berkeley / The Grosvenor are a pair of Queen Anne style apartment buildings on Montague Street, mirror-image twins cleverly joined to look like one massive structure.

The brownstone, brick and terra cotta building was restored in 2004.

The Berkeley / The Grosvenor Vital Statistics
The Berkeley / The Grosvenor Recommended Reading

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Franklin Trust Company Building

Franklin Trust Company Building (aka Franklin Tower Apartments) was built to impress. The bank is no more (absorbed through mergers into present-day Citibank), but the building still impresses.

The former bank/office building stands at the corner of Montague and Clinton Streets, on the block where Montague transitions from residential to “Bankers’ Row.” Diagonally across the street are three consecutive bank buildings.

In 2009 Rothzeid Kaiserman Thomson & Bee (RKTB) performed a $10 million “gut renovation” of the building, creating 25 condo apartments plus retail spaces while preserving and restoring the exterior.

Franklin Trust Company Building Vital Statistics
Franklin Trust Company Building Recommended Reading

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Brooklyn Trust Company Building

Brooklyn Trust Company Building, deemed “the most beautiful building on Brooklyn’s ‘Bank Row’,” is well preserved inside and out. The NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission took the unusual step of designating both the interior and the exterior as landmarks.

Chase Bank sold the building in 2007; those owners sold it in 2011, and the new owner is creating condominium apartments (Barry Rice Architects) in the rear (Pierrepont Street) annex.

Brooklyn Trust Company Building Vital Statistics
Brooklyn Trust Company Building Recommended Reading

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The Heights Casino

The Heights Casino is marked by distinctive gables, not tables: Flemish Revival style, applied to a private (and non-gambling) club. It is famed for games, though: tennis and squash; and for high society: the indoor tennis court can be converted to a ballroom.

The club’s former outdoor tennis courts were sold – on condition that the apartment building (Casino Mansions Apartments) to be built would complement the club, architecturally.

(Also see Casino Mansions Apartments.)

The Heights Casino Vital Statistics
The Heights Casino Recommended Reading

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Casino Mansions Apartments

Casino Mansions Apartments lacks the stepped gables of its western neighbor (Heights Casino), but the brickwork is distinctly Flemish bond, and the stone detailing aligns perfectly. No coincidence – the apartment building stands on the site of the Heights Casino’s former outdoor tennis court, land that was sold with the condition that the new building blend in with the old. It helped that the same architect designed both: William A. Boring.

As built, the luxury rental building had one eight-room/two-bath and one nine-room/three bath apartment per floor. Among the “best modern conveniences and improvements” reported by The New York Times in 1910 were steam clothes dryers, sanitary garbage closets, electric plate warmers, porcelain-lined refrigerators, and wall safes.

The apartments are now co-op, with units going for $1 to $3 million.

(Also see Heights Casino.)

Casino Mansions Apartments Vital Statistics
Casino Mansions Apartments Recommended Reading

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Port of New York Grain Terminal

The Port of New York Grain Terminal, the “Magnificent Mistake” in Red Hook, Brooklyn, has been shut since 1965 and is slowly crumbling into the Gowanus Canal. The ruins are now privately owned, apparently used only as a photo/movie backdrop.

The silos were built by the State of New York in 1922 in an attempt to revive Erie Canal traffic: Midwest grain could travel by barge through the Great Lakes, Erie Canal and Hudson River to this terminal, for onward shipment and/or local consumption. Unfortunately, New York’s labor costs drove the traffic to other ports.

Meanwhile, the site has become a challenge course for graffiti artists and photographers: The building is guarded on the north and west by a 12-foot concrete wall and chain link fence; on the east and south by the Gowanus Canal. I got my closeups by accident: The guard apparently went to get his lunch, leaving the gate wide open, when I wandered by. I spent a half hour shooting the grounds unchallenged. When I left, the guard had returned – and was furious. I suspect that the only reason I didn’t get in trouble is that he’d have more explaining to do than I would.

Port of New York Grain Terminal Vital Statistics
Port of New York Grain Terminal Recommended Reading

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Brooklyn Army Terminal

Brooklyn Army Terminal is Cass Gilbert’s monumental all-concrete intermodal warehouse, rushed to completion for World War I. Also known as the US Army Military Ocean Terminal or the Brooklyn Army Base, it was the largest concrete building, when built, and also the largest military terminal in the U.S. As a strictly utilitarian facility, the buildings totally lack the lavish ornamentation of Gilbert’s Beaux Arts and Gothic masterpieces.

Although completed too late to play a role in WWI, the five-million-square-foot terminal moved three million troops and 37 million tons of military cargo during WWII.

The terminal continued to operate through the cold war, as a supply base for U.S. troops in NATO. The most famous soldier to “ship out” from Brooklyn was Elvis Presley, in 1958. But after Elvis left the building, things were pretty quiet until the ’70s, when the Army itself shipped out. New York City bought the Brooklyn Army Terminal in 1981 and began converting it to civilian use in 1984, a process that is still continuing.

Like other industrial parks, Brooklyn Army Terminal is closed to the general public, but Turnstile Tours now has twice-monthly weekend guided tours of the facility.

(Many thanks to Corey William Schneider and the New York Adventure Club, the Facebook-based group that arranges explorations of lesser-known attractions throughout the city’s five boroughs.)

Brooklyn Army Terminal Vital Statistics
Brooklyn Army Terminal Recommended Reading

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Main Brooklyn Post Office

Main Brooklyn Post Office, aka Conrad B. Duberstein U.S. Bankruptcy Courthouse, is one of downtown Brooklyn’s architectural gems. The four-story (plus tower) granite structure is boldly detailed Romanesque Revival. The building originally included federal courtrooms – but the courts have now pushed the original post office functions into the addition, built in 1933.

Both the original building and the annex were restored, inside and out, from 1996 through 2013. But prior to the restoration, the Federal Government wanted to demolish the annex to build a 415-foot-high courthouse tower – a structure that would dwarf the original building.

As The New York Times reported in 1992, “Deirdre Carson, a vice president for land use for the Brooklyn Heights Association, said that the 1891 building was one of the classic architectural structures in downtown Brooklyn and that putting a large building next to it would ruin its visual impact. ‘We’re trading two years of jobs for generations of ugliness,’ she said.” (full story)

Main Brooklyn Post Office Vital Statistics
Main Brooklyn Post Office Recommended Reading

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Random: April 2014

Highlights from photos shot in April, 2014 – but not yet added to a New York neighborhood or specific building gallery.

In this album: