False Façade

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #79

I saw this tweet a couple of months ago, and of course, the first thing I thought was, “This would make a great entry in my What Do You Think You’re Looking At? series!”

The Brownstone Detectives @BrownstoneDetec

Since 1907, NO ONE has lived in this #Brooklyn Heights #brownstone, No. 58 Joralemon St. What has caused this enviable address to remain - to this day - ABANDONED?

If there’s an abandoned brownstone in Brooklyn, your guess is either some sort of environmental contamination, or some legal issue with the ownership. Otherwise abandonment doesn’t pay, as it were. But the story of this building is much more interesting than anything like that.

First of all, here it is on Google Street View (the one with the dark windows):

The other houses don’t have that full grate over the lower floor area, either.

And what’s with this unusual structure on the rooftop?

From Gothamist:

This Greek Revival townhouse was built in 1847 as a private one-family residence on land owned by a judge named Teunis Joralemon, who had purchased a small section of the 40-acre Livingston estate (once owned by Philip Livingston, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a lawyer, and a slave trader).

Joralemon bought the land in 1804, decades after the Revolutionary War ended and when Willowtown—as this section of the neighborhood was, and is sometimes still, called—“was a thriving community with a lot of houses,” New York Transit Museum curator Jodi Shapiro told Gothamist.

Then the subway came through.

Look at this, from further down in that Twitter thread I linked at the top:

The Brownstone Detectives @BrownstoneDetec

Here is what you see if you LOOK THROUGH THE MAIL SLOT...

It’s a ventilation shaft and emergency exit for the subway! The subway happened to go right under this townhouse, and rather than demolish it, the city purchased it and then gutted it, making the subway infrastructure invisible from the street—and for the erstwhile house’s neighbors.

The Gothamist piece even reports that neighbors could lease the backyard, which is still intact.

This is one of the coolest examples of “adaptive reuse”—the use of a building for a different purpose than intended—that I’ve seen. Read the whole piece and check out the whole Twitter thread for more photos and the full history!

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Related Reading:

Crossing Into the Supermarket

A Lesson in Adaptive Reuse

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #27

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