The View From Argyle Heights Is Southward This Time
by Joe Enright
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East 12th Street (Lower Right) Obscured by 65 Million Years
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| 1940: 815 E 12th Street |
For this issue we explored the Howell-O’Neill homestead in the southwestern hinterlands of the realm, where their historic house sits on the highest land in all of West Midwoodia.
First, some facts. On January 1st, 1898, the four outer boroughs were consolidated into New York City, sparking a land-rush frenzy in Brooklyn, where realtors began gobbling up all the farm and woodlands south of Prospect Park. In March the Wood Harmon Company, which billed itself as “a new Boston capitalist firm,” got in on the action.
It started buying large tracts near the rail lines that by 1900 would all be electrified, enabling speedier transport over the only East River bridges to Manhattan (sorry, Queens!). And thanks to "The Mistake of '98," riding from any point to point within the new expanded City would cost only a nickel. Southern Brooklyn was suddenly poised to become one of the first commuting suburbs in America.
Within 18 months Wood Harmon had accumulated 1,000 acres from 225 farms (over 20,000 housing lots). They immediately began selling plots on the installment plan, requiring only a nominal deposit of $1.50, and providing loans to buyers to finance construction of their homes. Thus, their developments were marketed as “homes working people can afford.” But because it sold directly to individual buyers rather than to large-scale builders such as John Corbin, T.B. Ackerman and E. R. Strong – who built West Midwood, Midwood Park, Beverly Square and Fiske Terrace – their first neighborhoods lacked homogenous streetscapes.
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Exerpt on Wood Harmon & Rail Lines
from Joseph Raskin's 2011 Book, "Routes Not Taken" |
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1910 Map - "Hiawatha Road" (Now Ave H)
& A Sparsely Populated Oak Crest |
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1899 May: New York Times Map.
Oak Crest Circled in Red (Center) |
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1903: Rand McNally 815 E 12th Top Center Left in Red.
Note Race Track to West Just South of LIRR |
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| 1906 :815 E 12th St Circled in Red |
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1897: Foster Avenue, A Dirt Path to be "Opened"
From Flatbush Ave to Coney Island Ave (Standard Union) |
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1898 Aug 4: Wood Harmon Lays Water Mains
From Ave H to Ave J Along Coney Island Ave |
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1898 Sep: Wood Harmon Gets No Help from City
(Brooklyn Citizen) |
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1898 Nov: Wood Harmon Still
Gets No Help from City |
Wood Harmon’s original development extended from the south side of Avenue H to Avenue J, and from Coney Island Avenue east to the Brighton line. The company invented a bucolic name for its initial realty foray – “Oak Crest” – inspired by the area’s abundant oak trees and the elevation of the land, gradually sloping upwards from Newkirk Avenue to the LIRR tracks, then sitting on a slight embankment, where the land crested at 40 feet above sea level.
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Proof! Sidewalk in front of 815 E 12th St =
36 Feet Above Sea Level |
After carving Oak Crest out of Lott's Woods – leveling the land, laying down macadamized streets and sidewalks – a hundred building lots went on sale to the public in July of 1898.
Research indicates 815 East 12th Street was built sometime between Summer 1898 and Fall 1899. It was also in 1899 that Dean Alvord bought the land that he transformed into Prospect Park South and three years before Lewis Pounds bought the Ditmas farm. It was also a full five years before Ackerman built Westminster Road in West South Midwood, just across “Hiawatha Road” – a Wood Harmon name for Avenue H that did not stick.
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Excerpt from "Brooklyn's Midwood"
by Merlis, Rosenzweig & Israelowitz |
The house originally looked out on a sparsely settled landscape, interrupted by a racetrack along Coney Island Avenue (extending from Avenue I to Avenue L) and the occasional roadhouse that catered to the gambling crowd. Sitting on the front porch, you would have been able to see three surface railroads: the Coney Island Railroad, 260 feet west; the LIRR Bay Ridge Line, 250 feet south; and the Brighton Beach Railroad, three blocks east, just before it descended into a trench that ran under the LIRR. But East 12th Street was merely a line on a street grid at that time, separated from the rest of Flatbush by empty land stretching all the way to Alvord’s Beverly Road.
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1903 Brighton Line Below, Bay Ridge Line Above
(Looking North Toward Newkirk) |
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| 1905: Fiske Terrace Station on Brighton Line (Top) |
The 1900 Census indicates the first owners were Charles Thomas, a plumber, and his wife, Clare. According to multiple news accounts, while the Thomas’s were attending the Grand Opera House on West 23rd Street in Manhattan on Thanksgiving Eve, 1906, a limelight fell on Clare rendering her unconscious and crippled. In 1909 a jury in Brooklyn Civil Court awarded her $10,000 in damages. Within a month of this favorable disposition, the Thomas’s put their house up for sale for $6,200. But there were no takers and a year later they spent part of their award to build a garage for their new car on the property.
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| 1900 US Census |
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| 1905 NYS Census |
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| 1910 US Census |
In a 1907 ad for a lodger, the Thomas’s described the nearest train station as “Fiske Terrace” on the Brighton line; but in a similar 1909 ad, just after the completion of the grade-crossing elimination project, they called it “Avenue H.” As part of that enormous undertaking which shaped Brooklyn as we know it today, the Brighton tracks were elevated over the LIRR, which was lowered into a trench. This work effectively cut off much of southern Oak Crest from its northern neighbors. But at least the trench made the block quieter, given the constant locomotive traffic on the two tracks connecting a Bay Ridge rail barge to the rest of Long Island. Today that traffic usually consists of one slow train a day along a single track.
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1905 Map - LIRR Over Brighton but at
Grade at Coney (Tunnel at Parkway) |
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| 1906 Jan: Fiske Terrace Showing LIRR Trestle Looking South |
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1906: Fiske Terrace Station
Northeast from Brighton Tracks (1) |
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1906: Fiske Terrace Station
Northeast from Brighton Tracks (2) |
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| 1906 Feb: Fiske Terrace Looking South |
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1907: LIRR & Coney Island Track Crossing
Looking Northeast (1) |
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1907: LIRR & Coney Island Track Crossing
Looking Northeast (2) |
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| 1907: LIRR Crossing BRT Brighton Line at Avenue H |
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| 1911 Jun: Brighton At Oak Crest (NY Times) |
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| 1918: Grade Crossing Report Map |
Meanwhile, the 1910 census still found the Thomas’s on East 12th. They continued to rent out four rooms until finally finding a buyer for the house in 1915, allowing them to relocate to South Orange, New Jersey, where they passed away during the 1940s.
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| 1909 Apr: Ad - 815 E 12th for sale "18x41" |
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| 1910 Apr: Still for sale at $6200 But Need $2400 Cash "18x47" |
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| 1910 Jul: Thomas's Want To Buy A Bungalow |
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| 1913 Jan: Ad for Furnished Room at 815 E 12th St |
The second owners were the Burr family, who would reside in the house until 1947. Samuel Burr, the son of a Park Slope grocer, sold Underwood typewriters for 33 years until New Year’s Eve 1936, when he suddenly died of a heart attack in the home. His eldest son, William, a statistician, and eldest daughter, Helen, a stenographer in a welding factory, became the breadwinners.
In May 1946 the Burrs posted an ad seeking a new home in Nassau County, a “six- room bungalow with gas heat convenient to trains and shopping for $10,000.” In August 1947 another ad appeared for an empty house, indicating the Burrs were successful in their flight to the next new suburbia: “815 East 12th Street - Beautiful, 40x100, 4 bed-rooms; Ditmas Park section; scientific kitchen; 2 car garage; fully detached; 3 blocks from Brighton line; $10,750.” So even in 1947, “Ditmas Park” had more cache than West Midwood, Oak Crest, Fiske Terrace or Flatbush!
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| 1920 US Census |
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| 1930 US Census |
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| 1937 Jan: Sam Burr Obit |
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| 1937 Mar: Burr Not a Wealthy Man |
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| 1940 US Census |
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1940: One of MANY Social
Notices Re The Burr Gals |
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1944 Dec Ninian Burr Dies
at 815 E 12th St |
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| 1947 Aug 815 E 12th For Sale in "Ditmas Park" for $10,750 |
The new buyers were the Sacks family from Coney Island, and it was during the next three decades that the house started to suffer neglect. Solomon Sacks was a locomotive mechanic in the 1920s but then became a vacuum cleaner salesman during the Second World War. His spouse, Bertha – like her husband, Russia-born – immigrated as a teenager, and married Solomon in 1918 in Manhattan. The Sacks had a troubled financial history, suffering foreclosure of their Coney Island home during the Depression. In fact soon after the foreclosure, Solomon Sacks attempted suicide by diving into the Hudson. Bertha outlived Solomon and transferred the house to her son a few months before she died in 1976. By that time the City had placed a sizeable lien on the house for non-payment of taxes, and Bertha was buried in Potter’s Field, which also suggests that she might have been estranged from her family.
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| 1917: Draft Reg Card for Solomon Sacks, Park Ave Manhattan |
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| 1920 Census (Bertha & Solomon Sachs in CT) |
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1937 Nov Bertha Sacks Property
at Mermaid & W 35th St to be Auctioned |
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1938 Sep: Daily News.
Bleak Times for Sacks |
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1942: Draft Reg Card for
Solomon Sacks, age 45 |
The estate sold the home in 1979 to newlyweds Ruby Freiser and Theodore Sitea. Their stay would prove to be the shortest-lived. We tracked Ruby Sitea to Arizona where she is an attorney, employed by the City of Surprise. Ruby and her husband, retired from an academic career which included a PhD from St. John’s University, recalled East 12th Street as being somewhat funky. “It was a very strange mixed bag. The house on one corner was landscaped with a toilet in the side yard which sported a plant. On the other corner was the Hotel Oak. A friend on the block thought the Oak residents were all in the witness protection program. On summer evenings to stay cool they would string a television out to the street and gather around. Most of the houses on the block needed work – for example, the only insulation in our house were newspapers dating back to 1910 – but most of us could not afford to do anything at the time.”
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| 1983: Oak Hotel @ E 12th & Ave H |
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Theodore Sitea's
Dissertation |
In 1984 Bob O'Neill, a social worker, and Linda Howell, a physical therapist – then living in a Park Slope apartment – bought the home from Ruby and Ted, seeking more space for a growing family. They wanted “a house, a porch, a yard, an attic and a neighborhood where our children could walk to school.”
Over the years they improved the house little by little as they could afford it until now it is a restored gem. East 12th Street is also less funky. Linda took the forefront in focusing the attention of the 70 Precinct on the prostitution, gun and drug markets thriving in the Oak Hotel. She singled out the work of Jerry Rahn, our earliest Neighborhood Coordinating Officer: “Many’s the night Jerry would sit in his scooter, shining a light on the Oak to discourage the bad guys.”
Eventually the slumlord was forced to sell and then the City shut down the next owner, which left the building unoccupied for a while. Lately the building has been operated as an adult shelter by a non-profit, Breaking Ground (previously Common Ground). The management of the place still leaves a lot to be desired according to those on the block but it’s definitely an improvement over the Wild West of the 1990s. Fun Fact: Contrary to myth, the Oak was originally a luxury apartment building when it was erected in 1906 and did not become a hotel until the 1930s. But its name is the only living remnant of historic Oak Crest.
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| 1910 Post Card for Oak Apartments |
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| 2018: Oak Hotel @ E 12th & Ave H |
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| 2019: Oak Hotel @ E 12th & Ave H |
Bob and Linda refer to their block as a Dead End – one of nine in our little cut-off haven – not a cul-de-sac. “Do you see any cul’s or sac’s around here?” Linda asked with a twinkle in her eye. Linda served as President of our Community Association for over a decade and upon reflection often wonders how she came to hold such a lofty position when her homestead is technically outside the West Midwoodian border. Indeed, many of the improvements Linda fought for that benefitted our community never reached East 12th.
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| 1940 |
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| 1983 |
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| 2019 |
“We worked hard to get this house,” Linda remembered. “We fought to keep it safe. Our children now live far away and want us to move. But we’re Brooklyn. This is our place.” “Yup,” Bob added. “This is our home.”
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| 2019 |
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| 2019: Dead End...We're Done! |
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William E. Harmon in 1909 & Raskin Book
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NOTE: Thanks to Paul Matus, Bob Diamond, Merlis, Rosenzweig & Israelowitz (see https://amzn.to/2U7FWNQ and https://amzn.to/2MD1tNH), Joseph Raskin, and so many others. Press clips from Brooklyn Eagle except where indicated.
