The Stories Your House Can Tell: 745 Rugby Road

745 Rugby Road has been the home for seven families during its 120 year history. The first owners were John S. Berry & Elsie Van Winkle, a young couple descended from Dutch settlers. They married in Park Slope in March 1904 and set up house in John’s spacious digs at the (then) luxurious St. George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights. Six months later they purchased 745 Rugby from its builder, the John R. Corbin Company, and sold it within nine months. It’s possible John Berry bought the house as an investment property – it was not uncommon at that time – and Berry was something of a wheeler and dealer in the coal industry. In fact, in 1907 John and Elsie moved to Cincinnati where John served as the treasurer of the Smokeless Fuel Company, an international firm selling anthracite coal (burns slowly, producing a short, blue, smokeless flame, used on ships) with branch offices in Manhattan and London. But Elsie smelled something fishy about the operation and left her husband, returning to Brooklyn. A few years later, their divorce was front page news in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, as was the Federal indictment of Smokeless Fuel and its Cincinnati president in the Southern District of New York for price rigging. 

The second owners would stay a while longer than the Berrys, sticking around from the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt through to Richard Nixon. Walter G. Read, born 1865 in the East End of England, was a commercial painter and illustrator (he signed his work “W.G. Read”). He grew up in Ontario, Canada, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1891 to work on the Columbia Exposition in Chicago. The following year he moved to Brooklyn and promptly married Elinor (“Nellie”) Matthews in Trinity Episcopal Church in October 1892. Nine years younger than Walter, she lived with her widowed Irish mother in a small row house under the Fulton EL’s approach to the nine-year old Brooklyn Bridge. After the wedding, they lived on the 2nd floor of 234 Adams Street, above Nellie’s mother, aunt and two sisters.

Nellie owned a camera, and so a 1896 photo (among many collected in the Read Family Papers within the Brooklyn College Archives) shows Walter and Nellie hovering over a Christmas meal with her family in the Adams Street apartment. The 1900 Census found the Reads still there, with a five- year old daughter, Viola, and Walter listed as a self-employed artist. One of his paintings, “Rough Riders,” depicting Teddy Roosevelt’s daring horseback charge up San Juan Hill in Cuba during the 1898 Spanish-American War, became quite popular as a lithograph, which Read also designed. 

Copies are still plentiful today, selling online for $25. Perhaps it accounted for the Reads’ ability to purchase 745 Rugby from the Berrys in June 1905, although they still needed a $6,150 mortgage, representing 80% of the purchase price.

 

Soon after moving in (Nellie used a photo of the house to announce the move to friends), the Reads installed a large awning covering the entire front porch, as well as awnings for all the front windows on the 2nd and 3rd floors, perhaps in response to record-breaking heat which killed scores of New Yorkers on a single day in mid-July that year. 

Pictures of the family posing during costume parties abound, usually gathered around a magnificent fireplace of inlaid stone which survives today in all its glory. 

1905 Nellie With Lloyd across the road in the side yard of 750 Rugby

1905 Viola age 11 on front porch

Read’s artistic output provided a very comfortable living for the family, judging by their many extended summer vacations. For instance, in 1926, the Reads drove west, stopping in Dayton, Yellowstone, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Las Vegas and San Diego. W.G. wrote in his travel journal on September 26: “At Las Vegas we slept in our car and it developed into a very cold night with some rain....Albuquerque to Las Vegas, 139 miles.”

[Author’s Note: Having recently driven that same distance in 575 miles, I am left to conclude that either W.G.’s odometer was broken or…space aliens.]

1940 NYC Real Estate Tax Photo

Meanwhile, their son Lloyd graduated Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1928 and launched a successful engineering career at Bethlehem Steel and other Pennsylvania companies. But Viola never left 745 Rugby and worked as a saleslady for a fabric wholesaler. The Reads were not immune from the Depression, forced to rent rooms in their home starting in the 1930s, which also coincided with Walter’s retirement. A 75 word obituary in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on November 9, 1945, was the only public notice of W.G.’s passing, although he was said to be “one of the pioneer artists [experimenting] in animated cartoons for motion pictures.” 

1950 US Census. Lines 14-17: Perkins & Reads

The 1950 Census indicates that Nellie and Viola were renting the first floor to Lindsey S. Perkins and Flora, his wife. Perkins, born in northern Florida, was a Brooklyn College professor who published works on the psychology of speech, and orators of the antebellum South. Widely respected, in 1952 he served as VP of the Easten Communication Association. It seems likely he used his communication skills to arrange for the Read Family Papers to be donated to the Brooklyn College Archives. Upon the death of Nellie (1964) and Lloyd (1965, in Basking Ridge, NJ) Viola inherited the house. She sold the home in 1969 and 18 months later joined the Read family plot in Green-Wood Cemetery.

The third owners were Anthony G. Lipari and his wife, Erika Koster. They were married in 1962 and moved from a very narrow Sheepshead Bay house to West Midwood in November 1969. They departed in early 1972, selling to a 30-something Kensington couple, Paul E. Wildstein and his wife of seven years, Jacqueline Schneider, who had a two year old boy, Allen. Not much is known about them, aside from Paul’s 1955 graduation photo in the Lincoln HS yearbook, his eventual death in 1987 at the age of 49, Jacqueline’s current address in Secaucus and Allen’s in California. 

In 1976, Paul deeded the home to his wife, and she sold it in 1982 to Anthony Eppolito and his spouse of eight years, Cynthia Kean, who were renting on Westminster Road, off Beverly. The Eppolito’s remained for 24 years, raising two daughters. Nora died of leukemia as a teenager and Allison now has a family of her own in Staten Island. Cynthia was an Assistant District Attorney in Kings County for many years, eventually becoming a Bureau Chief overseeing all felony prosecutions in the southeast quadrant of Brooklyn. Tony was an illustrator, perhaps channeling the ghost of W.G., and had his own advertising firm for a while. He passed away in Bay Ridge in 2010. Cynthia now lives up in White Plains.

In 2006 they sold the property (for $925,000) to Andrew Weber, who lived nearby on Webster Avenue, and he sold the home within a year, before the real estate bubble burst (for $1,060,000) to Amanda Wallace & Tamara Hartman, who were renting an apartment in Carroll Gardens. Tamara and Amanda raised two adopted boys here, Finn and Jet, until Covid hit and relocation to a large estate in Connecticut ensued.

In January 2023, Amanda and Tammara sold to Tammy Tibbetts and her husband Michael Walters. Tammy, a Jersey gal, is the co-founder and CEO of a girls’ education and empowerment organization, called She’s the First. She also wrote a book based on her experience in the nonprofit world, Impact: A Step-by-Step Plan to Create the World You Want to Live In. Michael, a native of Glasgow, Scotland, does startup scaling, most recently working in education technology, helping companies grow by focusing on purpose, people, and processes.

 

I asked them if their move here was prompted by their toddler Owen needing room to roam beyond their 5^th floor Flatbush condo. “Not exactly,” came the reply. “During the pandemic, we would take long walks and bike rides with our dog Wally from our Martense Street apartment to leafy green Prospect Park South and Beverly Square, and started to dream about living in one of these Victorian homes. On the way to the open house, we walked past Cortelyou Road, discovered West Midwood for the first time and were hooked.”

 

Now having experienced all the seasons here, Tammy and Michael enjoy hanging out on their porch, saying hello to neighbors as they walk by. During a recent visit, Tammy raved about the well-preserved stained glass windows and the parquet wooden floors on the first floor and how much she appreciates the stroller-accessible Avenue H subway station. “We love the Community Association’s events, and Owen really enjoys watching those Q trains go by!”