The Stories Your House Could Tell: 732 Argyle Road

1940 NYC Tax Photo

732 Argyle Road was constructed in the spring/summer of 1906 by John R. Corbin’s company. It was one of his 33 single family homes on Argyle between Glenwood Road and Avenue H, yet no two houses look alike. Yes, they were all free-standing wooden frames sitting on massive, rough-faced concrete block foundations with rectangular footprints, peaked roofs, and projecting bays on three sides, but each was slightly different. 732 was a Model C creation, among 30 he developed, crowned by a triangular gable containing a smaller, off-center gable heading a second-floor three-sided bay window. Some models have a simpler gable containing a pair of windows grouped beneath a molded projecting lintel. All were simply elegant.

Germania Real Estate Development Company sold all the plots to Corbin which only a few years earlier had been a virgin woodland known as Lott’s Woods, named for the Brooklyn judge John A. Lott (1806-1878), who had owned the land south of Foster Avenue stretching from the Coney Island Plank Road to Flatbush Avenue. [See insert] The house was first sold to Theodore B. Chancellor, a graduate of Columbia University & NY Law School, with offices at 170 Broadway who had recently formed a company to build a street railway in Buffalo. In 1909 his wife Annie Mae Sprague passed away in the home. A year later the US Census found Annie Mae’s 60 year-old parents, the Wharry’s, also living there (George Wharry was employed as a stereotyper at the Evening Sun), along with Theodore’s 12 year old daughter, Dorothy, and a Norwegian servant, Hilda.

Chancellor did not lack for assets, owning a number of lots along empty fields on Avenues J and K which he volunteered for use as vegetable gardens during World War I. Dorothy, a talented pianist, literally married the boy next door, John A. Currey of 736 Argyle Road, six years her senior in October of 1916, with the wedding taking place in the backyard of 732.

The 1920 Census found the couple living in a two-family house a half-mile away, with their 2 year-old daughter. John was employed as the assistant treasurer of a lumber company. Theodore Chancellor, now retired, was also living in the home, having sold 732 Argyle the year before. He passed away in 1934 in Fort Greene, bequeathing his $5,000 estate to Dorothy.

Morris S. Levien made some alterations before moving into 732 Argyle with his spouse Sophie in November 1919. He was a middle-aged Jewish German immigrant, naturalized in 1890, who owned a series of variety stores in northern Brooklyn. He was also found liable for patent infringement of women’s dress designs he was selling per a 1913 federal court hearing. Within weeks of his arrival on the block, Morris and his neighbors William & Ane Macintosh at 728 Argyle agreed to establish “a mutual auto runway” of 6 feet separating their two buildings. As memorialized in property deeds, each owner gave the other the right to use three feet of their property in return for the right to use the other owner’s adjoining three feet to accommodate “pleasure autos only” traveling from rear garages to the sidewalk.

Levien began placing ads in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle as 1920 dawned, specifying a phone of Kenmore 1591. First the need was for houseworkers in “a home of four adults” and then by 1923, he required “a nurse with pleasant personality for a bedridden woman,” his 60 year-old wife. By1924 the need was for care of “chronic patients, twelve hours a day.” Sophie died in the home on October 13,1924, and within a month Levien, who had earlier rented out his garage, placed this ad: “732 Argyle Sold-Must Vacate Immediately-All contents for sale 9 room house,” which included “invalid chair-bedside table-canvas sedan.”

On November 30, 1924, the Brooklyn Times Union reported the house had been sold to Charles L. Chadwick and his wife, Grace. Chadwick made headlines as a star athlete at Yale University in the mid-1890s, the son of New York City’s Waterworks Commissioner, Charles Noyes Chadwick, a Mayflower descendant with Connecticut roots who passed away in 1920.

1897: Charles Chadwick at Yale

Charles Jr. was appointed as an Assistant District Attorney in Kings County in 1902 and made headlines a year later when he single-handedly subdued and held two robbers on the subway who appeared grateful for the arrival of police officers. Thereafter Chadwick served as an Assistant Corporation Counsel for Brooklyn and began writing novels. While living at 732 Argyle, his mystery adventure, “The Cactus” was published. In Fall 1927 the Chadwicks advertised the house for sale: “Hot water heat - 9 rooms - $17,500,” but it didn’t sell until September of 1928. The Chadwicks moved to Connecticut and then Boston, where Charles taught a literature class at Harvard University.

1925 NY Times Ad

The next residents would also perform alterations on the house before moving in, then stuck around for 26 years. The 1930 Census listed the head of the family as John H. Cornehlsen, born 1867 in Lamstedt, Germany. He emigrated to New York in 1882 and was naturalized in Brooklyn in 1890. He wed Catherine, nine years his junior, in 1892 soon after she emigrated from Germany. Their sons were born in 1907 (John Jr), 1908 (William), followed by Margaret (1909).

To census takers, John Sr. would claim to be a “dairyman” collector for a milk company but in a more reliable passport application, he declared himself a major stockholder for a milk company. Both his sons graduated from Ivy League colleges in 1929, William from Cornell and John from Dartmouth. A year later, William suddenly took ill and died 48 hours later on Argyle Road.

John meanwhile pursued an academic career that took him to schools in Vermont and California, marrying an Iowa girl employed by Columbia University along the way and acquiring a degree in psychology to complement his undergraduate Art major.

Margaret graduated Connecticut College and was a social worker for most of her life, residing with her parents. Her mother Catherine died in 1944 at 732 Argyle Road. In 1948 Jeanne Young of 780 Argyle Road married a Flatbush WW II vet, Carl Runge, at Wells Church on the Corner of Glenwood and they made their home above the Cornehlsens at 732 Argle before relocating to North Carolina. In April 1953 John Sr. died in his bed at the age of 86. At that time John Jr. was a college professor residing with his wife Virginia and two children in Lake Success, Nassau County. By 1959 the Manhattan Phone Book had a listing for “John H. Cornehlsen PhD Psychologist 60 E 42nd St YU-6-5559.” In 1978 John Henry Cornehlsen was listed in the 12^th edition of “American Men & Women of Science: A biographical directory of today's leaders in physical, biological, and related sciences.” He died in 1998 in Manhattan at the age of 92. His sister Margaret died six years earlier in Greenwich, Connecticut.

In January of 1954, David & Pearl Gold bought 732 Argyle Road, to be close to Pearl’s brother, Edmund Preiss, an attorney who lived at 1304 Glenwood on the southeast corner of Argyle Road. David was a ceramic engineer whose job took him all over the world. Their daughter Joni, born 1950, came down with polio soon after arriving here, resulting in surgery and extensive therapy.

Encouraged by her parents to become as independent as possible, she chose a medical career, doing residencies at Downstate Hospital, graduating in 1974. She would become the Director of Pediatric Rehabilitation at NYU for 30 years, training many physicians and making such a significant difference in the lives of children with disabilities that her successful treatments garnered major press stories over the years. In November 2015 Dr. Joan Gold was honored with NYU Langone’s Lifetime Achievement Award and later retired to her home in Riverdale.

In May of 1986 Arjun & Florence Maglani, then living with two children in an apartment on Ocean Avenue found the space they needed when they bought 732 Argyle Road from the Golds.

Arjun and Florence met in Mumbai (then Bombay) in 1961 as teenage disaster relief volunteers. Romance bloomed but religious differences (she was Jewish, he was Hindu) delayed courtship until both emigrated separately to North America where they continued their post-college education. Arjun leveraged studies in electrical engineering to secure a position at New York Telephone in 1970, where for the next 31 years he worked in various technical and administrative positions specializing in revenue assurance. Upon retirement he became a financial risk management consultant.

Florence, who always wanted to be a social worker, obtained a Master’s degree in Educational Psychology at Brooklyn College to complement the MA in Clinical Psychology she earned in India, and was first hired by the NYC Board of Education as a linguist as a result of her proficiency in four languages. In 2022 she finally retired from a 24 year stint as an Adjunct Professor at Brooklyn College.

The Maglanis’ two children have also achieved impressive educational credentials and careers: Rajiv, a Stuyvesant HS and MIT graduate, is a cyber security specialist while Geetal has a PhD in Educational Psychology and is a school psychologist in Farmingdale.

15 years ago Eileen Brennan of Dekoven Court recruited Arjun as a My Own Book (MYOB) volunteer and he and Florence are still actively involved with this charity program at PS 217 which provides funds for 3rd graders to buy a book at Barnes & Noble under adult supervision to make sure it’s age appropriate. Florence has also proudly served as chair of the Brooklyn region of Hadassah International.

Looking back on its cavalcade of occupants, if 732 Argyle could talk, it would probably sound erudite and well versed in the wirings of our minds and machines, but with a compassionate disposition.