Walkabout: Castles Made of Air, Part 2

Read Part 1 of this story.

Frank Keith Irving’s houses on Linden Street in Bushwick are an eclectic Queen Anne group of brick and terra-cotta rowhouses that almost defy classification. They have elements of Moorish, Romanesque, Classical, and British Arts and Crafts architecture about them.

They even exhibit details from Asian and Pacific cultures, with swirling curlicues and geometric details. They are Irving’s masterpieces, and like the man himself, hard to pin down.

When did this man who could think so independently in architectural terms decide to go from bricks and mortar, legitimate sponsors and real-life clients, to fanciful but impossible designs and all out chicanery?

As he sat in his cell at the notorious Tombs prison in Manhattan, in 1889, Frank K. Irving must have wondered where it all started to go so wrong. Perhaps it started with an enormous castle that would have enabled man to literally, see heaven.

In 1888, the same year those wonderful houses were being built in Bushwick, the Brooklyn Eagle announced that Frank K. Irving would be the architect of the grandest, most ambitious building project seen in Brooklyn; a massively impressive new Theological Seminary that would house and school hundreds of men in Christian ministry and good works.

The school would take up an entire block, and would have a central tower that rose 580 feet into the air, with a state of the art observatory dome on top, and the world’s largest clock face below.

The rest of the building would be equally stupendous, and included dorm rooms for 500, classrooms, dining rooms, library, meeting rooms, offices, gymnasium, baths and an enormous four story multi-gallery auditorium covered with an immense stained glass dome, and corner towers reaching skyward.

The school would be designed, and its construction supervised, by Irving, and its general director was a mysterious Theodore Fuller.

The New York Times corroborated the story by mentioning that this Union Theological Institute was to be put together by a syndicate of investors headed by a Mr. F.C. Mardan of Jersey City, designed to be an international way station and retreat for visiting missionaries and any other Christian people visiting the neighborhood, as well as a school.

The project would cost a million dollars, a huge sum at the time when the price of building an upscale home was around $10K. The building would rise on Sackett Street, between New York and Brooklyn Avenues, and would be one of the architectural wonders of Brooklyn.

The Institute would be run, not by one of the mega-preachers or leading theologians of the day, but by a man named Theodore Fuller. Messrs. Irving, Fuller and Mardan could not reveal any of the other names involved in the project, to protect these important men from annoying queries and people looking for contracts, but as soon as all of the details were worked out, they would be revealed.

In the meantime, plans and models of the Institute were available at Frank Irving’s office on Bedford Avenue.

19th century people were not able to do a Google search on any of these people, but it didn’t take advanced technology to figure something may not be on the up and up here. First of all, the project was just too massive to be believed.

A building of that size and scope would have rivaled the Brooklyn Museum in size. (Which wasn’t even in planning at that time.) A project of that importance usually involved a public competition to pick the architect with the best design.

It was highly unlikely that an unknown, even a talented one, would be picked out of nowhere to design something like this. Even established architects would balk at something this big. Also, from the description in the Eagle, more fully elaborated on in the first part of this tale, this building was impossible to build, given the building practices of the time.

Irving proposed massively wide and thick walls to support his towers, and galleried domes. This was before steel construction, and he wasn’t even going to dig a cellar under his basement level, and was basically planning on having the ground built up around the building to help hold it up.

The building would have had to be so bottom heavy to support the top; it would have been an engineering and structural nightmare.

And then there was the business about the Sackett Street location. There was no Sackett St. between NY and Brooklyn Avenues. Sackett had been absorbed by Eastern Parkway over ten years earlier.

There were no records of a Mr. F.C. Mardan, or his consortium of rich, Christian investors. A group throwing around that kind of money would have been in the papers, or known by clergy or charities.

And who was Theodore Fuller, who was going to be the leader of this large Christian institution? He was known by no denomination, no clergy, and no charitable board. A man, who was slated to run the largest seminary in Brooklyn, if not the New York Metropolitan area, was a total cypher.

Not a well-known clergyman, not a scholar of note, a famous or influential theologian, or even a devout businessman. No one knew Theodore Fuller. Except the police. They knew him well.

His real name was Carl Fuller, although early in his criminal career, he went by Theodore Fuller, and he was a notorious writer and seller of policy. A man in the business of the poke moke: a numbers runner.

His first arrest to make the Eagle was in 1877. In 1878, as a 52 year old Theodore Fuller, he was arrested for running a numbers and gambling joint at 559 5th Avenue, in Brooklyn. He was held over for trial, but the case never came to court, and he made bail.

As Carl Fuller, he was picked up several times for running numbers and having numbers paraphernalia on him at the time of his arrest. He ran several more numbers shops.

He even used little girls to run numbers for him, and was arrested for that. In spite of the damning evidence surrounding him, he managed to stay out of prison.

Could he have been the same Theodore Fuller? The age corresponds, as do the con man qualities. Could Frank Irving have been the victim of the con as well?

In order to get the project going, in the spring of 1888, Frank Irving advertised for contractors to submit estimates for their work, and charged them $200 each for each signed contract.

His office, which he shared with another architect, was busy with bricklayers and carpenters coming and going all summer long, and the two young men he employed were busy with plans and projects.

Irving was a talented draftsman, and his office held fine renderings of the Institute and other projects he had completed. He told the contractors that he had submitted his plans for the Theological Institute, and received permits from the Brooklyn Buildings Department.

But one contractor had doubts. John J. Kierst, a Manhattan builder, paid the $200 for his contract, but then decided to do some checking. He found out that no one had ever heard of this Mr. Theodore Fuller, and more importantly, no plans had been submitted to the Buildings Department, and no permits were issued. There was no castle, there was just air.

In March of 1889, Frank Irving was arrested for fraud, taking money under false pretenses for a fictitious project. He sat in a cell in the Tombs, and told the Brooklyn Eagle reporter that he had been approached by an itinerant preacher who had raised the money to build this fabulous Seminary.

He said he had never met anyone else besides Fuller who was actually involved in the project. He thought the whole thing was a legitimate project, and he had intended to build it. He didn’t mean to defraud anyone, and didn’t know what else to say. He would later make his $1000 bail, and went home to his wife, staying with his father on MacDougal Street.

I don’t know what happened next. Everyone disappears for a while. Did they catch Theodore Fuller, either the con man, or some mysterious itinerant preacher? No.

Did Frank Keith Irving go to jail, for how long, and did it end his career? Were there more contractors or investors who lost money? I couldn’t find that out either.

He appears in New Jersey, listed as the architect of a fire house in Passaic in 1896, keeping his hand in, architecturally. But unless there was another F.K. Irving, he’s also known for his work with batteries and electricity, and was the holder of several patents obtained in 1899-1900 for improvements in battery design, and pioneering the use of electrodes.

He may have been back in Brooklyn, with a whole new, important, and legitimate career. A man of many talents indeed.

Perhaps Carl Theodore Fuller was the most talented of all. In 1894 an investigation of old cases by the current District Attorney showed that although he had been tried twice in the early 1880’s for two separate cases involving running a policy, or numbers, operation, Fuller had made bond, and the cases were never closed.

He had been found guilty in one, and never sentenced. A Grand Jury was convened and a lot of testimony from many important people, including former Mayor Low, showed the court system to be a mess, with so many defendants slipping through the cracks, it was ludicrous.

Carl Fuller was one of the names brought up many different times, as an example of a criminal who never paid for his crimes. And he never did. Someone with the name Theodore Fuller later shows up in the Eagle in 1900 running for a minor city office. Was that old Carl? We’ll never know.

Was numbers runner Carl Theodore Fuller the same man who came to Frank Irving as a humble preacher with a vision, or was he the man with a grand scheme that played on Irving’s ego, destined to take him down?

Or was Irving a willing participant in a massive fraud and con job? Could they have gotten enough money from contractors and builders to make it worthwhile, or were deeper, pious Christian pockets being lined up?

Why would this talented architect take part in ripping off contractors, the very people who made his profession a tangible reality?

The possibility of the greatest building Brooklyn had ever known was as lost as the truth in this story. But we’ll always have Linden Street.

[Photos by Suzanne Spellen]