Walkabout: Researching Historic Buildings, Part 1

Read Part 2 and Part 3 of this story.

For those of us who love historic buildings, especially our homes, researching a building’s history can be an interesting, frustrating, rewarding, and sometimes impossible, task. All of those things can be true in one building, because Brooklyn, as the saying goes, is a trip. This article is going to be all about researching buildings in our fair town; the good, the bad and the ugly. I could just list all of the resources, but that would be boring. It should be an adventure! For the sake of illustration only, I’m going to use as an example, a fake building on a real street. Let’s say we want to research the history of 1234 Sterling Place…

Landmark Preservation Historic District Reports: If the building is in an historic district, you are in luck. The LPC may have done the work for you. BUT, if your building is in an early historic district, like say Brooklyn Heights, the first historic district, designated in 1966, you have nothing coming to you. The earliest designation reports are very short in length, and very short on specific information. When Brooklyn Heights was designated, this was new territory, and the LPC was new to designation reports. It’s one page, and only lists the boundaries of the district, and a few words about its worthiness. No building by building descriptions or histories. Nada. You’ll have to go elsewhere.

Later HD reports have much more information, and the newest ones, like Crown Heights North, Prospect Heights, and DUMBO, for example, have a great deal of information, including architect, style, materials, and often a short history, and pictures of significant buildings. Many of the earlier ones are quite detailed as well, although often without photographs, but certainly full of information, and may satisfy your curiosity.

If you don’t live in an historic district, or you do live in Brooklyn Heights, your work begins. There are several guides you can go to on-line, some great books, and several places you need to visit in person. On line first:

The Brooklyn Eagle. I love the Eagle, it was a gossipy paper that included a lot of real estate news, because then, as now, real estate was a spectator sport. They often listed permits for new buildings, sales of property and homes, and ran lots of ads. They also ran special monthly real estate sections, usually on a Sunday, with extensive real estate news, often talking about the development in neighborhoods, or by certain developers and/or architects. These sections often came with pictures. If the home belonged to someone of note, there may be a lengthy and gushy description, or on rare occasions, a photograph or rendering. The ads sometimes included pictures, as well. The Brooklyn Public Library digitized the paper dating from 1841 to 1902.

If your home belonged to someone in society, or was noteworthy in some way, there may be stories about social events in the home, like weddings, parties, and funerals, gossip, or notations of sales. Ads often reveal how often the building was on the market, or what kind of servants they wanted/needed, or even an ad for a lost pet. This information puts a human face on your old building. Real people lived and worked here long before you.

I find their search facility often frustrating and incomplete, but sometimes you can strike gold. Use the “advanced search” and put your address in quotations: “1234 Sterling Place”, to avoid pulling up every listing with the word “place” or “sterling” or “1234”. You’d be amazed how many there are. I usually have the search work chronologically, but sometimes “score” is great if you happen to have an address or block that is listed in a ton of ads. The search will bring up the most important entries first, that is, those with a story attached. Be sure to try spelling “Place”, “Street”, etc. out, as well as trying abbreviations.

If you can’t find it by the actual numbered address, try just the street, and be prepared to weed through a lot of extraneous stuff. While you are on the Brooklyn Library’s site, check over in their photograph collections. They might have your house or building. Search by address, street and/or neighborhood.

The Real Estate Record and Builder’s Guide: Columbia University’s Avery Library has one of the finest collections of architectural archives in the country, and for New York City, including Brooklyn, is the mother lode of historic architectural information. A couple of years ago, they digitized the RERBG, a weekly magazine that catalogued the work of the real estate and building trades of the city: RE sales, mortgages, conveyances, proposed and completed buildings, and more, are all listed with amazing dedication and accuracy from 1868-1922. This is research gold, and the source for most of the LPC’s building info, as well as for architectural and amateur historians as well. Their search function can also be quite maddening, and I have to admit, I would take a tutorial on using it, if they had one, because I know there has to be a better way than some of my attempts to find things.

Using it can be tricky. You can try putting in your address, but most of the time you won’t get anything. That’s because 19th century real estate plots were not listed by address, they were listed by location. 1234 Sterling Place doesn’t mean anything, most of the time. The building would be listed as “Sterling Place, SS 245’ W New York Avenue”, an easy code that means, “Sterling Place, south side, 245’ west of New York Avenue”. You need to do some mental calculations with a Google or Property Shark map, figuring an average of 20’ per house, west of NY Ave, which means going towards Nostrand. Count down 245’, on the south side, and chances are you’ll figure out the address, or come pretty close. After that, the rest of the description, which includes the width, materials, number of stories, etc, may help narrow it down. Since most row houses were built in groups, even if you are one building off, it may be by the same architect, with the same date, something you can generally tell by looking at it. These descriptions are in the “Projected buildings”, or “New Buildings”. Some editions have both, some only “Projected”. There were some years, like 1905, that the Brooklyn edition was a separate book, and Columbia didn’t digitize it. ARGH!!

If you have a general idea of when the building was built, you can use a different search function to scan specific issues by year. This narrower search can often prove useful. If you are really into this, you can also look at each issue, one at a time, page by page. Brooklyn’s entries were usually a separate section, after Manhattan, so you don’t have to troll through all of the buildings in Manhattan and the Bronx. Each section of the magazine, Manhattan and Bronx, and Brooklyn, start with an article on various topics, often quite interesting, and there is a column about real estate deals and what the architects and builders are up to that week. This part of the magazine was the ego page, because it’s obvious that brokers, builders and architects sent their information to the magazine, describing their latest projects. Often you can find valuable information here, but frustratingly, it can be low on specific details, with entries like, “Mr. Smith, the architect, is building 4 homes on Sterling Place for Mr. Jones. They will be brownstone, with all of the most modern conveniences.” Yeah, but Sterling WHERE?

More madness: Many Brooklyn streets had several name changes over the years. The more modern ones, like Reid Street becoming Malcolm X Boulevard, are easy to find. But other name changes were so long ago, you need a scorecard: for example, Sterling Place in Prospect and Crown Heights, was called Butler Street until the late 1890’s. If you aren’t sure when your building was built, use both names in your search.

And still more madness: Heaven help you if you live on a street that has the same name as a Manhattan street, like Fulton Street, or Broadway. The search engine will often give you both. Good luck.

Other on-line sources of information:
Census Records: You can join Ancestry.com or find a friend who has, and look up your address for every ten years from 1890 through 1930. The records go back earlier, but the names are listed without addresses, and are no help. The census can be fascinating. You can see the neighborhood and lifestyles change, as one family houses with live-in servants, become two and three families, the roomers, without servants. Nationalities, ethnicities, religion, race, all can change over the years. A word of caution; these entries are listed by Wards which break down into smaller Assembly Districts. They all changed every ten years, so if you were in Ward 48 one year, you won’t be there the next. There are websites which can help you track down what ward or assembly district your address was in.

Also some census takers had atrocious handwriting, while others wrote in beautiful script. Guess which ones always seem to be the census takers for the properties you are searching for? If the census record skips your house, but lists those around you, look through the rest of the pages for your section. Sometimes the census taker went back. And sometimes they didn’t.

Google and other search engines: You can often find out quite a lot, especially if someone at the address made the papers, or has a Wiki entry. Military people show up a lot, as do scientists and anyone who would have made the public record. Criminals, too.

New York Times and other newspapers: A search on Google can sometimes lead to the Times, and I always check them, anyway, they had good Brooklyn coverage, and often list real estate transactions, society events, crime stories, and other human interest pieces. Other newspapers occasionally come through, too. Use “” in your search to weed out junk.

Next time: The DOB, and other in-person searches, books, as well as anything else I may have forgotten. The property research continues.