Past and Present: Midwood Trust and Title Insurance Co.

A Look at Brooklyn, then and now.

Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I used to wait for the B26 bus underneath the MTA Building on Jay and Willoughby, and spent a lot of time looking across the street at this building which, at the time, housed a men’s clothing shop. It was always well kept, with semi-circular awnings on the arched windows, and certainly looked a lot better than most of the buildings in the area. So when I came upon this photograph from 1928, in the collection of the Museum of the City of New York, I was thrilled to learn some little tidbit of the building’s past. More research would have to be done.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find everything I wanted, but here’s what we have. The Midwood Trust Company was founded in 1920, in Flatbush at 1138 Flatbush Avenue, near Dorchester Road. The company was started with a nest egg of half a million dollars, and its first board of directors and officers were local businessmen, bankers, and brokers. One was a Remsen, a VP at the Flatbush Savings Bank, and others worked for J.P. Morgan and other New York banks and trusts. They were an experienced and well-connected bunch. George Ramsey, the owner and head of the Riker-Hegeman Drug Store chain was elected the first president of the Trust.

Their first branch was finished by the end of 1920, a gleaming white Classical bank on the corner of Dorchester and Flatbush. It was designed by Trowbridge and Ackerman of Manhattan, a firm experienced in banks and other stately commercial buildings. It’s still there, and is now a 7th Day Adventist Church.

By 1928, the Midwood Trust Company had added a Home Title Insurance division to their letterhead, and the parent company had been renamed the Midwood Financial Corporation. The Trust had five branches in Brooklyn, and the Title Company had branches in Brooklyn, as well as in Jamaica and Long Island City, Queens. It seemed prudent to have a major branch in Downtown Brooklyn, so this headquarters and bank was opened in 1929. Unfortunately, my architectural records only go to 1922, so I’m hoping those with better sources can fill in the blanks for us.

The period photograph from 1929 shows the building just as it was being completed. You can just see the name of the building on the Jay Street façade. Although, technically, 45 Willoughby is the long, thin building facing Jay, it seems that the same architect is responsible for the building next door, wrapping around Willoughby, and part of the company at the time. The Midwood Financial Corporation would lease the second floor for their operation, and they may have been here, or in the bank building. They opened for trading opportunities on September 16, 1929. They also announced that they would be opening a life insurance division shortly, as well. It would be interesting to see what happened, as a month later, the Crash of 1929 occurred, leading to the Great Depression.

Other notable Downtown Brooklyn buildings are seen in this period photo: the Brooklyn Fire Headquarters, by Frank Freeman, and further down Willoughby, the NY and NJ Telephone Building, by Rudolph Daus. You also can see the excavation for the IND lines running under Jay Street, which would open in 1932. Today, the Midwood Trust still sports the awnings I used to see twenty years ago, and the ground floor of the Willoughby buildings is home to small shops. Considering how some buildings can change in Brooklyn, these changes have been pretty small, and the building still looks pretty much as it did in 1929. GMAP