Building of the Day: 12 Whitwell Place

Brooklyn, one building at a time.

Name: Mixed use commercial and residential building
Address: 12 Whitwell Place
Cross Streets: First and Carroll Streets
Neighborhood: Gowanus
Year Built: 1910
Architectural Style: Renaissance Revival
Architect: Unknown
Landmarked: No, but part of proposed Gowanus HD on the National Register of Historic Places

The story: The idea of draining the swampy Gowanus lands and building a canal for industrial purposes knocked around the Brooklyn halls of power for many years, beginning in the early 19th century. But nothing really happened until Edwin Litchfield came along. The powerful railroad magnate bought up the land much of the land now part of Park Slope, from 4th Avenue to Prospect Park, where his home stood. He took a chance on purchasing the worthless swampland between 4th and the shoreline, and then lobbied hard for draining the swamp and establishing a canal.

Digging the canal began in 1853, and muddled along for a number of years as work was completed sporadically. Litchfield had the streets in the Gowanus area mapped out, and other local landlords got involved, and in a long and complicated series of city and private efforts, the bulk of the canal was finished in the 1870s. The creation of the flushing system and flood water sewers, and all of that important development came much later, and has been a never-ending story ever since.

But more important to the BOTD here, as businesses grew along the canal, and on the other streets of Gowanus, homes for the workers who would toil in the warehouses, factories and the docks were also built. There had been homes here since the Dutch settled in the area, but most of them were in Red Hook and Carroll Gardens. The swampland that became Gowanus was not really settled until the 1880s.

They were not fancy homes, but tenements, boarding houses and small row houses divided up for working class families. Many of the buildings had storefronts or businesses on the ground floor, and two or three floors of apartments above. Whitwell Place is a small, one block street with mixed use buildings on one side, and the back of Our Lady of Peach Catholic church and school complex on the other.

The block is a mixture of one story garages and three story mixed-use buildings. This building, called alternately both 12 and 16 Whitwell Place, is the handsomest building on the block. It’s brick, with decorative bands of darker brick running across the upper two stories, with a nice pressed metal cornice and bracketed eaves. Many of the other buildings on this street were basically the same size, and from the looks of it, most of the one story garages look to have been built later than these houses, maybe replacing more of the same, so perhaps this block was more residential than commercial.

If you went by the Brooklyn newspapers, nothing good went on in this neighborhood. The only stories I could find were of poverty, street gangs, horrible accidents befalling children playing in the streets, muggings and beatings, and bodies in the canal. There were a lot of extremely biased and prejudicial accounts of the Irish and Italian immigrants who lived on this block and in the Gowanus area.

Those people living here, and the reporters as well, would be shocked at the revival of the Gowanus area. While industry and residential concerns are mixed, the area is fast becoming the new next thing. The buildings are now used by photographers and artists as live-work studios and the area is now hipper than hip in many places. Apartments in this building were as expensive as many in much more residential Park Slope. The city once despaired in articles in the newspapers that Gowanus was the worst place on earth. How things have changed. GMAP

(Photo:Google Maps)