Dean Street roofscape -- Brooklyn History
Dean Street roofscape, Crown Heights North. Photo by Suzanne Spellen

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of this story.

Back in 2004 or so, a periodical called, most appropriately, “Brooklyn Magazine” began appearing on the newsstands. The monthly magazine was of a high quality, with photographs and articles about neighborhoods, history, and culture, as well as articles about the new things coming into Brooklyn every day.

I think Brooklyn author Jonathan Lethem may have penned an article or two for it. Brooklyn Magazine had its offices on Atlantic Avenue, in the antiques district, very prominently on the block between Hoyt and Bond, where the Hope Vet Clinic is today. This was back when there was an antiques district on Atlantic Avenue.

I liked the magazine, and subscribed to it. One of the topics in an article in 2005 was about the new thing in communication called blogging and the mag published a list of Brooklyn blogs. That was how I discovered Brownstoner.

The blog was in its second year by then. I was working in a job with a lot of down time, and I had plenty of opportunity to immerse myself in the site. I was immediately hooked.

Mr. B. was still working on his renovations, and was inviting like-minded people who were doing the same thing to comment on the site.

He also created a forum where people could exchange the names of contractors and sources, sell or seek architectural salvage, and ask landlord/tenant questions, quality of life questions and other house and neighborhood questions. As time went by, more and more people found the site, and it grew.

I was already involved with another site, called the Old House Forum, which is also still with us. There, people from all over North America talked about old houses of all ages and styles. We exchanged DIY tips, expertise on particular old house traits and problems, like stripping wood and rebuilding just about anything, and posters shared photos of their renovations.

They were a varied bunch, mostly in the Midwest, and while I was deeply involved with the site, there was only one other person posting from New York City, another Brooklynite who used to occasionally post here on the forum.

That meant that although many on the Old House Forum found my brownstone fascinating, they couldn’t help with specific renovation foibles; the vertical living in a brownstone was quite foreign to most, and New York City was terra ingognita.

When I found Brownstoner, I found a group of people who knew what I was talking about, and had similar experiences or issues. I found myself in great company with people like Yenta, Gardens Gal, Slopefarm, Linus Van Pelt, Lothar of the Clinton Hill People, Putnam Denizen, Wasder, Johnife, Mopar, MacD, Bob Marvin, and many, many more.

Some of them, like Yenta, who is still a great friend of mine, and now posts under a different name, were the kind of people I could really relate to, as she and others were do-it-yourselfers like me. I don’t know whether from choice or finances, or both, but in those early days, there were so many more people willing to do the work themselves.

That is one of the biggest differences between Brownstoner of 2004 and Brownstoner of 2014. Back then people wielded power tools and knew how to use them. Today, most are more comfortable wielding a telephone and calling someone to come do the job.

Mr. B. had always been very interested in architectural salvage, and the early days of the blog were full of photos of fireplace mantels, pier mirrors, hall trees, built-ins and other salvage that people were eager to find or sell.

We used to get notices when someone saw a house was being gutted, or when a new load of salvage had arrived at Eddie Hibbard’s emporium.

A call for a specific doorknob could generate many comments back then. The site was very much about old houses, and how to care for them, and bring them back to life from years of abuse and neglect.

This was a different time. The Building of the Day would often be a house that had never been touched, with original details covered with old varnish or layers of paint. Sometimes it was an old SRO, or had been chopped up into too many apartments.

My first post on the site was a question, asking people if it was all that important to have a house staged, or more interesting to see a house in its raw, often messy state. At the time, there was actual debate on the question. Today, almost every house is staged to the nines.

As Mr. B. settled into his new Clinton Hill neighborhood, he began wandering around and taking pictures in neighborhoods that he was totally unfamiliar with. He posted photos from Bed Stuy, Crown Heights, Flatbush, East New York and Bushwick, places very few people that the site’s general demographic were considering as places to live.

The topics and comments on Brownstoner would often wander into social issues and quality of life concerns, and it became clear that not everyone who posted on the site was of the same mind.

I was very naïve in many ways back then. I was a veteran of the Brooklyn house tours, and I guess I thought that most of the people on Brownstoner were all like-minded old house lovers, akin to a bunch of musicians joining hands and singing “We Are the World.”

The house tours tended to be that way, people crowding into someone’s home to admire the woodwork. It didn’t matter what race you were, how old you were, or where you lived -– we were all there to ooh and ah over the fireplaces, fretwork and floors.

Real life, however, was much messier and more complicated. I found out that for many, houses were only investments, neighborhoods were there to be changed, and there were a few out and out racists on Brownstoner. Welcome to the real world.

There were certainly great people here on Brownstoner, but they weren’t the only ones. Mr. B. was now popular enough to have attracted a fair number of trolls, and they all came out from under their bridges when one particular neighborhood was mentioned –- Prospect Lefferts Gardens.

I don’t know why it was PLG, I don’t know if these people lived in PLG, had been rejected by the objects of their hearts’ desires there, or got beat up on the corner of Flatbush and Lincoln, but for a number of years, until Brownstoner began a registration system, PLG would bring them out like flies on dead meat.

They were relentless and vicious. They kept telling people that if someone visited the neighborhood or bought a house in PLG, they were likely to be killed, the victims of violence in a neighborhood where “bullet holes the size of baseballs” would more than likely be their fate.

Several of the most prolific posters at the time also lived in PLG, and the battles on Brownstoner over the desirability of PLG were legendary.

I was posting back then as Crown Heights Proud, usually called CHP, and one day, I decided to stick up for PLG. After all, the comments posted about PLG were the same sorts of comments being made about Bed Stuy and Crown Heights. At the time, I had never been to the neighborhood, and had no idea what it looked like. I most certainly did not live there.

But the main troll who tormented the PLG people decided I did live there, or had lived there, and that I was lying by saying I didn’t. He spent weeks, then months trolling me.

No matter how often I denied that I had ever said I lived there, he wouldn’t let up. Since we didn’t have registration back then, it was easy to hijack someone’s account, and he began hijacking me.

If I wrote a comment, he’d write a comment soon afterwards, signed in with my log-in, and say that I was sorry to have lied to everyone on the site, because I had, in actuality, lived in PLG. He spoofed me day in and day out, on every thread I posted on, always taking a position that I would never take.

Other readers couldn’t tell which CHP was really me. Then, because of my involvement with a community group in Crown Heights North, the troll figured out who I was, and got my name and phone number, which another member of my CHN group had posted on Brooklynian without asking me first.

He began posting that information on the site, adding in all kinds of nasty sexual innuendo, and putting my name and phone number on it. Mr. B. had a new job -– site sheriff. He spent a lot of time deleting this clown’s posts whenever he got really disgusting, and when he began posting personal info.

In case you think I was special, I was not. Mr. B. spent a lot of time policing the site in those days, as the troll, his sock puppets and minions were everywhere, causing chaos wherever they landed. Mr. B spent much of his day removing the trash.

Finally, Mr. B. had had enough, and began the registration requirement on the site. By that time, I had decided to give up being Crown Heights Proud. Internet stalking was a rather new thing back then (this was 2006 or so), and was scary.

I actually reported the troll to the police a couple of times after he wrote some pretty awful stuff and used my address, phone number and a description of me in several of the posts, and threatened to come find me. Fortunately, the troll was all mouth and no action. Thank goodness.

I was not working for Brownstoner then, I was merely a prolific commenter, and never shied away from posts about social issues, and about the real story of life in Central Brooklyn. I loved Bed Stuy and Crown Heights, and defended them to the best of my ability; I always have, and always will.

I became Montrose Morris, a name I picked because he designed great buildings in both Bed Stuy and Crown Heights, the two neighborhoods I was most familiar with, and quite proud of.

Montrose Morris wrote the same long-winded rebuttals to the Crown Heights naysayers as CHP did, Montrose had the same likes and tastes, and the same writing style, and it didn’t take a detective to figure out we were the same person.

But MM never got trolled again by the Brownstoner troll. At least not with the same furious and evil dedication. If that troll changed his or her game and remained on the site, the infatuation with me was more or less over.

In 2007, after I answered a whole lot of readers’ questions about buildings in Bed Stuy and Crown Heights, Mr. B. asked me to write a column. I was quite flattered, and became a regular columnist on the site, starting with Walkabout, and eventually all the rest.

Neither he nor I had any idea how those columns would grow. In the process, I learned an awful lot about a great city and the people who built it. I learn new things every day in my journeys into the past.

I got into this initially because of the architecture, and then I discovered the history that went with it. Our buildings are the ties between every story I write.

Each structure is connected to the heroes and heroines of the past, the crooks and liars, those who struggled to live, those who lived to create, and those who made their fortunes, tried to make things better, and just lived and died in Brooklyn.

We walk with the ghosts of some fascinating people. We live in a changing time where the past disappears for the future almost faster than we can believe possible, and we need to learn what is important to keep, and what we should let go of.

I became a preservationist and a spokesperson for my neighborhood. I’ve made real and true friends with people from this site, and I gained a new profession. I count myself fortunate to be friends with some of the most influential preservationists in the city, and several of them call themselves fans of my work.

The neighborhoods, the architecture, the history, and the possibilities of Brooklyn: They are my passion, and now my profession. After 10 years of Brownstoner, and close to seven years of columns, there are still plenty more stories to tell.

(Dean Street rooftops, George P. Chappell, architect. Crown Heights North. Photo: S. Spellen)


What's Your Take? Leave a Comment

  1. The Brownstoner Troll was interviewed on WABC radio at some point. I think it was 2007? I can’t remember. I’d always wondered whether The Brownstoner Troll and The What were the same individual. Lord knows they both got a lot of press from their activities here. However, after hearing the interview, my sense was that they’re not the same person.

    I’ll also say this much, as much as the trolling of past years was a pain in the behind, the site was much, much more interesting before mandatory registration was implemented. IMHO.

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