Building of the Day: 295 Gates Avenue

Brooklyn, one building at a time.

Name: Former private house, then club house, now church
Address: 295 Gates Avenue
Cross Streets: Franklin and Bedford Avenues
Neighborhood: Bedford Stuyvesant
Year Built: 1869-1870? Perhaps altered or replaced later
Architectural Style: Queen Anne
Architect: Possibly Amzi Hill
Other Buildings by Architect: Row houses, mansions, flats buildings and tenements throughout Bedford Stuyvesant and Stuyvesant Heights. Also in Clinton Hill, Crown Heights, Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope
Landmarked: No

The story: There used to be many more large mansions in Bedford Stuyvesant. If you walk or drive around the neighborhood, it’s possible to come across one or two on a block you never would have thought they’d be on. Many of them just didn’t survive the economic changes, and many of those that did are merely shadows of their former selves. They’ve been chopped up, covered up, covered over and made into lodges, schools and most often, churches.

Gates Avenue was once one of central Bedford Stuyvesant’s premier streets. It’s a long street, stretching from Clinton Hill to Bushwick, and was once home to some very successful and wealthy people, the most successful being John Gibb, whose enormous mansion is just down the street. When Gibb had his house built here, other wealthy people followed, moving into superior speculative housing, much of it developed by Mr. Gibb himself. Other people had houses built themselves.

That appears to have been the case for this house, which was built for Captain Frederick Bolton Langston, a wealthy ship captain. Amzi Hill, who designed many of the earlier houses in this neighborhood, as well as the Gibb mansion, may have designed this house.The house looks more Queen Ann than Italianate, the prevailing style of the day, so perhaps it was added on to in the 1880s, or replaced by an new facade. The records are not forthcoming, although the papers do emphasize that the Captain moved to this address in 1870.

Captain Langston moved here with his wife and three children in 1870, and lived here for the rest of his life, dying in 1906 at the age of 84. British by birth, he had been on the sea since he was 14. He was captain of his own vessel by the age of 21. He made his home in America, and made his fortune running his ships on the lucrative East Coast to South America run. He married Isabella Bowman, and they had two sons and a daughter.

If the Langston name sounds familiar, that’s because one of the sons, also named Frederick, became a well-known architect, whose work appears here often. Alone and with his partner Magnus Dahlander, Frederick B. Langston was responsible for some of the most impressive and ornate Queen Anne style townhouses and apartment buildings built in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Langston’s buildings are well represented in Bedford, Stuyvesant Heights, Crown Heights North, Park Slope and Prospect Heights.

The address was in the news when the Langston family lived here, in 1900, when sons, Frederick and William, and a friend were lost at sea. Like their father, the Langston boys loved to sail, and that fall, their small yacht was caught in a storm and drifted far off course. The family thought they were all dead, and the newspapers were camped out in front of the house. Fortunately, they drifted to Jamaica, where they contacted their devastated families. That story in full can be found here.

None of the Langston children married, and all lived here with their parents most of their lives. After Captain Langston died in 1906, they all stayed on until Mrs. Isabella Langston died in 1912. A few years later, the family sold the house. At least one other family lived in it after that, and in 1922, it was sold to the Foresters.

The Ancient Order of Foresters was a fraternal organization that originated in England in 1834. They trace their history back to actual foresters on the 14th century. The group made its way across the ocean and was established in Canada and the United States. Like most fraternal organizations, they incorporated initially to provide insurance and financial aid to their members.

And like most fraternal organizations, they had their own mysteries, initiation rites, lore and organizational hierarchies. For the men of the 19th and early 20th century, membership in these organizations meant comradery, but also business connections and inroads to higher social status and opportunities. At the time the Foresters of America purchased the house, they had over 25,000 members in Brooklyn and Queens alone. Their headquarters at this house was officially called the Forester’s Temple. News of the sale was in the Brooklyn papers in 1922, with a photograph, seen below.

They bought this house and the house next door, at 293 Gates, and radically transformed them both from a family dwelling to a meeting place with open space, communal kitchen and other necessary changes. They did not change the façade. The Foresters also rented the building out to other organizations for their meetings. As such, it became the J. W. Pearson Post of the American Legion during this time. They owned this house from 1922 to 1938.

The timeline between 1938 and 1950 is fuzzy, but in 1950, the building was sold to the Bibleway Church, an African American Pentecostal denomination. They were located here until they expanded past the capacity of the building and moved further into Bedford Stuyvesant in 1973. They sold the building to the present owners, the Jubilant Pentecostal Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith, known as the Jubilant Church.

One of these churches bricked in the windows of the bay, and otherwise changed the façade. A look at the official tax photo from the 1980s shows that Jubilant also added the new brickface job, and the new entrance. Most of the details that made this such a handsome house are now obscured. But at least it’s still here.

(Photo: Nicholas Strini for PropertyShark)

GMAP