Building of the Day: 262-270 Gates Avenue

Brooklyn, one building at a time.

Name: Row houses
Address: 262-270 Gates Avenue
Cross Streets: Franklin and Bedford avenues
Neighborhood: Bedford Stuyvesant
Year Built: 1884
Architectural Style: Queen Anne
Architect: Amzi Hill
Other Buildings by Architect: A great many row houses, flats buildings, mansions in Bedford Stuyvesant, Stuyvesant Heights, especially, but also Crown Heights North, Clinton Hill and Park Slope
Landmarked: No

The story: I’ve always liked this group of houses. Back in the mid-’80s I used to take the Gates Avenue bus to work often, when I worked in Clinton Hill, and would pass these houses almost every day. The laundromat has been in No. 264 since those days. I always liked their appearance on the street, and was always intrigued by them. I wasn’t the only one; our editor Cate has always liked them as well, and took the more detailed photographs of the houses below in September. I’m glad to be able to use them now.

Like many other houses on this block and in the immediate neighborhood, these houses were designed by Amzi Hill, one of Bedford Stuyvesant’s most prolific architects. If neighborhoods were named after the architects who designed a great majority of the buildings, Bedford Stuyvesant and Stuyvesant Heights would have long ago been named Hillville. These houses are typical Amzi, showing his love for using common red brick. The corner side of No. 262, showing the chimneys, is signature Amzi. You can always identify his decorative and distinctive corner house exposed chimney work.

The four houses are numbered from the corner house at 262, to 270 Gates. There is no 266 for some reason. The houses were constructed at a time when this part of Bedford Stuyvesant was home to some pretty wealthy people. Gates Avenue was home to the wealthiest of them all, John Gibb, whose mansion was only a block and a half from these houses. Gibb was a rich lace merchant, and soon to be owner of Frederick Loeser’s, one of Brooklyn’s largest and finest department stores. However, by the first decades of the 20th century, the blocks were still very respectable, but had lost their luster. Several of these houses became high end boarding houses for people of good reputation and credentials.

Nos. 262 and 268 have had the most interesting histories. The house at 268 was home to a wonderfully feisty lady named Mrs. R. C. Talbot-Perkins during the first two decades or more of the 20th century. She was a political activist who was very active in the Women’s Suffrage Movement. I’ll have more on her adventures in an upcoming Walkabout.

The corner building, 262, was probably always a small flats building, offering elegant flats in a single family house neighborhood. The ground floor seems to have been doctors’ or other professional offices. Between 1906 and 1920, this address was the home, and perhaps office, of Dr. J. Richard Kevin, who was president of the New York State Medical Society.

In 1925, it was the clinic and offices of Dr. G. M. O’Malley, aka the O’Malley Institute. He advertised his services throughout the year in the Brooklyn Eagle, Standard Union, and the Eagle’s companion publication, the Brooklyn Life and Long Island Society, which only chronicled the doings of the wealthier part of the population.

The good doctor was pushing several treatments that were early 20th century science fiction. One was his “Alpine Sun Ray Light,” which was so powerful it could burn the skin right off your body. An article in Brooklyn Life stated, “This is a tremendous machine, of mercury in quartz, so powerful it is impossible to look at the light without glasses.” He used it to treat tuberculosis and to get rid of skin parasites.

Regular exposure to sunlight was proven to improve the health of tb patients, so it was thought strong exposure would cure a multitude of sins. According to his ads, it was no worse than a slight sunburn. The rays would burn off the epidermis, thereby killing skin parasites, and would also cure other maladies. Skin cancer was probably not one of them.

The other treatment advertised even more than the Alpine Laser Death Ray was his use of x-rays as a general checkup and diagnostic tool. He writes in a long ad in the Brooklyn Standard Union in 1925 that for only $3, patients could get a full fluoroscopic x-ray and a checkup and diagnosis of what ailed them. No matter what your complaint, he took x-rays. “The Fluoroscopic X-Ray Examination enables Dr. O’Malley to see the vital organs at work,” the ad claimed. It was accompanied by a photograph of a doctor looking at a standing patient’s organs through a fluoroscopic x-ray machine.

This tool gave him a “remarkable insight” into the conditions of his patients. The ad went on to say that, “He has gained an enviable reputation and today his name is known all over Greater New York. The Brooklyn Citizen, a daily paper, has written that ‘Dr. O’Malley, the head of the Institution at 262 Gates Avenue, is today considered one of the most able and prominent physicians in the borough.”

However miraculous, able and prominent, he was gone a year later. I wonder what happened to him. I hope he didn’t sit underneath his Alpine Sunlight Ray and vaporize.

(Photo: Christopher Bride for PropertyShark)

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