Building of the Day: 1-24 Revere Place, a Study in Elegant Urban Design

Brooklyn, one building at a time.

Name: Row houses
Address: 1-24 Revere Place
Cross Streets: Dean and Bergen Streets
Neighborhood: Crown Heights North
Year Built: 1896-1897
Architectural Style: Mixed Romanesque and Renaissance Revival
Architect: Albert E. White
Other works by architect: Similar row houses on Dean Street, St. Marks Ave., Prospect Place in Crown Heights North, also Park Slope and Stuyvesant Heights
Landmarked: Yes, part of Phase III of Crown Heights North Historic District

The story: Brooklyn has quite a few one and two block streets that unexpectedly appear on the street grid, creating semi-private enclaves with their own quiet charm.

Isolated from the street traffic of main thoroughfares, some of these blocks were purposely created to invoke a sense of privacy and exclusivity. Others were simply the practical use of odd-shaped lots, enabling a developer to get the most bang for his buck.

The eastern end of the Crown Heights North Historic District has three such enclaves, but Revere Place was the first. Over the years, this elegantly designed block attracted two notable Brooklyn families.

Initially, the land belonged to the Plummer family, and the street was called “Plummer Place.” In 1896, John A. Bliss, one of Central Brooklyn’s most prolific developers, purchased the land and began building houses on both sides of the street.

Brooklyn Eagle ad, 1897

His architect for the project was Albert E. White, who had worked with Bliss on many of his other projects, including rows of similar houses on Dean Street, between Nostrand and New York Avenues, as well as elsewhere in the neighborhood.

While most houses in the area were built as two family houses, Bliss was counting on the small block’s isolation and quiet to enable him to sell one family houses here.

White had great experience arranging long rows of houses, and he did so on Revere Place quite well, with buildings that are symmetrical to each other and also mirroring the homes opposite.

The houses are arranged in an A-B-C-D-E-A-A-E-D-C-B-A arrangement. The “A” houses anchor the groups and give them their center. They also have an extra story. The rest of the houses are two stories and a basement. There are twelve houses on either side of the street, 24 in total.

The building styles are a mixture of Romanesque and Renaissance Revival, with both stone and brick in different colors and textures. Stained glass was originally found in transoms, and the groups were finished off by a combination of straight and dog-leg stoops, with handsome ironwork fencing.

Bliss advertised that these houses — which at 18 feet wide were a little smaller than his other houses, and less ornate — were a bargain. They sold for $7,900. In contrast, his Dean Street houses at $15,000. He called them “pocket editions,” and they sold quickly.

Photo by Suzanne Spellen

By the turn of the 20th century, the houses had all been sold to professionals and business owners. They included a lawyer, doctor, fruit importer, clergyman, dry-goods store manager, printer, insurance clerk and an electrical engineer. All but two were American-born; one was Canadian, the other English. Almost all of them had servants.

By the 1920s, African Americans began moving into the neighborhood. They were also professional people, and included clergy, real estate men, and others. The 1930s and ‘40s saw a large influx of African Americans, as the development of the A/C lines along Fulton Street, and the IRT lines along Eastern Parkway brought more people into the area.

1 Revere Place. Photo  by Greg Snodgrass for PropertyShark

Two resident families on this block stand out. Between 1941 and 1942, an apartment at 11 Revere Place was home to novelist Richard Wright and his wife Ellen.

Wright’s groundbreaking novel “Native Son” had been published in 1940. He married Ellen Poplar in 1941, and money was tight, so they rented the apartment on a year’s lease.

During the time they lived here, Wright wrote the novella “The Man Who Lived Underground,” and the book “12 Million Black Voices,” a collection of photographs taken during the Depression by the WPA, with prose by Wright.

9 Revere Place. Photo by Suzanne Spellen

Just next door, 9 Revere Place was home to the Eutemy family, which also moved there in 1940. Bert V. Eutemy was of Chinese and Jamaican ancestry, his wife Louise was twenty years younger, and African American. They had two sons, Edward and Loring. Louise’s mother, Bertha Holmes, also lived with them.

The 1940 census taker didn’t know what to make of people of mixed Asian and African heritage, who probably looked more Asian, as they had “Negro” written in for Mr. Eutemy and his sons, crossed it out, and wrote “Chinese” above that in the margin. Louise and Bertha were definitely “Negro.”

Interestingly enough, Bert Eutemy was New York City’s first licensed Chinese undertaker and embalmer. He operated the Chinese Cheung Sang Funeral Home at 22 Mulberry Street in Manhattan. The NYC newspapers translated the name as the “Chinese Wish You Long and Happy Life Funeral Corporation.”

Mr. Eutemy had run his funeral business long before moving to Brooklyn. His conducted the funerals of many prominent and noteworthy Chinatown individuals over the years.

Eutemy was the head of the Chinatown branch of the “Foreign Division” of the Red Cross. In 1925, he presented them with $800 collected from the community for a fund raising drive.

He made the papers across the state in 1930 when he arranged the funeral of Charlie Yee, a popular Chinatown laundryman. Mr. Yee was tall and weighed 275 pounds and died of a sudden heart attack. Bert Eutemy had to have a custom casket made in record time for the funeral parade. Charlie Yee was laid to rest in style.

There were other Eutemy relatives in Harlem and Brooklyn. They were all quite popular and social, appearing in the society pages of the African American newspaper, “The New York Age.” Bert Eutemy was in business through at least 1954. We’ll have to wait until the 1950 census is released to see if the family still lived here through 1950.

Today the block is still a quiet enclave. Most of the houses are well preserved, and many are still home to professors, lawyers and other professional people, most of whom are still African American. It’s one of the great blocks in the newly designated Phase III of the Crown Heights North Historic District, approved in early 2015.

This and top photo by Suzanne Spellen