Walkabout with Montrose: What's in a Name?

Montrose:

Several of the buildings you show are familiar to me from growing up in Crown Heights during the 1950s.

Names like Betsy Ross, Adelphi, Traymore, Woodrow Wilson, etc. promised grand lobbies with Neo-Georgian, Tudor, neo-Classical and Gothic-Revival finishes and furnishings. Of these the Betsy Ross was perhaps the most refined, with wing chairs, spindly settees, and white-painted wainscotting one might find in a Colonial-era town house.

"Like a museum," as one of my parents' friends described her lobby on St. Marks Avenue, which at the time had medieval-style furniture and -- even! -- knights' armor leading to the elevators.

In retrospect, pure Disney, of course, but as representative of its era's middle-class values as today's slick condo lobbies. Back then, for rising first- and second-generation immigrants, building lobbies and names provided history and class for people self-conscious about their own provenance. From shtetl to Eastern Parkway, from despised European minority to assimilated American, or better yet, Anglo-American.

Where else would Marjorie Morningstar, Herman Wouk's West- Side upper-middle-class Jewish girl live but in a building called El Dorado? Here was a place so beyond the reach of most Brooklynites that it broke free of WASPy connotations for a mythical status derived from the Spanish conquest of America.

With friends on the West Side, I always enjoyed their houses' names. ("House" is what New Yorkers of my parents' generation called apartment buildings.) Century, Majestic, Normandy, etc., many stylishly Art Deco. Different from places on the East Side that generally had only street addresses. Then again, at the time people on the East Side were rich and secure enough that they didn't need aggrandizement. (Along Park Avenue I think there's only one building with a name, #610, Mayfair House, carried over from its days as a hotel.)

Do the names of these Brooklyn buildings resonate the way they did fifty and more years ago? My guess is that current residents, with their own cultural histories, project into them different meanings. It would be interesting to know what they think.

Nostalgic on Park Avenue

Posted by: NOP at June 9, 2009 4:39 PM

Montrose, I should clarify: the medieval lobby was up St. Marks Avenue from the Betsy Ross, between New York and Brooklyn Avenues. I don't recall its building's name and number, unfortunately. The armor, I'm sure, is long gone.

Nice to know the Betsy Ross is in good shape. I wonder if there are any current tenants who lived there when I was a boy. People were terribly proud of it and referred to it as "the best house in Brooklyn." It may not be anymore, but it had the kind of pre-war apartments everyone covets these days: drop-down living rooms, arches between rooms, pastel tiles in the baths. And from the upper floors looking north, all of the Manhattan skyline stretching into the distance. NOP

Posted by: NOP at June 9, 2009 6:30 PM