Building of the Day: 119 Eighth Avenue
The BOTD is a no-frills look at interesting structures of all types and from all neighborhoods. There will be old, new, important, forgotten, public, private, good and bad. Whatever strikes our fancy. We hope you enjoy. Address: 119 Eighth Avenue, corner of Carroll Street Name: Thomas Adams, Jr. House Neighborhood: Park Slope (Park Slope Historic…
The BOTD is a no-frills look at interesting structures of all types and from all neighborhoods. There will be old, new, important, forgotten, public, private, good and bad. Whatever strikes our fancy. We hope you enjoy.
Address: 119 Eighth Avenue, corner of Carroll Street
Name: Thomas Adams, Jr. House
Neighborhood: Park Slope (Park Slope Historic DIstrict)
Year Built: 1888
Architectural Style: Romanesque Revival
Architects: C.P.H. Gilbert
Landmarked: Yes
This double house is regarded by most architectural commentators to be the finest Romanesque Revival private home in the city. It certainly is one of my favorites.
Thomas Adams made his fortune, and that of many dentists to come, with his manufacture of Chiclets gum, and the vending machine that dispensed it. The building was built as a double house, one facing 8th Ave, the other facing Carroll St, both for Adams family members.
There is, of course, the tale of the house being haunted by the spirits of servants who died, trapped in an elevator when the rest of the family was away.
CPH Gilbert, who also designed much of Montgomery Place and Carroll Street, adjacent to this house, was a master of the Romanesque Revival and Queen Anne Style, and his houses are among the Slope’s best and most expensive homes.
He would go on to Manhattan, to design some of the Upper East Side’s most ostentatious chateaus, all quite different from his warm Brooklyn buildings. He is not Cass Gilbert, architect of the Woolworth Building, btw.
The Adams house is a wealth of individual details that make it so good: the magnificent stained glass, the Byzantine leaf ornament and the carved dragons, as well as the ornate wrought iron fencing, and those amazing doors with the fanciful hardware.
I love it all! An important house like this needs to be better taken care of, however, and I hope it doesn’t deteriorate more, quite a surprise for the Slope.
Maybe it’s the unhappy spirits of those unfortunate servants. Property Shark lists 10 apartments in the building, and it seems to have been owned by the same person for a very long time.
[Photos by Suzanne Spellen]
So all of those landmark district signs around Park Slope that refer to Cass Gilbert are wrong??? Why has nobody done anything about this?
I live in the wonderful 115 8th Avenue, which is the half of the building that faces 8th. Our part is a co-op, and the other side, which faces Carroll, is the rental part with the mysterious absentee owner. We love our building and try to take care of it, and have been sad to see the garden of old hydrangeas at 117 razed to make room for a field of woodchips and weeds. I think that’s the haunted half, as I haven’t experienced any ectoplasmic activity in our place.
Regarding Chauncey House in the Heights, should read Joralemon St, not Pierrepont. Got my Pierreponts all confused.
Speaking of Cass, did he ever design anything residential in Brooklyn? I always thought he just did the Austin Nichols Warehouse and the Brooklyn Army Terminal as far as Brooklyn goes.
Thanks MM.
Confusing as all the historic district signs do say Cass (as in the tinyurl photo I attached).
No, etson, that was CPH Gilbert. Charles Pierrepont Henry Gilbert. He designed much of Montgomery, as well as houses on Carroll. He also designed the Daniel Chauncey House at 129 Pierrepont, in the Heights. The doors have similar ornate hardware. His other houses in the Slope have great hardware, too.
Interesting (& confusing!) re Cass Gilbert vs CPH Gilbert, btw.
Cass did (also?) design ‘much of’ Montgomery Place, which is one block down, according to the historic district signs.
http://tinyurl.com/2fhqbde
When I moved to Park Slope in 1970 this building was referred to as the Woolworth mansion, but I guess the connection to that family was apocryphal. It was reputed to have some of the nicest apartments in what was then a barely gentrified neighborhood. I never inquired about apartments there because the owners were also reputed to refuse to rent to Jews [and YES, there was a good deal of Antisemitism in the Slope back then–it’s the only place I ever experienced it].
Nice feature. I love C. P. H. Gilbert’s houses (and Cass’ buildings, too). Has anyone been inside this house? Didn’t C.P.H do that house on Pierrepont and Henry, too.
Had no idea this place had anything to do with Chiclets but Chiclet had a factory in LIC that exploded because of high levels of ambient magnesium stearate used to lightly powder the gooey center of Freshen Up gum. I remember reading about it in a Business Ethics class. Seems they’d ramped up operations to 3 shifts per day and jerry-rigged a German confection machine and were cooling it with liquid nitrogen or something sililar. The explosion may have been cased by an electrical spark. I think over 50 people were killed.