122-132 Halsey Street -- the View From the Porch

Brooklyn, one building at a time.

Name: Row houses
Address: 122-132 Halsey Street
Cross Streets: Nostrand and Marcy avenues
Neighborhood: Bedford Stuyvesant
Year Built: 1884
Architectural Style: Queen Anne
Architect: Amzi Hill
Other Buildings by Architect: Row houses, flats buildings and apartment buildings throughout Bedford Stuyvesant and Stuyvesant Heights. Also same in Crown Heights North, Clinton Hill, Park Slope and a couple in Brooklyn Heights
Landmarked: No, but calendared for upcoming designation, hopefully this year

The story: By 1884, when this group of houses was built, Bedford was well on its way to becoming Brooklyn’s fastest growing new neighborhood. Every block in the district had construction going on; it must have been noisy and yet very exciting as well.

In addition to the houses, the neighborhood was also seeing churches, schools and shops going up. As construction on these houses was ending, the new Girls High School was also being built, right beside the end house in this group. This was quite a coup for the neighborhood – the first public high school to be built in Brooklyn.

Houses were selling briskly, and this group must have been quite appealing because they were different from their neighbors. There is a lot of variety on this block, with many different developers and their architects working here over the span of 20 years.

Most of the houses on this side of the block were built in the early 1880s.This group was designed by Amzi Hill, who probably designed at least one group of houses or an apartment building on almost every block in Bedford and Stuyvesant Heights. The man was everywhere.

Like any good architect, he evolved. He partnered with his son Henry later in his career, thus extending the Hill influence. He began with the Italianates and Neo-Grecs of the late 1860s and early 1870s. By the mid-1880s, he was designing in the more free-form Queen Anne style.

This group of houses is very similar to a pair of houses directly behind it, at 73-75 Macon Street, and to a recent Building of the Day on Gates Avenue, all by Amzi Hill. Today’s houses are three pairs of mirrored houses; they all still have the original wooden porches, with amazingly preserved gingerbread trim. The porches are all covered with 100 plus years of paint, but the wood details have survived.

The roof above the porches used to all have decorative ironwork, but much of it is now gone. The houses are a bit narrow, at 17.5 feet, but are generously proportioned in design, with the rectangular bays adding a bit of square footage to the footprint of the houses. Hill, who was a master of brick, uses the contrast of the decorative stone elements against the brick well. These are fine looking houses.

The buyers of these houses were upper middle class, and included doctors, lawyers and merchants. Their children’s weddings were recorded on the social pages, as were their summer trips to the resorts of upstate, Long Island and New Jersey. Their death announcements also made the papers.

George H. Dallon, a stock broker, lived with his family at 128 Halsey. Over the years the papers recorded his daughter’s wedding, then George Dallon’s illness, death, funeral, and finally the auction of his property in 1904. After the presumed sale of the building, ads for rooms for rent start to appear.

The most interesting person in the group was a Dr. Martha Peebles, who lived at 132. She was one of the few female doctors around, and was also a captain of the Woman Suffrage party of the 17th Assembly District.

She was interviewed by the Eagle in response to some “authority” who had declared his opposition to women being involved in any kinds of physical fitness and athletics. She told the paper this:

“I am considering the average home woman, and can you tell me of any man who endures such work as the woman who manages her home and brings up a family? A man flies off at the slightest irritation. He has no patience. A woman can outlast him anytime in such work as sitting up at night, nursing, or anything that requires endurance.”

Above photo: Suzanne Spellen