Building of the Day: 46 Madison Street

Brooklyn, one building at a time.

Name: Former carriage house, now church
Address: 46 Madison Avenue
Cross Streets: Classon and Franklin Avenues
Neighborhood: Bedford Stuyvesant
Year Built: Sometime between 1880 and 1888
Architectural Style: Italianate
Architect: Unknown
Landmarked: No

The story: As regular readers know, I have a fondness for service buildings, especially carriage houses. As neighborhoods grew and developed, service buildings were often the first to go, in the interests of urban renewal or building for the future. All of our brownstone Brooklyn neighborhoods have carriage houses, some more than others. Bedford Stuyvesant doesn’t have as many as some other neighborhoods, but they pop up here and there, and are always a delight, especially when they are intact.

This one was built sometime between 1880 and 1888. Maps of the area show an empty lot in ‘80, and the building there in ’88. It’s a large building, on a block that developed with middle class speculative housing as early as the 1870s. Perhaps this stable/carriage house was built as a private business, to board several horses, or for carriage rental purposes, or it may have belonged to a private individual from one of the mansions blocks away in Clinton Hill, or one of the nearby streets.

Whoever the owner was, this was a large carriage house, at 25×65 feet, wider and longer than most of the houses around it. I tend to think it was private, because in 1900, a coachman named J. Wilson put an ad in the Brooklyn Eagle, advertising himself. He was looking for a new position as a coachman, after working for the same Brooklyn family for years, and 16 years in the business. He notes in his ad that his present employers were moving out of Brooklyn, and that was why he was looking for a new job. 46 Madison was his address.

By 1912, the building was no longer a carriage house, or even a garage. It was the home of the Madison Bottling Company, a small soda bottling plant. The Bottlers Union was very strong at this time, and conducted raids on bottlers who were not using union workers. The article that mentions this plant, also stated that they seized 23 sodas that were being bottled without union supervision. But they were going to cut the Madison Bottling Co. a break, because it had just joined the union. I have to find out more about this one. One wonders how far those confiscated bottles got before being opened.
In 1914, the building was home to the Eastern Parquet Company, a flooring company. No other information was available on them. I was unable to find any other reference to the building up until the 1980s, when the Municipal Archives show that this was a church, even then, but it had a different name. Today, it is the Earthen Vessels Church.

46 Madison Street is a handsome carriage house building, very well constructed with plain red brick, with brownstone lintels and a handsome arched main entryway. The upstairs windows are generously spaced, probably reflecting the rooms of the coachman’s apartment. The building also has a very well preserved wooden cornice. It’s a great service building and a wonderful little piece of history here on mixed use Madison Street in the old town of Bedford. GMAP

(Photo: Nicholas Strini for Property Shark)