Walkabout: No Room, Just Store it!

Travel across the United States, well, just travel around Brooklyn, and you’ll find plenty of large buildings offering self storage space. Neighborhoods rich and poor, we all need more space than what we have where we live.

Most storage, it may well be argued, is unnecessary. If we only got rid of stuff we didn’t use and didn’t need, most of us with storage spaces could give them up.

We, as a society, are pack rats, keepers, some of us are even hoarders. Some of us have had to downsize from larger living arrangements, some of us seem to have a lot of records, books and accumulated stuff that we can’t seem to part with, some of us actually need storage space for goods related to our work or avocations.

Whatever the reason, the storage business is booming. And this isn’t new. It should come as no surprise that one hundred and more years ago, people then needed storage too. And many of their storage buildings are still with us. Some familiar, some maybe less so, but all important to the development of our neighborhoods, and our society.

The Eagle Warehouse and Storage Company was built to store goods for private individuals. This Frank Freeman designed warehouse is massive, and was built in 1894, on the site of the old Brooklyn Eagle building, on Old Fulton Street.

At the time of its opening, the warehouse advertised that it was fireproof, and was designed to be a storage facility for furniture and silverware, the latter kept in huge vaults in the basement.

Keep in mind that the silver pieces in a wealthy Victorian home of that time included not just a couple of sets of cutlery, but large silver serving pieces, such as trays, tea and coffee sets, tureens, vases, candelabras and candlesticks, punch bowls and other large pieces, even chandeliers.

The fortress-like design of the building gave clients the assurance that their goods were safe, guarded like a castle. Late 19th and early 20th century advertisements and postcards show moving trucks and wagons busily storing and returning goods.

Part of the Eagle Warehouse became the Brooklyn Law School from 1904 through 1928, it was declared a landmark in 1977, and in 1980 was converted into condominiums.

Further uptown, at the corner of Flatbush and Livingston Avenues is the Pioneer Warehouse. It opened in 1897, the building designed by architect J. Graham Glover. Pioneer was founded by Samuel Firuski, a successful Fulton Street auctioneer.

The warehouse had the largest elevators the Otis Elevator company had ever made, capable of carrying entire moving trucks to the different floors, eliminating the need to unload everything twice. By 1915, the warehouse had several additions, and the ten story building had 1,500 rooms.

In 1911, Louis Firuski, the founder’s son, installed a safe deposit room with a 38 ton door, which he paraded down the street at its installation. Each customer was offered a private booth with available maid and secretarial service and a telephone.

Contemporary advertisements of the day showed the vault and its 14 steel door, and advertised household storage, as well as the safe deposit storage vault.

By the 1920’s, Pioneer was emphasizing records storage, and the Equitable Trust had offices there, with telephone connections to their headquarters in Manhattan. Today the building is still owned by the descendents of Samuel and Louis Firuski, and is used for the storage of business records, both paper and computer.

Nearby, the Peter F. Reilly Storage Company has been a mainstay of Prospect Heights, at 491 Bergen Street. Their handsome storage facility is a large Neo-Gothic limestone, brick and iron building on Bergen near 6th Avenue.

They also advertised fireproof vaults, and the storage of household goods. Peter F. Reilly began his moving and storage business in 1860, and by the late 1880’s was located in warehouses on Dean Street, near Vanderbilt (now part of AY lands).

He advertised often in the Brooklyn Eagle, offering large moving vans which could move furniture, pianos, pier mirrors and other large pieces across the country, or to his warehouses on Dean St.

By the turn of the century, his ads boasted 900 rooms of storage, as well as open air carpet cleaning. Peter Reilly’s son, also Peter F. Reilly, took over the business at his father’s death in 1898, and is credited for the invention of the enclosed moving van. He must have built this facility, as well as a similar one in Manhattan.

The building is a Gothic fortress of storage, with Gothic style ornament, including decorative faces. It’s a great building. The Manhattan facility, as well as this one appears to now store business records, no longer storing furniture and silver for the wealthy.

Not a lot of information about the present company is easily available, but I intend to pursue this topic further at some future time. I would love to know who designed it, and when.

Lastly, in the growing Bedford section, we have the Long Island Warehouse and Jenkins Trust Company at the corner of Gates and Nostrand Ave. I’m not sure if the two companies occupied the building at the same time.

I have an early postcard of the building which calls it the Jenkins Trust Building. This dates from 1906, when the building was finished, and shows it complete with the tower that used to crown it. The building was designed by Helmle, Huberty & Hudswell.

Frank Helmle was a former employee at McKim, Mead and White, and was responsible for St. Barbara’s Church in Bushwick, as well as St. Gregory the Great Church in Crown Heights North, and the Boathouse and Tennis House in Prospect Park, among other fine buildings.

The Jenkins Trust didn’t stay here long, by 1913, advertisements in the Eagle for the Long Island Warehouse offer moving services, as well as storage for furniture, and vaults available for valuables in their highly fireproof facility. The building would pass to the Empire State Warehouse, before being transformed into the IBM Systems Product Division, and then housing.

There are of course, many, many more old storage facilities scattered all across Brooklyn. These were just the tip of the iceberg. See the Flickr page for more period and contemporary photos.

As I find out more information about other facilities, I’ll revisit this topic. Sources: Pioneer Warehouse: Christopher Gray’s Streetscapes column in the NYT. The rest: Brooklyn Eagle, NY Times, AIA Guild to NYC.

[Photos by Suzanne Spellen]