Brooklyn Heights in 1910

Thanks for posting the link…I love shorpy!

I think the tall (relatively) buildings you mention were a mix of apartment buildings and houses on the west side of Columbia Heights. You can make out P.S. 8, Assumption Church and Plymouth Church a few blocks east, so those structures mark out the lines of Poplar, Middagh, Cranberry and Orange Streets. I looked at some old maps available online at the NYPL’s digital gallery to make some guesses about the buildings.

As you know, everything on the west side of Columbia Heights north of Orange Street was torn down to make way for the BQE (the last remaining buildings besides the Squibb factory are a couple of buildings at the foot of old Poplar Street). Between Orange and Cranberry stood houses from the original development of the neighborhood in the 1820s/1830s. They show up on the 1850s maps. One of these is supposed to have been the house the Roeblings lived in during the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Between Cranberry and Middagh was originally a “Colonnade Row” of houses which burned down in the early 1850s. On the mid-1850s maps those lots were empty, and by the end of the century appear to have been replaced with taller brick tenement apartment buildings (one is called the “Water View”). Between Middagh to Poplar, the street starts down the hill, and there was a mix of brick warehouses and light manufacturing buildings that grew out of the old Everitt tanneries from the early 19th century that went through to what became Furman Street, and then by the end of the century were taken into the Squibb complex.