Past and Present: 157 Waverly Avenue

A Look at Brooklyn, then and now.

Sometimes I wish I lived in Brooklyn in the 1960’s. I would have been a school kid, and probably would have had to travel the city on the subways, and take the El trains. By the time I moved here in the mid-1980’s, as an adult, the Myrtle Avenue El was only a memory. Its last ride was in 1969, and its tracks and stations were torn down soon afterward. One of the many students riding the Myrtle Avenue El during the 1960’s was a Bishop Laughlin student named Patrick Cullinan. Over the years, he took lots of photographs of the el, and the landscapes below, and this particular one intrigued me.

It’s a shot of the Golden Key Hotel, which stood on the corner of Waverly and Myrtle. During the 1940’s and ‘50’s, perhaps even longer, the Golden Key was known as Lenruth Hall. There are newspaper clippings and documents from these years, when the Hall was a dance venue, and events space, hosting many events for unions, government, civil service and other such groups. It was also a working class hotel. Republican speech writer Peggy Noonan’s grandmother was a coat attendant here in the 1940’s. Patrick Cullinan took his photo in 1969, right before the El was dismantled.

This part of Clinton Hill was particularly gritty, back in the day, and the building, which still had a lot of 1880’s charm, looks a movie set, with wooden Venetian blinds in the window, and the “Five Kees” bar looking like the kind of place you enter carefully, with a voice-over and a poignantly sweet jazz trumpet playing in the background. Today, the Golden Key name still exists as the LLC for the 14 unit co-op apartment building which now occupies the building. They’ve brightened it up with white paint on the Myrtle façade, and painted brick façade on Waverly, but I think it had much more moxy before. I really liked the contrast between the cream colored colonettes and pilasters and the darker window lintels. And look closely at how the colonettes are strapped to the building. That’s kind of lost now. Great stuff! More has changed besides the loss of the El, that’s for sure. GMAP