Past and Present: 89 Gerry Street

A Look at Brooklyn, then and now.

From the collection of the Museum of the City of New York comes this wonderful photograph of small business in Brooklyn, from 1924. The photograph is of the White Silver Wet Wash Laundry Company, of 89 Gerry Street, in Williamsburg. The business was housed in a former stable, which is at the time, still a handsome building. According to old city maps, the stable was there from at least 1887, a wonderful Romanesque Revival brick structure, sandwiched between two wood framed mixed-use tenement buildings. From the look of the bags of laundry, and the burly men in the photograph, it seems likely that the White Silver Wet Wash did bulk commercial laundry, perhaps restaurant work, hotel, or hospital. This does not look like the place a lady would send her dainties.

It’s rather amazing that this company and its employees was captured by the Wurtz Brothers Photographers, forever preserving a photo of a small company , and a block, that would disappear without a trace. In checking aerial maps of the street, by the 1950s, the block was losing buildings, by the 1990s, it was a vacant wasteland. Today, this block and several around it are part of the development zone called “the Broadway Triangle,” now being hotly contested for new affordable housing in this part of Williamsburg, near the old Pfizer plants.

As interesting as the laundry is, the fate of the old clapboard tenements is also interesting. They were infamous for being firetraps, and were slowly being phased out as viable housing, as the 20th century progressed. But they hung in there in many of Brooklyn’s older lower income areas, in some places removed only as urban renewal projects wiped out entire blocks, replacing them with housing projects. Here, they were not replaced at all. At least not yet.

Gerry Street is interesting for another reason. The street is named for Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814), a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a member of the Continental Congress and governor of Massachusetts. He was also Vice President under James Madison, and the street was probably named after him for that reason. But no one remembers him for any of those reasons. Elbridge Gerry will forever be memorialized for his efforts in trying to re-draw his district, in order to be re-elected as governor. The resulting district, drawn to include those towns he knew he could count on, resembled a salamander, and the resulting border manipulation was called “Gerrymandering”, a phrase that is still used today for the same reasons. Ironically, Gerry Street is now at the center of a contentious battle now being fought over turf and housing. GMAP