Past and Present: Atlantic Avenue at Cumberland Street

A Look at Brooklyn, then and now.

Today’s historic photo from 1924 shows two commercial buildings on the south side of Atlantic Avenue, near Cumberland Street. Frequent passers-by today will recognize these as the sole remaining 19th century large commercial buildings in the AY footprint. On a 1929 map, 700 Atlantic Avenue, the building on the right, belonged to the American Railway Express Company (AREC), a large shipping company founded in 1917 to consolidate shipping efforts during World War I. It was bought out by the railroads, and was an early shipping company that was like UPS with trains instead of planes. Goods were shipped via rail, taken to warehouses like this, and then shipped by trucks to their destinations. They needed warehouses near rail lines for the most efficient transfer of goods. They couldn’t get any closer than this.

The larger building, 718 Atlantic, was home to the Magnus Chemical Company, as well as a shoe factory on the upper floors. Sounds like a recipe for disaster in one building, but fortunately that never occurred. Neither company was there very long, because on the 1929 map, which was the closest date I could access, the building was the home of the Brooklyn Metal Stamping Corporation, and J.M. McCauley & Company. It’s interesting to see the loading docks stretching further down Atlantic Avenue, to the east. Those are long gone. McCauley & Co. was there until at least 1942, when they contributed to an ad in the Eagle towards the War Effort.

Today, 178 is home to Storage Mart, a self-storage facility. All of the windows, glassed in and functional in the 1924 photo, have been filled in. 700 Atlantic Avenue has been vacant for a long time, and seems to have survived AY, although I don’t know if that will be true forever. It is deteriorating rapidly. Both are handsome buildings, reminders of Atlantic Avenue’s industrial past. Hopefully both will still be here in the future. GMAP