Past and Present: Empire Chevrolet

A look at Brooklyn, then and now.

It’s quite possible to live in New York City and never own a car. We have great public transportation to almost anywhere in the city, and failing that, there are always car services, taxi cabs, Zip cars, bikes or your feet. Yet in spite of this abundance of ways of getting around, there are no more dedicated automobile owners than New York City’s. The car has always done well here, especially in the “outer boroughs.” There have always been, and always will be, people who feel the need to own a car, in spite of alternate side of the street parking, hyper-vigilant meter attendants, a lack of parking spaces, car theft, and other urban annoyances.

Our city planners, especially Robert Moses, also loved cars, and in the mid-20th century, they cut highways and built bridges and tunnels in order for us to get around better, and get out of town when necessary. Consequently, a large industry of automobile dealers, service facilities, garages and auto supply businesses developed on Bedford Avenue and other “Automobile Rows” throughout the city. When these businesses first developed in the teens and 1920s, there were a lot of different car companies, with different models, price ranges, and amenities. You could get anything you wanted, as long as it was black.

But by the 1940s and ’50s, the field had narrowed, but it also grew. There weren’t as many American car companies anymore; many had failed, and the rest had been bought out, consolidated and gathered into Detroit’s Big Three. But the Big Three had more cars than ever. You had every variety of price range, sizes, styles and amenities, and all of them came in a growing range of colors! So much to choose from! As the makes and models and colors grew, the small automobile showrooms of yesteryear, which often could only house four or five cars, weren’t going to cut it. A modern car dealership needed to show you just about every make and model your car company made. And for that, you needed some room.

By the 1950s, Bedford Avenue’s Automobile Row was almost dead. Most of the car showrooms had been abandoned, and the buildings repurposed, especially the smaller ones. The large car companies had moved to more spacious digs, placed along major streets and boulevards that still had room for these companies to grow. Brooklyn’s more outlying neighborhoods, middle and working class communities like East Flatbush, Coney Island, Canarsie and Ray Ridge began getting more and more large dealerships in their neighborhoods. Ironically, you needed a car to get to many of these car dealerships, but these were also the neighborhoods where just about every family had a car.

One of the largest of these car dealerships was Empire Chevrolet, in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. It opened in the 1940s, moving several times before landing here, at 1 Remsen Avenue, a major junction, where Remsen, Utica, Lefferts and East New York Avenues, and Empire Boulevard all intersect. What a perfect place for a new car showroom, service station and used car lot.

Empire Chevrolet was owned by Milton Kaufman. Empire opened just after World War II, opening at 1159 Utica Avenue in East Flatbush. I checked on Google, and his lot is still there, now abandoned, undeveloped and for sale. He then either moved to Neptune Avenue in Coney Island, or he opened another branch there. Following that, in 1950, he moved to 1 Remsen, finally getting on Empire Boulevard itself, right at the very beginning of it.

This space was even larger than the Utica Avenue space, and took up the trapezoidal corner made by the intersection of all of these important streets. Kaufman built a huge showroom, with multiple bays stretching down Remsen Avenue. At the oddly shaped end of the street, where his offices were, and where the streets all converged, Empire Chevrolet sported a tall steel tower which advertised the name of the establishment for miles around. He had some advertising post cards printed, and sent them out as publicity. Printed in the 1950s, the postcard really illustrates that Empire was quite the empire. This facility was huge.

Milton Kaufman worked hard, and became quite wealthy. The papers don’t have much to say about him personally, except that he was well off enough to make the social pages, Jewish charity and social columns, and the like. His wife and daughter were part of the Brooklyn social scene, Carole Kaufman being sought out by the young men. She married one, a gentleman named Feldman, and the wedding and reception was noted in the newspapers.

Of course, when you are successful, there are always people who want what you’ve got, and here was no exception. Empire Chevrolet’s safe had been cracked five times, by 1954, and Kaufman had lost about $25,000. He had had enough. He had a new kind of alarm system installed, a state of the art one called the “ultra-sonic burglar alarm,” which made no noise there at the dealership, but alerted the alarm company, which called the police. One night in August of 1954, the alarm went off at 5:30 in the morning. When police got there, they found two burglars in the middle of trying to break open the safe.

Alfred J. DeMichele, 24, and Joseph Moraglia, 28, had climbed in through the skylight, and were at the safe with a sledgehammer and tools when the silent alarm did its job. The two men were arrested, caught in the act. Milton Kaufman told reporters that the alarm, which was advertised to “pick up the sound of a wet caterpillar falling into a feather bed,” was worth every penny. He had just put $15,000 in the safe, keeping it overnight for deposit in the bank the next day.

Empire Chevrolet was in business until the 1980s. I remember their commercials when I first moved to New York in the late 1970s. Milton Kaufman’s must have died in 1988, because that’s when his estate gets involved with the title, which seems to have gone to his daughter, Carole Feldman, who is listed as trustee. She held on to it for another twelve years before selling it in 1999. At some point, the huge car facility was subdivided into smaller units, and over the years has held a number of small businesses, including a funeral parlor, and at one time, a jerk chicken restaurant.

Today, the main part of the showroom is taken up by a large Duane Reade Drugstore. The Duane Reade signage has replaced the Empire Chevrolet sign that used to rise above the intersection. The middle lot that was a parking lot for customers or stock is now a parking lot for Duane Reade. Beyond that is the funeral home, which expanded into a second storefront, the community board headquarters and a Papa John Pizza shop. But it doesn’t matter what is there now, you can still see Milton Kaufman’s Empire Chevrolet under all of the new stuff, an enormous streamlined building constructed when the automobile was not only king, it was an American success story.GMAP