Past and Present: The Old Tower House, Park Slope

A Look at Brooklyn, then and now.

According to the Brooklyn Eagle in 1914, this house, at 300 8th Street, near 5th Avenue, was the oldest standing house in Park Slope. In 1913, when this photograph was taken, it was the home of the late Asa B. Richardson, who was, among many things in his long life, a hops merchant and a man “engaged in the commission business,” according to the paper. I think that means he was a salesman. Whatever he did, he did it well. At any rate, in 1850, he purchased this house, in a neighborhood the paper said residents called Gowanus, but the paper called “the Park Slope”. The large, octagonal house with the prominent tower was called, appropriately, the Tower House, and had been built a few years before that by a German who modeled the house after his ancestral castle on the Rhine, also according to the paper. Seems unlikely, but it’s a good story.

The house was octagonal, 25 feet wide, and the round front tower contained a stairway. The paper said the original entrance in the front led to a ground floor dining room and kitchen, and the circular stairway led upstairs to the main parlors on the second level, which took up the entire floor. In 1876, Mr. Richardson remodeled the house completely. He added an entire brownstone house to the side, moved the entrance to this building, with a stoop and parlor stairs, and put a mansard roof on the whole thing. He also added an addition to the back. Inside, Richardson had the circular staircase removed from the tower, and the interior stairs were moved to the entrance side of the building. He lived here with his wife and daughter. His daughter tragically died first, then his wife, and in 1908, he too, passed away, at the ripe old age of 87. He had been active in the Board of Education, and had been one of the guiding hands behind the building of PS 39 on 8th Street and 6th Avenue, an event he considered his legacy.

The Eagle went on to mention that when Asa Richardson bought this house, the land around him was still farmland, with the vast estate of Edwin Litchfield stretching all around. Houses were just being developed above 6th Avenue, and a large estate took up the entirety of 8th Street, presumably between 6th and 5th Avenue. In 1910, Richardson’s nephew sold the house to a developer who planned on razing it and building an apartment building, but the project never came to fruition. The property was sold again, this time to a fish merchant named, most appropriately, J.G. Hook, who lived in it only long enough to sell it to a developer who also bought Temple Bnai Sholaum, which backed this property, and faced 6th Avenue. He planned to tear down both buildings and put up a vaudeville theater.

A theater called the Paradise RKO Prospect Theater was built at this location in 1914, with its face on 9th Street, and rear elevated section on 8th, where the Tower House once stood. The building is now condos, with retail on 9th Street. Sadly, this unique confection of a building, with its Rhine Valley tower and Mansard roof, is long gone. The Brooklyn Eagle, in the days well before preservation, simply ended its piece on the house noting that demolition of “the old landmark” would begin in three weeks. GMAP