Out & About

More tax photo wandering. Here's a house on 22nd Street, just below Greenwood Cemetery. The photo is mid 80s, but the house looks true to its nineteenth century roots.

Here it is today (tucked away at the right), with a brickface veneer, porch gone, and cornice wrapped in siding. Next to it, a large apartment building.

A long time ago, a realtor on 9th St. (Royal Slope, now gone) was giving away reproduction maps from the 1886 Atlas of the City of Brooklyn, published by E. Robinson & Co.  I still have my map.  Looking at it, I can see that in '86 there were only four brick buildings on my block, apart from the three end buildings with avenue addresses.  On the southern side of 14th and the northern side of 15th, between Fifth & Sixth, not one brick building, and on the avenue ends of the blocks, only four brick buildings on Fifth. The map also shows just how many wooden buildings in South Slope/Greenwood Heights shared their lots with back-houses. There are still a number left, with or without their partners. Some of them are easy to catch glimpses of down alleyways, and some remain hidden by other buildings. There are also other older houses that, rather than built close to the street, were set deep into their lots.  I'd like to live in one of these anomalies. They seem to exist in a secret world quite out of kilter with convention.

 

These four houses on 19th Street seem to share (or have shared) one lot, & there still seems to be common access. At any rate, in 80s tax photos, they're bundled together as one.