Heavy Heavy

The Brooklyn Warehouse and Storage Company, on Schermerhorn Street west of Flatbush and Third Avenues, was a massive building. “Fireproof warehouses” were a niche in the nineteenth century, particularly for records storage: in a city where most buildings were constructed with wood floors and the occasional horrific fire served as a reminder that anything could burn, how did you keep paper safe? The most famous of these buildings in Brooklyn, the Eagle Warehouse & Storage Company, was originally built to house the archives of the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper.

This ad, from 1894, gives a sense of the niche:

The phrase “absolutely fireproof and indestructible” is not one that anyone would use today, and some of the fireproof warehouses proved to be…not. The building on Schermerhorn Street never burned, but as the niche became less important with better fireproofing and fire-fighting, it was eventually torn down.

But that’s not what this blog post is about. Here’s the front door of the building, barely visible in the ad above:

That’s a Wurts Brothers photo, probably from the 1930s, and look at that arch. If I’m counting correctly, it’s 23 courses of brick high, with six of those courses being soldiers and the rest headers. This extremity was not needed to carry load or for any other physical purpose: it is a statement of strength, a symbol. If you ask me, it was an effective statement.