Some House

From Max Hubacher, January 11, 1952, “Old red brick house in downtown Brooklyn, L.I., on the site a park is planned. In background the Manhattan Bridge.”

It’s amazing that it could be so hard to place a photo taken in downtown Brooklyn within living memory, but it is. The obvious location is the stretch of park between Cadman Plaza West (formerly Fulton Street) and Cadman Plaza East (formerly Washington Street) between Brooklyn Borough Hall and the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge. Technically, that’s three parks: Cadman Plaza from the bridge south to Tillary Street, Korean War Veterans Plaza from Tillary south to Johnson Street, and Columbus Park from Johnson south to Borough Hall. The picture isn’t Cadman Plaza, since construction there started in the 1930s. This might be Korean Veterans Plaza, or it might be Walt Whitman Park, a small square just east of Cadman Plaza. Or maybe…here’s a 1903 map of the area. Note that a lot of the land that later became Cadman Plaza was being used, apparently, for streetcar storage:

(Also, the site of the 1930s expansion of the Brooklyn General Post Office was occupied by the Universal Bowling Academy.) The thing in the middle of the photo appears to be an elevator shaft installed to connect two buildings, a narrow one to the west and a wide one to the east. The only thing on the map that looks remotely like the configuration we see in the photo is the Home for Women on Concord Street between Washington and Adams Streets (not the depressingly-named Home for Friendless Women and Children on Concord between Washington and Liberty). The 4-story Home for Women could be the wide building in the photo, the 4-1/2 story house immediately to its west (down the page) could be the narrow building, and the narrow yard between them could be where the elevator shaft was built. Maybe. Both buildings in the photo have fire-escapes, so both were multiple dwellings or commercial. The open space past the street on the left suggests that we are east of Washington/Cadman East.

One last thing: if the House for Women and its neighbor are the buildings in the photo, then they weren’t demolished for a park. They are south of Concord, and Walt Whitman Park is north of it. A federal courthouse (the Eastern District of New York) was built in 1963 on the block with those two buildings. Did the demo and construction somehow take 11 years? Or do I just have the wrong location?