Brooklyn Heights Orphanage

Brooklyn Heights Orphanage

Brooklyn Heights Orphanage

Neighborhood: Brooklyn Heights
Address: 57 Poplar Street

This beautiful Brooklyn Heights building was once an orphanage. Designed by architect Marshall Morrill, the red brick Victorian Gothic Style building featured arched windows and a French mansard roof, first popularized during the Baroque period, punctuated by dormers. The 60’ x 100’ building is 4 stories plus an attic and basement. Housed within it were a dining room, kitchen, bathrooms, gymnasium, offices, classrooms, reading room, parlor and bedrooms. It was built in 1883 to replace a building that was too small to meet the needs of the facility.

Dormers

The building was the headquarters for the Brooklyn Children’s Aid Society. The Aid Society was known for establishing a home for newsboys or newsies. The newsies were young boys, many of them orphaned and homeless whom hocked the city’s newspapers on the street. The boys were between five and fifteen years old and included bootblacks and messengers in addition to those who sold newspapers. When the Society first took in the newsboys it was in a more modest building that occupied the site of 61 Poplar Street. An influx of boys quickly filled that building necessitating the larger home.

Windows

In addition to feeding and housing the orphaned boys, the new home was used to run classes for manual labor skills, drawing and military drills. Although the institution was a boy’s home, sewing classes were offered to boys and girls and in 1888 a cooking class for girls was instituted. The cooking class taught girls to bake bread, as well as cook meat, vegetables and deserts. An added benefit to the cooking class was that the girls were allowed to take whatever they made home.

Entrance

Sometime around 1911 the building was converted to studio apartments. Then, it was used as a machine shop prior to being abandoned. By the mid 1970s the orphanage and adjacent historic buildings were badly deteriorated. The structure was supposed to be renovated and converted into 30 residential units in 1976. However, it wasn’t until 1987 that the former orphanage and adjacent buildings were connected and converted into luxury condos by David Hirsch and firm Wids de le Coeur.

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Sources:

1. Vehslage, Ann “A Bone of Contention” Brooklyn Heights Press 12 February, 1976
2. Spellen, Suzanne "Building of the Day: 57 Poplar Street" Brownstoner 12 May, 2011

Riverside Apartments

Riverside Apartments

Neighborhood: Brooklyn Heights
Address: 2-34 Columbia Place

Alfred T. White commissioned the Riverside Apartments. White was a successful businessman that attained his wealth from the fur trade, although, he was trained as a civil engineer. His success came at a time when most working class families lived in some degree of squalor. He believed that the working poor had a right to dignified housing, so he set out to create a new model for worker housing. White’s mantra regarding his real estate developments was“philanthropy plus 5%”. The Riverside apartments featured amenities uncommon in tenement buildings at the time and were White’s contribution to elevating the living standard of working New Yorkers. Other tenement buildings commissioned by White include the Tower and Home Buildings in Cobble Hill.

Entrance & Arched Stairwell Openings

Arched Stairwell Openings with Terracotta Trim

Perforated Metal Railings

Designed by William Field & Son in an eclectic Romanesque – Italianate style, the Riverside Apartments were built in 1890. The building’s architectural embellishments include arcaded loggias, perforated metal railings, brick patterns, corbeling and terracotta ornamental detailing. Architectural innovations for tenement housing featured in the design included a toilet in each unit, open stair towers to ameliorate foul odors common in closed tenement stairwells, and a spacious central courtyard with a band shell. In addition, the building’s design afforded residents more natural light and fresh air than most tenements from the period. According to the AIA Guide Alfred T. White’s buildings are the “original limited-profit housing, predating the City and State’s first “limited-dividend” projects (Stuyvesant Town) by 57 years”. However, there is another comparable building that comes to mind. The Astral Apartments in Greenpoint were built with a similar vision.

Although the Riverside apartments take up most of a city block, there were once more of them. The complex was truncated by the BQE when four of the nine buildings were removed to make way for the thoroughfare. Also relinquished was the building’s central garden. The original affordable housing complex had a capacity of 280 families, utilizing forty nine percent of the lot for structures and the rest for open space. Apartment sizes had a range from two to four rooms. Rents were on a sliding scale with prices based on floor level and unit size.

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Sources:

• Gray, Christopher "Streetscapes: The Riverside Buildings; A Model Tenement in Dickensian Style" New York Times 23 August 1992
• White, Norval, Willensky, Elliot, and Leadon, Fran AIA Guide to New York. Oxford University Press, 2010
• McCormick, Tim "History Buff: The Riverside Apartments" Brownstoner 22 August, 2006
• McCormick, Tim "ARchitecture 101: The Riverside Apartments" Brownstoner 9 May, 2005