Esther Crain's Blog, page 16

A boarded-up Gothic church hangs on in what was once Manhattan’s Hungarian immigrant enclave

On a quiet Upper East Side block stands a lovely Gothic Revival church, its blond brick facade and copper steeples fitting in with beauty and symmetry amid its low-rise neighbors.

Former church, I should clarify. Though small crosses still grace the roof, the arched front entrance at 211 East 83rd Street between Second and Third Avenues is now boarded up; stained glass no longer fills the windows.

A resident across the street told me the church bell was recently removed. Religious artifacts and liturgical items were apparently taken away at night earlier this summer, per the New York Post.

This historic sanctuary—sold to a developer in April for $11.8 million, per East Side Feed, and now under threat of demolition—deserves better.

Its story begins in 1892, when the church was built for a German Lutheran congregation. A quarter of a century later, it became the home of the Church of St. Elizabeth of Hungary—just as many of New York’s Hungarian and Slovak immigrants were relocating from the Lower East Side and East Village to the less crowded tenements and storefronts of Yorkville.

St. Elizabeth’s Catholic church moved from Lower Manhattan to Yorkville (above, in 1940) with its congregants, leaving the original small church at 345 East Fourth Street for this four-story house of worship, which includes a rectory on the left.

The church was one of the foundations of the Hungarian community here. Since the early 20th century, thousands of Hungarian immigrants—who colonized “Little Hungary” around East 79th Street—shared Yorkville with Czech immigrants closer to East 72nd Street and German newcomers on and around East 86th Street.

As the number of church members began to dwindle toward the end of the 20th century, St. Elizabeth’s took on a new role. In 1980, it was designated by Cardinal Cooke as a congregation for deaf parishioners, with services conducted in sign language.

St. Elizabeth’s fortunes turned in 2014, when the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York announced it would close and merge with a neighboring parish, St. Monica’s on East 79th Street. (Another Hungarian congregation, St. Stephen’s on East 82nd Street, also merged with St. Monica’s.)

With the church sold and being emptied out, this pillar of a formerly vibrant immigrant community needs an angel. Neighborhood preservation group Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts is spearheading a campaign to have St. Elizabeth’s obtain landmark status, which could stop its destruction.

This email address will fill you in on what’s needed to keep this sanctuary of loveliness and peace in the cityscape.

[Third image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

This early 1900s summer resort and amusement park was the Bronx’s version of Coney Island

Is the Bronx the land of the forgotten amusement park? The borough’s death toll of defunct parks is impressive.

Starlight Park, which opened in 1920 beside the Bronx River and lasted into the 1930s, thrilled visitors with its roller coaster, bathing pavilions, and shooting gallery. Freedomland‘s attractions celebrated American history; this Disney-like park had a short run in the 1960s in Baychester. (Co-Op City took its place.)

And from the late 1890s to the 1940s, a spit of land jutting into the East River where it meets the Long Island Sound was once the site of a popular summertime resort district known as Clason Point. (Or Clason’s Point, as vintage maps have it.)

“Clason” came from Isaac Clason, a Scottish merchant and ship owner. In the early 18th century, Clason purchased one thousand acres of land in this corner of the southeastern Bronx, states Rob Stephenson in his Substack newsletter, The Neighborhoods.

Much of Clason’s land was devoted to farming through the 19th century. Then in 1892, a railroad builder named Clinton Stephens bought 25 acres near the waterfront and “began to develop the area as a recreation destination,” writes Stephenson.

“Stephens established ferry service from Manhattan and College Point in Queens, and soon weekend revelers were availing themselves of the casino, dancehalls, and drinking establishments that populated the point,” he adds.

Boats and steamers brought heat-addled city residents to Clason Point from Long Island, Mott Haven, and Manhattan, states the 2010 AIA Guide to New York City. A trolley arrived in 1910 for even greater access to this burgeoning seaside paradise.

Think of Clason Point as the Bronx’s answer to Coney Island. Bringing Coney-like attractions here was a canny move by developers like Stephens, since late 19th and early 20th century New Yorkers now had the leisure time to take day trips to seaside destinations in Brooklyn and Queens.

A ferry ride to Clason Point from the Lower East Side, Yorkville, and Bronx neighborhoods like Mott Haven was likely faster than a boat trip or railroad journey to Coney Island or Rockaway Beach.

The revelry sounds a lot like Coney Island, as well as “Little Coney Island,” a rollicking dance hall and pleasure garden district that popped up at the time on today’s West 110th Street.

“The attractions were dance halls and hotels, picnic grounds and a bathing pier, restaurants, a salt water pool, and places with names like Dietrich’s, Gilligan’s Pavilion and Killian’s Grove, Higg’s Camp Grounds, and Kane’s Casino,” wrote Philip Lopate in a New York Times article in 2000, quoting. from the 2010 AIA Guide to New York City.

Clason Point actually had two separate parks. One was the privately owned Clason Point Park, which appears to be the original resort opened by Stephens. Another, the delightfully named Fairyland, operated on leased land, according to a 2014 writeup on hubpages.com.

Despite Clason Point’s popularity and accessibility, there were a few drawbacks. The saltwater pool earned the nickname “the Inkwell” because it was filled with unfiltered polluted East River water. “One hates to speculate exactly what was in that ink,” comments the hubpages.com post.

Also, some of the rides malfunctioned—in one case with tragic results. In 1910, two of the cars on the roller coaster collided high in the air. Rescue workers had to retrieve stuck passengers with rope and a 75-foot ladder, according to a 2012 article by Bill Twomey in the Bronx Times.

Then, in June 1922, with approximately 80 passengers riding the 100-foot-high ferris wheel, a sudden storm toppled the ride.

“The wind appeared to lift the upper half of the wheel and toss it with its merrymakers into Long Island Sound,” reported The Evening World. “The collapse of the lower half followed, burying those in it under the wreckage.” Seven passengers were killed, and scores sustained injuries.

The ferris wheel disaster and filthy salt water pool didn’t spell the end of Clason Point (below, an abandoned dance hall) so much as Prohibition and the impending Great Depression did.

“Fairyland went out of business in 1935, as did some of the other independent amusements,” states the hubpages.com post. “In 1949 the entire property was sold to developers who removed all the remaining amusements and converted the area into a private country club.”

Today Clason Point lives on as a New York City Park—the appropriately named Clason Point Park.

Visiting amusement parks was just one way city residents cooled off during the sweltering summer seasons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Click here and listen to Ephemeral New York and Carl Raymond, aka The Gilded Gentleman, on August 20 in a podcast episode titled “In the Good Old Summertime: Where the Gilded Age Played.”

We’ll delve into all the ways city residents found relief from summer heat in the Gilded Age, from the tenement districts to upper class townhouses. You’ll be glad we live in the age of air conditioning!

[Top image: eBay; second image: Scarsdale Historical Society; third image: New-York Historical Society; fourth image: New York Public Library Digital Collections; fifth image: The Evening World; sixth image: New York Public Library Digital Collections]

The blueish skies and orange glow of 1910 New York City at night

George Luks never shied away from the gritty side of Gotham, depicting honest, sometimes bleak moments in time amid the markets, tenements, docks, parks, and sidewalks of the city’s downtown slum and working-class districts.

I’d always thought of this early 20th century Ashcan School painter as one who focused primarily on people—using plays of light and dark to bring out the humanity of the shoppers, workers, beggars, onlookers, children, and others who go about their day along the streets.

So what to make of this 1910 image, New York City Nightscape? There’s no humans that I an see. The old and new buildings seem out of proportion, and blotchy blue-gray nighttime skies contrast with the almost flame-like yellow-orange glow from windows. The buildings in the forefront look like they’re on fire.

What is Luks telling us about the New York of 1910? I’m not sure, but the orange colors ablaze in the darkness are magnetic.

[Image: Greg Thompson Fine Art]

The Ziegfeld showgirl, the media mogul, and their Riverside Drive townhouse hideaway

In 1917, William Randolph Hearst was watching a performance of the Ziegfeld Follies at the New Amsterdam Theater on 42nd Street. His eyes zeroed in on one of the featured players—a young, blonde, Brooklyn-born actress named Marion Davies.

It was love at first sight for the newspaper tycoon and politician, who reportedly saw the show every night for eight weeks “just to gaze at her,” wrote the New York Times in 1961.

Hearst, 54 years old when he fell for 20-year-old Davies, was a regular theater-goer—known as a “stage-door johnny” who became infatuated with chorus girls and actresses despite the fact that he was married (to a former stage actress) and father to five sons.

Other girls in the show warned the sharp, effervescent Davies that Hearst, who began sending her flowers and small gifts, was “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” as she recalled in her autobiography, published posthumously in 1975.

But what Davies described as a friendship in her book developed into something much deeper between the two, with Hearst regularly having dinner with her family and arranging for Davies to begin starring in silent films financed by Cosmopolitan Pictures, Hearst’s film production company.

Their love affair was now in full swing. “Since 1917, [Davies] had become an integral part of his life,” wrote Ben Proctor in his book, William Randolph Hearst: The Later Years, 1911-1951. “He showered her with gifts, talked with her daily, and, like a lovesick schoolboy, wrote amateurish but heartfelt poetry about his feelings of love and endearment.”

Still, the couple took care to keep things under wraps. Flaunting their relationship would have been unseemly for the highly visible Hearst, whose wife refused to grant him the divorce he asked for, according to Davies. Living together would have also been out of the question in the 1910s.

So in 1918, Hearst purchased for Davies a 26-room townhouse at 331 Riverside Drive, one in a row of seven beaux-arts beauties (above, in 1932; second house in from the right) built in 1902 between 105th and 106th Streets. At the time, Riverside Drive rivaled Fifth Avenue as a road of mansions and luxurious new apartment buildings occupied by business titans and creatives.

Hearst himself lived in one of these new apartment buildings. He and his family resided in a sumptuous, 30-room penthouse covering the top three floors of the Clarendon, built in 1907 at Riverside Drive and 86th Street. An avid art and antique collector, Hearst fashioned his penthouse with treasures salvaged from European monasteries and castles.

Why would Hearst want Davies to live on the same street as his wife and children? Perhaps he bought 331 Riverside Drive to keep his love close—but not too close so gossip columnists and business enemies would learn of the affair and make it public.

Also, with Riverside Drive north and west of the business and theater districts of Manhattan, there was a sense of privacy few other city streets could offer. Davies’ townhouse fronted the slender carriage road that runs parallel to the main Riverside Drive, away from prying eyes.

Hearst outfitted Davies’ townhouse with many comforts. “Hearst saw to it that Marion’s abode was nothing less than a palace fit for a movie queen,” wrote Richard Alleman in New York: The Movie Lover’s Guide. “Marion’s interviews were usually scheduled to take place in her private sitting room, which was decorated with a marble fountain and statues of cupids.”

Hearst also built his love a reading room—filled with book she never read. Maybe she was too busy making movies and doing press, or simply enjoying time with her family. Her mother and sisters moved into 331 Riverside Drive to keep her company, and Hearst purchased the townhouse next door at 332 Riverside Drive for her father, a lawyer and judge.

During her years on Riverside Drive, Davies’ star rose. She made a series of popular films and took on historical and romantic roles, which Hearst pushed her to play, stated Daniel Wakin in The Man With the Sawed-Off Leg and Other Tales of a New York Block.

Hearst was heavily involved in steering her career, as well as maintaining her “gilded-cage standard of opulence” to reduce the odds that she would have affairs with younger men, wrote Wakin.

“Davies depended on [Hearst] to establish her a star, but stuck by him—truly loved him—even when she had reached that status,” according to Wakin. “If she was never going to become Hearst’s wife, she would take the film career instead.”

Davies and Hearst ultimately left Riverside Drive—and New York. Hearst’s New York American newspaper did an investigative story on a shady lawyer, who hit back by announcing that he had some lurid info about Hearst’s relationship with a certain popular actress.

Amid the publicity, Hearst moved Davies to a mansion in Beverly Hills. He followed soon after.

The couple, and the movie industry, established a base in California—prompting Hearst to sell 331 and 332 Riverside Drive. Hearst and Davies stayed together for the next three decades until Hearst’s death at age 88 in 1951.

Davies film career petered out in the late 1930s, and 10 years after Hearst died, this stage siren and silent film star passed away from cancer.

But what about her former home at 331 Riverside Drive? It was purchased in 1925 by Lucretia “Lulu” Davis, her next-door neighbor at the astounding mansion at 330 Riverside Drive and the heir of the Davis Baking Powder company, which Lulu’s father founded.

Today, the townhouse is owned by the New York Buddhist Church. It’s still part of a row of restored Gilded Age beauties with rich backstories.

Marion Davis’ Riverside Drive townhouse is part of Ephemeral New York’s Gilded Age Riverside Drive tour. Join us Sunday, August 18 at 1 p.m. to explore the story of many more illustrious mansions, row houses, and memorials along this beautiful and historic avenue! Tickets can be found here.

[Second, third, and eighth images: Wikipedia; fourth and fifth images: New York Public Library Digital Collections]

What remains of an 1830s church walled off and unrecognizable behind East Fourth Street

It’s the kind of curious New York City relic you typically find by accident. In this case, the story starts with a visit to a parking lot at the northeast corner of Lafayette and Great Jones Streets, just behind East Fourth Street.

The parking lot occupies space in this historic area of Noho, where 19th- and early 20th–century stables, tenements, and manufacturing buildings intersect with an older generation of pre-Civil War row houses.

From the parking lot, the backs of some of these buildings fronting Lafayette and East Fourth Street can be seen; nothing looks out of the ordinary.

But then there’s a brick structure behind a row of buildings just inside East Fourth Street. It’s hemmed in from the streetscape and only viewable between the steel vehicle stackers where cars are parked.

The red-brick building has the peaked roof and general outline of a Federal-style building, which was a popular architectural style in early 19th century New York City.

On closer inspection, something even more remarkable appears on both sides of the building—enormous Gothic-style cathedral windows.

The windows are the giveaway that this lonely building was once a church, and the peaked roof was perhaps a vaulted ceiling that helped create a simple yet light-filled, inspiring space of religious devotion and celebration.

But what kind of church was it, and why was it left behind in anonymity? A little research reveals that what is left of this house of worship was once St. Bartholomew’s Protestant Episcopal Church, founded in 1835 (illustration above).

“In 1835-36, a church in neo-Classical style with a Gothic or Regency spire was erected at a cost of $33,000 on Lafayette Place at Great Jones Street,” states nycago.com of St. Bartholomew’s.

“It was a time of unprecedented prosperity, when the price of land and the cost of building was at the peak,” the site continues. 

This prosperous time in New York City history resulted in the creation just a few years earlier of “Lafayette Place” as it was called—an elite enclave for posh city residents looking to move away from the crowded downtown neighborhoods of the city center.

St. Bartholomew’s, part of the Evangelical movement of the Episcopal church, was constructed in the heart of this high-end area. Worshippers likely included many wealthy merchants and prominent New Yorkers.

The prosperity, however, came to a halt in 1837, a year of financial panic and ruin.

“For the next fifty years, the church struggled with inadequate finances despite having a communicant list that was larger than any other New York Episcopal church, including some of the wealthiest and most aristocratic families,” states nycago.com.

Coinciding with the church’s financial struggle was the northward march of rich New Yorkers to newer, more stylish neighborhoods like Gramercy and Murray Hill. By the Gilded Age, St. Bartholomew’s was in an unfashionable, increasingly commercial area.

So the church congregation moved with them—to Madison Avenue and 44th Street (above, sixth image). The land for the church was purchased with help from William H. Vanderbilt, a parishioner, states nycago.com.

James Renwick, the architect behind Grace Church and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, designed the new granite church, which featured a bell tower and eventually a “triple portal” by Stanford White. It was completed in 1876.

Structural problems forced the church to move again, and in 1918, a third St. Bartholomew’s opened to parishioners, this one on Park Avenue between 50th and 51st Street (seventh image, above).

This third St. Bartholomew’s still stands today, a Byzantine Revival-style house of worship with a congregation dedicated to a strong social justice mission.

But what about the original St. Bartholomew’s from 1835? It seems to have become an afterthought. At some point, its spire disappeared. Construction in the early 20th century to create today’s Lafayette Street may have pushed the former church off its original corner.

It’s hard to tell, but the front of the church looks connected to a building facing East Fourth Street. Maybe the church is part of a loft or residence?

Or perhaps this church erected with power and purpose has been reduced to a mostly hidden remnant of the pre-Civil War city.

[Fourth image: nycago.com; sixth image: MCNY, 93.1.1.2472; seventh image: MCNY X2010.12.87; eighth image: Google maps]

Decoding a vintage two-letter phone exchange from a plumbing supply sign in Brooklyn

Walking toward Gravesend Bay on Brooklyn’s 18th Avenue is like stepping back in time several decades to an unfancy, low-rise New York of small shops, Key Food supermarkets, and auto repair businesses.

It’s also the pre-1960s New York of two-letter phone prefixes—exemplified by the red and white ads across the facade of the Bruce Supply Corporation, located between Bath and Cropsey Avenues.

Bruce Supply Corporation, which sold plumbing equipment, was founded in 1969. The ads on the facade for sinks, pumps, and pipe fittings certainly could be just as old, and therefore the phone number under the ads would feature a two-letter phone exchange—in this case, CL.

Okay, so what does CL stand for? Typically these old-school letter exchanges noted a local landmark, business, or neighborhood name, like MU for Murray Hill.

Based on comments from a previous Ephemeral post about these two-letter phone prefixes, which started getting phased out in favor of all numerals in the early 1960s—it appears that CL was for Cloverdale.

But a 2007 post from the blog Brooklyn Ramblings notes that CL stood for Clarkson. A photo in the post shows an old sign with a CL phone number above a Bath Beach upholstery store. (This store and sign still exist, by the way.)

The Bruce Supply Company is firmly in the Bath Beach neighborhood. So I’m thinking CL might be for Clarkson. Whether it’s Clarkson or Cloverdale, however, the local significance of either name remains a mystery.

Spotting these old-school literary phone numbers across the city is a lot of fun—check out some recent posts about them here.

A peek at the rudimentary playground for city kids in 1870s Central Park

A swing set with wooden chairs, a seesaw that’s little more than a board nailed into a base, girls jumping rope and playing with hoops, a boy throwing a ball, and parents keeping an eye on their little ones.

Call it scenes from a Central Park playground, 19th century-style.

This illustration, captioned “Out-Door Summer Amusements, the Swings in Central Park” was printed in Harper’s Weekly on July 8, 1871. To say it’s quite a departure from the safer and sturdier playgrounds in Central Park today is an understatement. (Can’t you just hear the squeaking of those wood swings?)

Seeing this mini-playground is something of a surprise, because I had always been under the impression that Central Park since its infancy in the early 1860s had no true play areas for children. The park was designed to be a recreation of nature, a respite from the ill effects of urban life.

But in response to adults who wished for a place in the park for children to play, Central Park co-designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux “designated a hill in the southern portion that they called the ‘Kinderberg’ or ‘Children’s Mountain’ for children to climb on (at the present–day Chess & Checkers House), but overall there were few formal play areas in the park,” states NYC Parks.

As the decades went on, that would change. In 1926, Heckscher Playground opened as the official first playground in Central Park, per NYC Parks. In the 1930s and 1940s, more playgrounds arrived. Today, the park has 21 playgrounds.

As for the swings and play space in the illustration, I’m unsure exactly where this was. Perhaps near the Dairy, which might be the Victorian-style building in the back at right?

[Image: LOC]

This stunning 19th century building on the Bowery has a mystery balcony

The building, a five-story loft with ground-floor commercial space at the corner of Bowery and Spring Street, is a showstopper.

The first two stories are done up in red brick and sport enormous showroom windows, while the top three floors are a little less eye-popping, with brown and tan brickwork and rows of smaller, Romanesque arched windows.

But Two Spring Street, or 188 Bowery, as it’s also known, has one architectural feature I’ve never seen anywhere else in Gotham: a cone-shaped arrangement of bricks topped by what looks like a lacy iron railing that circles just below a narrow corner window.

It appears to be a balcony. But the railing seems too weak or short to serve as much of a balcony.

A fire escape perhaps? The building already has fire escapes on both the Bowery and Spring Street sides; the first laws mandating fire escapes on New York City buildings appeared in the 1860s.

I don’t know exactly when this beauty began gracing the cityscape, but I’m going to guess the 1870s or 1880s, when loft buildings joined walk-up tenements and other low-rise structures on the Bowery.

For decades in the 19th century, it housed Church’s Dispensary, or pharmacy, and it most recently housed a jeans shop. In 1940 when the above photo was taken, the ground floor was an Adler Shoes store, one of many in midcentury New York, though what was happening on the upper floors is not known.

Ornamental outdoor storage unit? Giant flower pot? Or a display space for some kind of decorative object or piece of art? Right now, your guess is as good as mine.

[Third photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

Decoding the colors of the globes outside New York City subway stations

Street-level subway entrances have undergone many changes since the first train made its inaugural ride at the now-shuttered City Hall station in October 1904.

Graceful, iron-shingled kiosks topped by a dome or peaked roof disappeared in favor of simple railed staircases. Signage noting the IRT, IND, and BMT was replaced by signs with a unified typeface plus standardized train letters and numbers.

And 40 years ago, the iron railings of subway entrances and exits were suddenly topped with globe lights in red, yellow, and green colors.

You may have never noticed these colored globe lights. They’re the kind of street furniture that city residents pass every day and don’t always register, especially when rushing to catch a train.

But it seems like the vast majority of street-level subway entrances are flanked by these globes, and it’s not simply for ornamentation. So what is their purpose, and what are the different colors supposed to tell riders?

First, let’s go back to the subway of the 1980s, when many stations had a human sitting inside a booth taking a rider’s cash in exchange for a token to gain access the platform.

“Color-coding of entrance globes began in the early 1980s to help customers determine which entrances were open and had a manned booth,” states the New York Transit Museum in a 2022 Facebook post.

“Originally, green indicated a 24-hour token booth, yellow meant a part-time booth, and red meant entrance limited or exit only.” Yellow lights, however, were discontinued to make the color-coding system easier to understand, the post explained.

MTA officials weren’t just trying to be helpful for the sake of improved customer service. The early 1980s city was a more crime-ridden place, and subway riders were prime targets.

In a 2002 article about the color-coded globes, New York Times writer Randy Kennedy noted that they were installed “mostly to try to prevent muggings” but ended up causing a lot of confusion.

Then in the 1990s, the colored globe system was thrown a loop, as Metrocards began to replace coin tokens. Turnstiles that allowed passengers to enter a station via Metrocard were installed at what had been exit-only subway stops. The red globes, therefore, “were no longer needed,” stated the Transit Museum.

Today, green globes seem to dominate the cityscape. But you can still find red globes outside some subway exits, like the two in this post. (The second photo was taken on Lower Broadway near Trinity Church; the fourth photo at Grand Central Terminal on 42nd Street.)

There’s one more feature about the globes worth decoding. Riders became concerned that the colored globes didn’t give off enough light, and without proper illumination, station entrances and exits could become more dangerous.

So MTA officials stopped using full-colored globes in favor of what they call “half-moons,” which have a colored top and an opaque bottom, explained Kennedy.

Of course today, in the era of phone apps that can tell you almost everything you want to know about a subway station before you get there, the old-school globe system seems like a quaint anachronism.

New York City’s oldest stone mile marker stood on this Brooklyn road for almost 200 years

The low-rise, mostly commercial stretch of Brooklyn’s 18th Avenue running through Bensonhurst has a historic feel. That’s due in part to the circa-1829 New Utrecht Reformed Church and replica Liberty Pole facing the avenue.

But a pocket park a few blocks away at 18th Avenue and 82nd Street contains an even more curious artifact from the former colonial town of New Utrecht’s pre-Revolutionary War backstory.

In the center of the park is a replica of New York City’s oldest mile marker. The original sandstone marker was erected on this corner in 1741 to help guide travelers on Kings County’s few roads.

On the front of the original milestone (above, in 1910) is an inscription giving precise directions. “8 1/4 mile to N. York ferry this road” and “to Denys’s ferry, 2 1/2 mile.” Denys’s ferry refers to a local resident who ran a ferry from today’s Verrazano Bridge to Staten Island, according to Heyridge.

(On the map below, from 1776, Deny’s Ferry is spelled “Dennis’s” as it crosses the Narrows below New Utrecht.)

The side of the milestone reads “10 1/2 mile to N. York ferry this road” and “to Jamaica 15 mile.” At the time, Jamaica was the county seat of Queens County.

Directions on two sides of the stone indicate that in the 18th century, this mile marker was at the juncture of two key colonial roads: Kings Highway and the Old New Utretcht-Flatbush Road, which was eventually renamed 18th Avenue.

At this juncture just behind the mile marker was the Van Pelt Manor (below, in 1911), a Dutch-style dwelling built in 1672. This was the home of Aert Teunisse Van Pelt, whose prominent family stayed in the lovely house through eight generations.

They weren’t the only ones to occupy the house. “Both Continental Army General George Washington (1732-1799) and British General William Howe (1729-1814) used it at different times as a military prison during the Revolutionary War (1776-1781),” states NYC Parks.

In 1910, family descendent Townsend Cortelyou Van Pelt “deeded the manor and the stone to the city for one dollar on the ‘express condition that the said premises be used and maintained as a site for exhibiting and preserving thereon a certain old Dutch milestone,'” states NYC Parks.

“The city agreed to fence off a 300 square foot area that enclosed the stone and set it on a concrete base,” per NYC Parks.

At some point, the “certain old Dutch milestone” went into the safe hands of the Brooklyn Historical Society. The replica, placed on the exact spot of the original, dates to 1917.

And Van Pelt Manor? This charming house remained on the site, a witness to centuries of Brooklyn history which saw Kings County go from sparsely settled farmland in the 18th century to a mighty city a century later and then downgraded to a borough of Greater New York in 1898.

A fire destroyed the manor in 1952, and it was torn down as a result, but not without protest from one Brooklyn Eagle reader, who wrote the newspaper about how it should have been preserved.

After the Manor was demolished, the pocket park rose in its place in the 1920s—a patch of green space with tables and benches appropriately named Milestone Park.

New York has other milestones still planted in the streetscape, like this relic in Inwood and another on the grounds of the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Washington Heights.

Brooklyn also has an extant mile marker on Ocean Parkway and Avenue P—or at least it did when I snapped the photo in 2010.

[Second image: MCNY X2010.11.10066; third photo: Center for Brooklyn History/Brooklyn Public Library/Brooklynhistory.org; fourth photo: MCNY X2010.11.7899]