The delightfully ornate building that brought the feel of the Bowery to the 1870s Bronx
It’s a stunning and surprising sight in the Melrose section of the South Bronx: a Second Empire-Italianate building that resembles a gingerbread house with icing decorating the mansard roof.
This delightful confection has stood at 614 Courtlandt Avenue since 1871. It was out of place back then, a spectacular beauty with design similarities to many of the buildings on the Bowery.
And it’s out of place now, spaced apart from the low-rise walkups and empty lots in the surrounding neighborhood.
How did this striking building find itself here, and why did it survive? The story begins with a German immigrant named Julius Ruppert, who noticed a migration of fellow German newcomers from Lower Manhattan to the countryside of today’s South Bronx—and saw an opportunity.
It’s not clear when Ruppert (no relation to Jacob Ruppert of brewery fame) first arrived in New York. But in 1859, he was running his own billiards hall at 50 Bowery. This main drag of Manhattan’s crowded German immigrant neighborhood, known as Kleindeutschland, was populated by thousands of Germans who settled in New York before the Civil War.
Four years later, with Kleindeutschland extending to today’s East Village, Ruppert opened a saloon at Avenue A and First Street. By the 1870s, German immigration had ramped up again following a pause during the Civil War. Ruppert turned his attention to the section of New York where many German immigrants were relocating.
“No doubt, Ruppert was aware of his countrymen’s migration to the Bronx and was motivated to follow his former customers and to offer them the same hospitality in their new neighborhood,” stated the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), of the Melrose area.
What drew Germans to Melrose and the other villages of today’s South Bronx? Fresh air and roomier quarters. The South Bronx—still part of Westchester until it was annexed by Manhattan in 1874—was farmland before the Civil War.
By the late 1860s, Courtlandt Avenue had transitioned into “the main shopping street, lined by beer halls and the scene of parades by German bands,” notes the LPC. Courtlandt Avenue had taken on such a deep German identity, it earned the nickname the “Dutch Broadway.”
Ruppert bought the land for his building from a German butcher, then commissioned a “builder-contractor,” per the LPC, likely a fellow German immigrant. Three stories with a mansard roof, long windows, decorative fan motifs, and portal windows, it housed a saloon on the ground floor, public rooms for German social and political clubs above the saloon, and a residential flat.
Interestingly, Ruppert himself never moved in. But his wife, Catharine, did reside there from 1880 to 1894. During her time, she leased the ground floor to a butcher and then to saloon keepers. She also made some structural changes.
“It was Catharine Ruppert who commissioned Hewlett S. Baker, architect, to renovate the building in 1882, dividing the second and third stories into two residential flats each,” noted the LPC. “Baker lowered the second story ceiling and, as a consequence, the height of the distinctive windows.”
Following Catharine and Julius’ deaths, their heirs sold the building in 1927. But after World War I, “the neighborhood lost its predominantly German character, and still later, in common with the rest of the South Bronx, had to fight for its very life,” wrote David Bady on a Lehman College website about Bronx architecture.
“As a result of those hard times, the building, always meant to stand out, today stands alone on its corner, next to a vacant lot,” added Bady.
Designated a New York City landmark in 1987, this fanciful building underwent major renovations in the early 2000s, with the upper floors converted to housing, according to a 2008 article in the New York Times.
What’s happening with 612 Courtlandt Avenue these days? A Google search discovered that it’s home to Bronx Documentary Center, a nonprofit gallery and educational center that showcases documentary photos and films that drive social change.
Whatever happens in its next act, this stunner remains “a monument to the first stage of urbanization within what had been the previously rural South Bronx,” stated the Historic District Council, adding that the building “has many of the stylistic features which characterized those along the Bowery in the area known as Kleindeutschland, where Julius Ruppert first established his business before following his fellow Germans to the Bronx.”
[Fourth photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]
