POTW: Bulger's Hotel: Subway Construction Photographs Shed Light on a Lost Brooklyn Business

One of the most frequent challenges for staff and researchers in CBH's Othmer Library is finding photographs that provide evidence of Brooklyn's past built environment. The city's 1940 tax photos are our go-to resource, but these can miss houses, businesses, and community landmarks that were razed in earlier years.

For some neighborhoods, our subway construction photographs offer earlier visual documentation. The photograph above documents sidewalk conditions in 1915 in advance of subway construction, but also provides evidence of an impressive hotel and cafe that once stood at the southeast corner of Willoughby and Pearl Streets in downtown Brooklyn. Just a stone's throw from Borough Hall, Edward F. Bulger's hotel was a meeting place for local labor and political organizations including the Regular Colored Democratic Society of Kings County.

The Bulger family had deep roots in Brooklyn's lucrative liquor business. Irish immigrant John J. Bulger had a saloon at the corner of Pearl and Plymouth streets by the mid 1860s, and a second Bulger family establishment later opened at the corner of Pearl and Sands streets. The latter location became known as the first Bulger's Hotel after the passage of Raines Law in 1896, when saloons began offering lodging and frequently-inedible sandwiches to evade new anti-liquor regulations. 

John J. Bulger died in 1907 and his son, Edward F. Bulger, established the pictured Bulger's Hotel in the years following. Advertising Carstairs Whiskey and Jacob Ruppert's Knickerbocker Beer on its elegant facade, the business was likely a victim of Prohibition and had disappeared by the early 1920s. 

Interested in seeing more photos from CBH’s collections? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images, or the digital collections portal at Brooklyn Public Library. We look forward to inviting you to CBH in the future to research in our entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections. In the meantime, please visit our resources page to search our collections. Questions? Our reference staff is available to help with your research! You can reach us at cbhreference@bklynlibrary.org.