J. S. Johnston, Life Saving Station, Manhattan Beach, Coney Island, N.Y., c. 1894, v1972.1.557; Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History. This week's photo takes us to the lost eastern end of Manhattan Beach.Manhattan Beach, on the eastern end of Coney Island, was the brainchild of robber baron Austin Corbin. In the 1870s, he bought 500 acres here and erected two luxury resort hotels for vacationing New Yorkers (not all New Yorkers, however, as Corbin was a notorious anti-semite who barred Jews from the resort). He also built the New York and Manhattan Beach…
Ralph Irving Lloyd, Meserole House, 1000 Lorimer St., c. 1905, lantern slide, V1981.15.124; Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History. This week’s photograph of Adrian and Mary Meserole’s house on Lorimer Street takes us to the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Adrian Meserole’s family had once owned much of present-day Greenpoint. His ancestor Jean Meserole and his wife were Huguenots—Protestants in Catholic-controlled France—who fled with their young son first to Amsterdam and then to New Amsterdam, present-day New York City, in 1663, becoming one of…
Classon Avenue showing entrance to Union PlacePhotograph album; Bommer family collection, 1992.033, Box A0142; Center for Brooklyn History.
This week we explore photographs of a Clinton Hill block from the Bommer family collection.
The easternmost end of Pratt Institute’s Clinton Hill campus gives little indication that it was once a densely-built city block, but it was. Bounded by Classon, Dekalb, and Willoughby Avenues, and formerly by Emerson Place to the west, the block was unusually wide. In the 1870s, a wealthy, Spanish-born merchant-developer named…
A draught of New York from the Hook to New York Town: by Mark Tiddeman [1773-1780]; NYC-[177-?].Fl.RA; Brooklyn Historical Society.This week’s map is a colorful nautical chart, where the numbers in the water indicate soundings (measurements of the depth of the water) in fathoms (one fathom equals six feet). The map is oriented with north to the right and shows the western end of Long Island, including four of Brooklyn’s original six towns. Can you spot them?
A draught of New York from the Hook to New York Town was originally created around 1730 by British navigator and…
v19721771Eugene L. Armbruster, Dreamland, 1904; V1972.1.771, Early Brooklyn and Long Island photograph collection, ARC.201; Brooklyn Historical Society.Eugene L. Armbruster's dreamlike photograph shows a mother and daughter in Coney Island's Dreamland amusement park in 1904, the year the park opened.
Dreamland was the last of Coney Island's original three large amusement parks, along with Steeplechase Park and Luna Park, and sought to draw visitors with sophisticated architecture and its location right at the water's edge, where the ocean breeze would cool the public during…
Graduating class, Public School 15With this week's Photo of the Week, we congratulate the graduates of 2020!
The photograph above shows the graduating class of P.S. 15 in the year 1900. The school stood on Third Avenue between Schermerhorn and State streets. Today it is the home of the Khalil Gibran International Academy High School, but you can still see evidence of its history above the entrances, where there appears a “Public School” sign in terra cotta over one door, and “Public School No. 15” over another.
We are fortunate that on the back of the photo, the donor…
Group portrait of Miss Stanton and girlsThis week we honor Brooklyn's teachers. To all the educators who have rapidly adapted to a remote learning environment, thank you for continuing to provide educational opportunities and a crucial sense of routine to our children.
Children in 19th and early 20th century school photographs often look stiff and expressionless—an image of childhood that feels unfamiliar. The many poses and personalities among these students at Emmanuel House in Clinton Hill, by contrast, give these charming photographs a sense of relatability even one…
Interior of Cutler's Drug StoreInterior of Cutler's Drug Store, 1887, V1972.1.587; Early Brooklyn and Long Island photograph collection; Brooklyn Historical Society.This week we are honoring all those employed in pharmacies who continue to work throughout the pandemic, ensuring that New Yorkers can obtain the medications they need. We thank you!
George E. Cutler was born in 1842 in Massachusetts, where, after serving in the Navy and fighting in the Civil War, he studied pharmaceutics, boarding and working at an apothecary in his hometown. By the 1870s, he had moved…