The Deleted Scenes - False Façade
I saw this tweet a couple of months ago, and of course, the first thing I thought was, “This would make a great entry in my What Do You Think You’re Looking At? series!” Since 1907, NO ONE has lived in this #Brooklyn Heights #brownstone, No. 58 Joralemon St. What has caused this enviable address to remain - to this day - ABANDONED? If there’s an abandoned brownstone in Brooklyn, your guess is either some sort of environmental contamination, or some legal issue with the ownership. Otherwise abandonment doesn’t pay, as it were. But the story of this building is much more interesting than anything like that. First of all, here it is on Google Street View (the one with the dark windows): The other houses don’t have that full grate over the lower floor area, either. And what’s with this unusual structure on the rooftop?
Then the subway came through. Look at this, from further down in that Twitter thread I linked at the top: It’s a ventilation shaft and emergency exit for the subway! The subway happened go right under this townhouse, and rather than demolish it, the city purchased it and then gutted it, making the subway infrastructure invisible from the street—and for the erstwhile house’s neighbors. The Gothamist piece even reports that neighbors could lease the backyard, which is still intact. This is one of the coolest examples of “adaptive reuse”—the use of a building for a different purpose than intended—that I’ve seen. Read the whole piece and check out the whole Twitter thread for more photos and the full history! Related Reading: What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #27 Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive: over 400 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this! You’re a free subscriber to The Deleted Scenes. For the full experience, become a paid subscriber. |
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