MILTON STREET, GREENPOINT

Here is a second entry in The Forgotten NY Overlooked Series, in which I revive old pages that somehow were not converted when FNY changed layouts and hosting services in 2011 and 2018. This is the second and last one I know about, and it’s difficult to track them down without doing a meticulous search through over 4700 posts, which I don’t have the time or inclination for at present. But, rest assured, 98-99% of every page I composed has been posted. This page, on Milton Street in Greenpoint, was originally posted in early 2007. Please note, I scanned these photos somewhat smaller than I do today.

DESPITE some back discomfort probably due to years of poor posture combined with vaulting over ice floes (and 2007 is the least snowiest winter in years) your webmaster decided to finally check out the smoldering ruins of the Great Greenpoint Fire of May 2006. OK, they’re not smoldering anymore. But, I decided to visit before the moneybags developers build $1M apartments along the East River there. I used Milton Street as my conduit, and found the best block in Greenpoint.

Note: back discomfort all this month in what appears to be sciatica. Age 65 ain’t easy.

Greenpoint street names aren’t easily explained. Very early on they simply bore letters, from A to Q; they later acquired names, in alphabetical order: Ash, Box, Clay, Dupont, Eagle, Freeman, Green, Huron, India, Java, Kent, Milton, Noble, Oak and Quay. L seems to have become Lincoln, and then Greenpoint Avenue, and P Calyer Street, both by 1855. Some of the buildings still carry letter signs, which marks them as quite old. Ash, Box and Clay seem to attest to the area’s industrial past while India and Java hark back to the region’s former waterfront history, with ships carrying cargo from far-off lands laid anchor; Milton Street was named for 1840s ship chandler Daniel Milton. The Meseroles and Calyers were early settler families in the 17th Century, but it was industrialist Neziah Bliss and educator Eliphalet Nott who transformed the sleepy farms and fields into an industrial and shipbuilding town beginning in 1834. Meserole and Calyer are Greenpoint street names, while Bliss settled for a street in Sunnyside, Queens, across Newtown Creek.

If you have an hour or two, here’s the early history of Greenpoint.

The Three Towers

Milton Street is recognizable from Manhattan (the east side in the East Twenties) by its collection of tall towers.

Milton Street runs just two blocks — from West Street east to Manhattan Avenue. It is in fact the first in its alphabetical series to not extend past Manhattan Avenue; there’s a bend in the avenue here that allowed the parish of St. Anthony of Padua to construct a massive near-cathedral in maroon and white brick in 1875, employing Patrick Keely as architect. It’s fully 240 feet tall.

Sixteen years later, St. Anthony would be joined by a new spire, as the Evangelische-Lutherische St. Johannes Kirche, or St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church was constructed by, as fitting, a German architect, Theobald Engelhardt. While Anthony’s the star, John has a couple of highlights, like a flying buttresss here and a collection of lancet windows there to recommend it.

At the other end of the street is a longstanding water tower which over the years has collected a “Save Palestine” sign and a Polish flag. [both have now been painted over]

The Black Arts

It is impossible to write any account of the development of Green Point without paying considerable attention to industries. In its history it has followed the same line of growth and change as all other communities similarly located and affected by the changing currents of occupations and inhabitants. The growth of the means of conveyance, and ready access to the great city across the river, guaranteed the future, but the coming on a large scale of commerce and industry determined definitely the character of the place. By 1860 the Five Black Arts, so called, Printing, Pottery, Gas, Glass, and Iron, were firmly established. The earlier industries remained only as long as they were imperatively needed for the life of the people and then they were supplanted by other forms of activity. The farmer gave place to the shipwright and he in turn to the factory worker. Shipbuilding went to the Pacific coast or to the coast of Maine, where raw materials from the forests could be had in abundance at the water’s edge and labor was cheaper and not so well organized. New avenues to wealth were opened as a result of the industrial invasion. Real estate values rose rapidly. The employer of a hundred hands with a small margin of profit from the daily labor of each worker could progress financially much more rapidly than the farmer who had only a few men under him. William Felter, “Historic Greenpoint,” 1915

For such a short street Milton has a big spiritual side. The Greenpoint (Dutch) Reformed Church at #136 is the former Thomas C. Smith mansion. In a formerly industrious neighborhood this was the relatively modest castle of one of the area’s chief manufacturers, as Smith (1815-1900) was the founder of the 19th Century’s foremost fine china and porcelain makers, Union Porcelain Works. Smith built the house in 1867, and the church moved from Kent Street in 1944, after the building enjoyed a stint as the local YMCA.

A few buildings west on the same side of the street we find the St. John’s Parish House. It too was designed by Engelbreit, in 1889; the AIA Guide to New York City describes “The bracketed canopies over the entrances [as] lusty celebrations of entry.”

From the comments board in Brownstoner [link has expired]:

“I have to share an awesome tidbit about the St. John’s Parish House. I knew an old Polish lady that owns two buildings on the block (one she lives in, and one of apartments she rents) and this building came up for sale some years ago (15 or 20?). She wanted to buy it and looked at it many times while making offers. Here’s the gold: Evidently, the building has its own built-in recreation in the form of a frickin’ BOWLING ALLEY in the basement.

“The alley is old and manually run, and there are only two lanes or something, but presumably it was installed for the wholesome entertainment of the Lord’s servants originally living there. Still fully functional. A bowling alley. Man! And the rest of the building is apparently lousy with original, untouched details.”

There is one unintentionally interesting detail left from the original [Reformed Church]: over the years, as the concrete floor in the basement has worn down, the aggregate has become exposed in places.

It seems, that to economize, [Smith] used damaged or seconded ceramic door knobs from his factory as the aggregate in his concrete. So now, many antique doorknobs are showing through the floor. New York Architecture Images

Smith purchased the land the house is built on from Samuel Tilden, a Democratic NYS Governor who, in 1876, won the popular vote in the Presidential election against Republican Rutherford Hayes but lost by having fewer Electoral College votes, which should remind you of the races in 2000 [and 2016].

The buildings above  were built by Thomas C. Smith, who had a way with a recessed porch known as a loggia. Other than a renowned china maker, Smith also had a long career as an architect–for example the buildings with the loggias, #141-149, were built in 1894 while the Second Empire-style pair with the mansard roofs date to 1868.

These three buildings, the first two facing each other just west of Manhattan Avenue, have no genuine architectural pedigree. They merely have a sense of style that today’s residential architects have forgotten or prefer to dismiss.

Many of their original, or near-original elements are still present; I tend to look at doors quite a bit, especially noting double doors or doors that contain mini-windows. The ground floors (above left and left) are likely rented as apartments, and have small gardens in the back; I have had friends who lived in houses just like these, and they’ve tended to stay there, once they move in, until they find something they can afford. Sometimes, that’s in Long Island, sometimes in upstate New York, and sometimes in Georgia. These days, it’s rarely in Brooklyn.

Milton Street’s ubiquitous red brick, limestone, terra cotta, surprising details and deep-front gardens all help give the street its cheerful air, so different from the often dour quality of Brooklyn’s brownstone streets. Francis Morrone, An Architectural Guidebook to Brooklyn

The row of brick buildings, part of 93-103, might look inauspicious but check the curved lintels over the windows and he decorated concrete arches (called archivolts) over the doors, which, by the way, are all different in the three buildings pictured. They are among the older buildings on the block, having been built in 1874.

Milton Street between Franklin Street and Manhattan Avenue is urban architecture at its finest.

Storefronts, Franklin Street between Milton Street and Greenpoint Avenue. Franklin Street is formerly the main commercial conduit of the town, and was part of the toll road built by Neziah Bliss that crossed Newtown Creek into Queens.

[These storefronts have long since been repurposed]

Beyond Milton

Much of the Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse, a group of abandoned commercial and factory buildings between West Street and the East River from Milton to Oak Streets, burned down in an extremely suspicious fire May 6, 2006. If it was a mecca for urban explorers before the fire, it’s even more Pavlovian now; why, the gate was wide open and I wandered in as brazen as you please, without any barking security guards or dogs to mess with. If it wasn’t for my delicate back muscles, I would’ve been clambering over the ruins like everyone else.

Most people consider the Empire State Building as iconic, romantic, and the eidolon of NYC architecture; I call it the King of All Buildings.

In a context like this, though, I prefer to envision it the way it was used in the 1980s junkie sci-fi film Liquid Sky: as a representation of a syringe.

Oak Street’s overhead walkways at Greenpoint Terminal, destroyed during the fire. This has been the site of a number of movie shoots, notably “Romeo Is Bleeding” (1993)

The Gem of Greenpoint

Gem Street runs for just one block, between Meserole Avenue and North 15th Street jus east of Franklin. It is completely unlit (your webmaster is the only one who would come here on foot on a 30-degree Sunday afternoon, and only rumbles occur here at night) with a collection of small businesses. It’s a stumper why it’s called “Gem Street” — there’s 2 streets in Greenpoint called Jewel and Diamond, but they’re 10 blocks away. I see a vague commercial connection: the next street over is Banker, and then there are two streets vaguely associated with farm animals, Dobbin and Guernsey (though Leonard Benardo tells us in Brooklyn By Name that Guernsey is named for a prominent homeopathic doctor, Egbert Guernsey (1823-1904). But it’s Gem we’re concerned with here…

So, this is where Wile E. Coyote does his grocery shopping.

Gem and North 15th. Greenpoint’s not a strict grid. Williamsburg’s NE-SW angled streets run against Greenpoint’s more east-west layout here, and odd angles are produced. By 2067, when I’m 110, I think I’ll have photographed every odd triangle building in NYC.

Forgotten Fan Stephanie Leveene: One note about the page you put up yesterday: the Acme Smoked Fish factory, which supplies fish not only to supermarkets but also to the top appetizing places in the city (Zabar’s, Russ & Daughters, etc.), opens its doors to the public every Friday from 8 AM until about noon. They sell packaged fish as well as whole whitefish and cut-to-order pieces of lox at wholesale prices. It takes a little while to find the “store” when you get there, but it’s worth it.

[I wonder if that’s still the case]

There’s no attendant, no 7-11, certainly no men’s room, but there’s a couple of gas pumps and an open gate at Franklin and North 15th; if I were driving, I could have filled up. But then again, it was after 10.

{This area has severely gentrified since 2007, and the gas station has been privatized]

As always, “comment…as you see fit.” I earn a small payment when you click on any ad on the site.

2/21/07, revised 5/29/23