My fascination of the narrow strip along Old Fulton Street where Brooklyn Heights meets DUMBO is ever-engrossing for me, as it has breathtaking views of Manhattan and interesting brick-dominated architecture. My interest was initially piqued, though, when as a lad I pored through the Brooklyn map and poked through the Geographia “Little Red Book” Street Guide and wondered about all the tiny streets and alleys to be found. DUMBO has lost, I’d say, about 75-80% of its ancient alleys to “urban renewal” and expressway construction. I’ve listed these long-gone ways in FNY’s Street Necrology of Downtown Brooklyn. I often joke about getting into an H.G. Wells model time machine, but I wish it was real; one of my missions would be to go back and get photos of them all, as photographers of the 19th and early 20th Century largely ignored them.
Though the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was bruited through the southern part of this 1929 map excerpt much of the ancient alleys arrayed south of (now Old) Fulton Street are still there: Doughty, Everit, Elizabeth, Vine and part of McKenn(e)y.
Everit Street was named for a butcher and slaughterhouse owner on Fulton Street, Thomas Everit. Three buildings on Everit survive, #11, a warehouse on the corner of Doughty that still has an intact pulley on the third floor, and a pair of brick dwellings, #8 and #12. The street itself, a northern extension of Columbia Heights, has a good view of the Brooklyn Bridge. Wedged as it is between taller buildings fronting Old Fulton and Vine Streets, Doughty Street looks a little forbidding. It follows its original path for the most part between Furman and Hicks Streets. Doughty Street is named for Brooklyn Village president Charles Doughty (1759-1844) who was the first Brooklynite of note to free his slave, Caesar Foster. He was a Quaker turned Swedenborgian.
This tiny piece of McKenny connects Doughty and Vine. It went without a street sign for decades until the most recent round of street sign replacements in the 2010s. Older maps like the one shown above revealed that the street did indeed have a name, McKenny Street. In a now-deleted post (I have no idea why many websites remove posts), The Brooklyn Historical Society blog had an item on it. All of its facing buildings were obliterated by the construction of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in the 1950s. It was named for a Brooklyn lawman named John McKenn(e)y who settled on the street.
Vine Street runs for one block between Columbia Heights and Hicks Streets between the Hillside Park dog run and the Jehovah’s Witnesses Watchtower complex, formerly Squibb Pharmaceuticals. Watchtower was sold in 2016 to a group headed by Jared Kushner, former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law.
As for Vine Street, I’ll let Henry Hope Stiles discuss it in A History of the City of Brooklyn from 1867:
I have a lot more on these tiny streets on this FNY page from 2010.
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11/9/23
6 comments
Until hearing about this, the only cities I knew that had a Vine Street was Hollywood and Philadelphia.
The city where I grew up has a Vine Street, but it’s in just about the worst part of town.
You should have grown up in the Heights instead of the Ridge.
Much more interesting.
There is a Vine Street in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Its in a nice part of the city, near Elmora Avenue.
I have harvested numerous photos of Vine Street from the NYC Municipal Archives and other sources. Many of the streets around here, including Poplar, were extremely truncated or have nearly vanished entirely when the BQE was rammed through by Robert Moses, who never saw an old building or neighborhood he didn’t want to replace, preferably with more highways.
Hinsdale, Illinois a Vine Street.