On Sunday, March 17, 2024 I meandered around the Gowanus area and wound up walking the length of Nevins Street, which runs from Carroll Street to Flatbush Avenue in the heart of downtown Brooklyn. Gowanus is under heavy construction these days with massive residential buildings popping up along Gowanus Canal, though Lavender Lake is not much cleaner than when I circumnavigated it back in November 2005. Nevins Street begins (or ends; its house numbering is north to south) at Carroll just east of the canal and proceeds in. astraight line north to Flatbush Avenue. It is named for Russell Nevins (1785-1853) a real estate developer and partner of Charles Hoyt, who has a street of his own two blocks west.
I left off Part One at Nevins and Union Streets. Proceeding north, I found this storefront identified only by a small sign showing a bicycle and the word “Tuned” which is actually a bicycle repair shop. This fooled me, as I have never seen a bike repair/retail shop with a lot of bicycles on racks outside and/or in the windows.
There’s some construction activity going on at this building at the SW corner of Sackett and Nevins. The 1920 Belcher Hyde desk atlas identifies it as the National Packing Box Co., which means that it was likely built for James Dykeman’s box empire (see last entry on Part One, linked above.
At the SE corner of Nevins and Sackett Streets, it’s not immediately apparent what “Victor”was on the SE corner of Sackett and Nevins, but an internet query reveals that it’s a Mediterranean-cuisine restaurant; as the review in Eater says, it gets decent crowds. I remember this as the former location of Freek’s Mill, a previous bar/restaurant. (It’s for people who like oysters, prawns, octopus, cauliflower etc., which I stay away from, since I unashamedly have the culinary sensibilities of an 8-year-old.) Yelp reveals the location is now closed, and that leads me to the saddest discoveries I made on Nevins north of Union. We now have to deal with a number of buildings that have been torn down in recent years, in fact since I was last in these parts in 2021.
The T(heodore) E. Conklin Brass and Copper Company was founded in Manhattan in 1860 and has had a warehouse on the Gowanus Canal since 1959. The building abuts the canal and, the gate to the parking lot, open during the week, allowed me to get in closer to get these photos. The Indispensable Walter Grutchfield reports that the company moved to Hudson Street in 1981, but I suspect there’s still some operations here. A handy Conklin fraction-decimal conversion chart was available on ebay in October 2019.
I found the whole shebang had been torn down and eliminated as the site is being prepared for what New York Yimby reports will be “the Gowanus Canal Combined Sewer Overflow Facilities project, a wastewater retention complex spanning three properties at 242 and 270 Nevins Streets and 234 Butler Street in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Designed by Selldorf Architects and managed by the NYC Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), the development will consist of a two-story head house with underground water retention tanks and a 1.6-acre public park with landscaping by DLAND Studio. Hazen and Sawyer, and Brown and Caldwell are engineering consultants and Gowanus Canal Constructors is the general contractor for the project[.]”
Meanwhile, on the northeast corner of Sackett, I found that the Adams Book distributors had been razed with an apartment building to rise in its place.
The Adams Book Company occupied a warehouse on Nevins between Sackett and DeGraw. According to their website, they have been in business since 1946 and [are] “the nation’s largest K-12 educational clearinghouse for new textbooks, used textbooks, new workbooks, paperback novels, and reference materials. We serve the K-12 educational community as a single source provider of any book in print. We are committed to supplying teachers with new paperback literature, new textbooks and reconditioned used textbooks all at the best possible prices.”
It was somewhat surprising to find a book distributer here on the banks of the swiftly flowing Gowanus. Now that they’ve moved elsewhere it’ll be interesting to see a high rise apartment building directly across Nevins Street from the Gowanus Canal Combined Sewer Overflow Facilities project. Well, if the windows don’t open, as most high rise building windows don’t, the well-heeled apartment dwellers won’t be dealing with miasmic sewer vapors.
Meanwhile at the Thomas Greene Playground, on former Brooklyn Union Gas territory at Nevins and DeGraw, is what appears to be some Keith Haring-inspired chalked artwork called Double D. Breakdown by Katie Merz. The playground itself was built in 1935.
A block north at Nevins and Douglass at another teardown site, this time of a former garage serving delivery vehicles of the Scranton and Lehigh Coal Company, once the largest coal producer in Pennsyvlania, is a fascinating grouping of photos comprising artist Demarcus McGaughey’s “Kindred”, which
honors the sometimes-forgotten ancestry of Black Americans while acknowledging the cultural contribution of his family beyond enslavement.
The series comprises over 40 mixed media pieces exploring memory, identity, and spirituality and are inspired by his rediscovery of family photographs and cherished stories. These images reacquainted Demarcus with his history and reaffirmed for him the importance of understanding the impact of his family’s existence in the American south for more than five generations.
“While creating the work for ‘Kindred,’ I transported myself to a time where the appreciation of tangible items held a weight much heavier than present day,” he says. In a world where digital content is king, Demarcus honors his family’s legacy by way of family photo albums, boxes of snapshots, and generations of memorable stories. [Artwork Archive]
I wandered a bit down Douglass (my fascination with Gowanus is ongoing despite its constant “disappearances”) and was rewarded with a faded painted sign for Quality Woodworking Corp. The company is apparently still in business:
Quality Woodworking was founded by Anthony Borruso in 1941. The business manufactured wooden boxes, attach cases and novelties for industrial needs. In the early 1960’s, his son Joseph Borruso took over the company and the business saw tremendous growth. Over time, the business has expanded into manufacturing kitchen cabinetry. Quality Woodworking now features three prominent cabinet lines including: Wellborn Forrest, Kitchen Craft, and Omega Cabinetry. [Real Yellow Pages]
There are interesting buildings and remnants of a similar age nearby. At Butler and Nevins was the 1913 Gowanus Water Supply Distribution Station, identified in terra cotta on the pediment. Unfortunately this building, as well was claimed by Gowanus Canal Combined Sewer Overflow Facilities project.
I did not wander west on Butler on this occasion, but you can still see an original American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals office building and a horse trough, one of the few remaining around town.
Directly across Butler Street is this stolid, concrete building with nifty terra cotta highlights built in 1914, once home to the printing plant for R.G. Dunn and Company. In 2014 plans were announced for a 162-room hotel here. That’s right, half a block away from the Gowanus Canal pumping station and across the street from a sewage tank now under construction. Deep Brooklyn! So far, nothing has been done with the building, which still stands.
The Wyckoff Gardens apartment complex rises in the distance at Nevins and Wyckoff Streets. The 6-acre complex housing 1300 residents was completed in December 1966. It figured in the 1995 Harvey Keitel vehicle “Smoke.”
The new Evalyn’s Tap House at Nevins and Butler Street is located in a brick building originally home to the Brown and Bailey Condensed Milk Co. The building was given a new facade and an addition that hosts The Cliffs, a rock climbing gym. (I would have been in the ER. Even if I tried it 30 years ago.)
Work Heights, a coworking space (a shared working space where people who work for different companies work in the same office or room) at #506 Warren Street at the corner of Nevins, replaced the Cobble Hill Deli and Grill. (This area is just north of Gowanus and I’d call it more Boerum Hill than Cobble Hill, which is further west.) Alongside it are a pair of woodframe buildings which take a back seat to brick or brownstone residences in what was originally called “South Brooklyn.”
A look north on Nevins from Wyckoff, as the Brooklyn Tower looks oin balefully.
Nevins Street briefly touches on the small Boerum Hill Historic District between Dean and Pacific Streets, designated by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1973. From left to right, #116, #112 and #110 were constructed by buildier John Doherty from 1852 to 1853.
New and old show up at Nevins Street and Atlantic Avenue, as the 610-foot, 55-floor skyscraper called The Hub at #333 Schermerhorn looms above all.
Looking west on Atlantic from Nevins, a building I recall from my youth is in view.
When I was a kid my parents and I would go on lengthy trips of exploration on local buses, and one of the routes was the B63 which ran down 5th and Atlantic Avenues to the waterfront. On the return trip I remember being amused by the factory building near Nevins that was emblazoned “Ex Lax” over its front entrance, since even as a kid I knew that was the name of the “chocolate laxative” which was then advertised heavily on TV.
It was indeed an Ex-Lax factory, but it closed sometime in the 1960s. It was an early residential conversion in 1979, when I was still attending St. Francis College a couple of blocks away. A few years ago I went on an Open House New York tour through one of the ultramodern residences that have been carved out of the old poop loosening factory, which once kept a “staff” of monkeys on hand for product testing. The monkeys’ old quarters, in which they were kept in cages, has been incorporated into one of the apartments.
I would like to know more about this carriage house on the east side of Nevins between State Street and Atlantic Avenue. This is not in the landmarked district, so research could be tedious.
The handsome brick building at 50 Nevins Street (at State Street) is home to the Institute for Community Living and Broooklyn Psychosocial Rehabilitation Institute, treatment and residential programs for people with mental illness. Until I’m crazy enough, I’ll admire the building from the outside with its impressive arched entrance, window lintels, and masoned plaque explaining that Fort Masonic formerly stood here, one of the many fortifications erected in NYC in anticipation of a British invasion during the War of 1812. The tablet was placed on the centennial of the fort’s institution when the building was constructed.
It was one of a line of defenses including Fort Green (near the site of, but not the same as, the Fort Greene built during the Revolutionary War), Fort Cummings (DeKalb Avenue and Bond Street), Fort Swift (Atlantic Avenue and Court Street).
None of these old forts has left any trace — but a War of 1812 blockhouse still stands in Central Park.
A look east on Schermerhorn Street (inexplicably pronounced by Brooklynites of a certain generation as “skimmerhorn”) at a new grouping of residential towers, including The Hub on the left. Both Schermerhorn and Livingston Streets have completely metamorphosed in the past decade.
The Ministry of Love, actually Consolidated Edison headquarters, stands in a triangle formed by Nevins, Livingston and Flatbush Avenue. There’s actually an architectural genre called Brutalist, and this is Brutalist at its worst, from the dark and distant time that was early 1970s building design.
[images of Brutalist buildings]
I continued west on Livingston, but that will wait for another page.
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4/21/24