ORIGINAL STREET SIGN, BROOKLYN HEIGHTS

GRADUALLY, my photos of Livingston Street that I fired off at the end of my Nevins Street walk are leaching out. This is at the very beginning of Livingston, at Clinton Street in Brooklyn Heights, at the tiptop of #133 Clinton, a landmarked building constructed in 1851 in a neighborhood full of them in NYC’s first Landmarked district. The LPC (Landmarks Preservation Commission) has published a report for all of NYC’s landmarked districts. The very first one is rudimentary indeed. Unlike later reports, there isn’t an exhaustive neighborhood history, and each building isn’t described in detail. But it was done on a typewriter and the LPC just scanned the early reports and put them online as is, so it’s an interesting artifact of low-tech.

What intrigues me about #133 Clinton is that on the roof you can see a pair of original “humpback” Brooklyn street signs. They were in black (or perhaps a very dark navy) with white sanserif letters, and were the basis of the black and white vinyl signs of 1964-1984. a number of these hung tough for a few years after the “vinyls” appeared.

However, appended to the sign is the house number, 133, in one of the metal and enamel signs that were the predecessors of the “vinyls.” These first showed up in the 1950s and I noticed them, as a kid, in Brooklyn and Staten Island (there they were yellow with black letters). I don’t know if they were employed in the other boroughs.

In Brooklyn Heights, and only Brooklyn Heights, house numbers were added to the street signs, making them look like this. On my bus rides around Brooklyn as a wee lad , I didn’t see this practiced anywhere else. It may have been a pilot program by what was then the Department of Traffic, and didn’t make it past Brooklyn Heights.

This sign has been on the roof of #133 Clinton for a long time. I remember it from my St. Francis College days, 1975-1980. Forgotten NY wasn’t yet a twinkle in the eye then. But I was piling things up in the noggin that I would remember and use when the time came. The sign has outlasted SFC which was on Remsen Street, but now occupies a couple of floors above the back door of Macy’s (the old A&S) on Livingston 3 blocks east.

Forgive the blur, this strained the zoom lens, and my shaky hand when zooming can be a problem. I don’t want to haul a tripod around.

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5/9/24