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Before ATMs and apps, there was “commuter banking” inside this Brooklyn subway station

March 30, 2026

If you’ve ever found yourself descending from the Court Street entrance into Brooklyn’s Borough Hall subway station, you may have rushed past it—a blue, subway-tiled corner surrounded by a network of overhead pipes.

The three shuttered metal windows look vaguely institutional, and like the rest of this part of the station, the corner storefront is unattractive and neglected amid excess platform grime.

So you can be forgiven for not stopping and taking a closer look. But only then, when you see the faded words “commuter banking” in black above the metal window frame, will you realize what this strange relic once was.

Beginning in the 1960s, this corner structure served as a branch of the Brooklyn Savings Bank, where tellers sat at the windows and catered to the financial needs of on-the-go postwar Brooklynites.

“Service call buttons are centered on the ledges at the base of the windows where a second inscription states, ‘Banking Hours – Monday through Friday 8 a.m. to 6 p.m,'” notes Atlas Obscura in a 2020 article.

“Stainless steel drawers for the exchange of currency and documents are located beneath the teller windows.”

The Brooklyn Savings Bank was founded in 1827, when Brooklyn was just a small town in Kings County. It maintained a prominent presence in Brooklyn Heights until 1990, when the bank became defunct.

The commuter banking idea was actually pretty canny. What better way to reach new customers and provide convenience to existing bankers than by putting a couple of friendly, efficient tellers below ground?

When the branch handled its last transaction isn’t clear, but my guess is the 1980s, as subway crime surged and 24-hour ATMs made their appearance on sidewalk-level branches.

Most in-person banking is now handled by ATMs and banking apps. But isn’t it cool to pass this relic from an era when you had to speak to a human to deposit your paper paycheck, and then have that transaction stamped by the same human in your cardboard bank book?

[Third image: Staten Island Advance; fourth image: Wikipedia]

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Posted in Brooklyn, Random signage | 7 Comments »

The little stories of humanity playing out on a sweltering East River pier

February 23, 2026

Amid this frigid winter with yet another blizzard painting the city white, you might be longing for the light and heat of summer—the long days, the relaxed vibe, the outdoor gatherings with friends and family.

“Facing the East River,” a 1945 panaroma of humanity by Saul Kovner, is a visceral reminder that New York in the summertime can be a sweaty, solitary, miserable mess.

I can see why Kovner, a midcentury painter born in Russia who established a studio near Central Park, was drawn to this pier and the people who seem to be marooned on it.

While better-off residents could escape the heat at the beach or in the country, the riverfront was often the only place New Yorkers on the margins could escape a sweltering tenement or scorching asphalt playground. It’s an ideal site for observing people and possibly capturing something about their inner life, their story.

What side of the East River are we on? I’m going with the Queens side, with a view across the river of the twin gas storage tanks that once stood on East 61st Street close to the Queensboro Bridge.

That would place the pier in Astoria—though there’s no bridge or Roosevelt Island in view.

Kovner might be painting from Greenpoint, looking toward the last of the gas storage tanks that sat beside the riverfront in the East 20s Gas House District. This working-class industrial neighborhood was completely razed by 1945 to make way for Stuyvesant Town.

Where the pier is located isn’t that important. Much more captivating are the people Kovner painted as they seemingly bide their time here, a mass of disconnected lives riding out the heat in shared space.

A serviceman holds his baby while his wife bends down to tend to second child in a carriage. A mother stares toward the water with a kid in her arms and another tugging her dress. Men in shirtsleeves, undershirts, or without a shirt at all read the newspaper, lie down, or sit along the edge, speaking to no one.

Boys climb up wood posts; one seems to be in the water grabbing a rope. A man in a suit and hat holds court among a group of older adults. A ferry belches smoke into the sky, as do three smoke stacks from a factory across the river.

It’s a representation of 1940s New York on one airless summer day—each person tied together by their proximity to each other but with their own unknowable stories.

Kovner didn’t shy away from winter scenes. Here he depicts a snowy day in Tompkins Square Park, and in this one, a magical day of ice skating under twilight in Central Park.

[Painting: Artsy]

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Posted in Brooklyn, Lower East Side, Queens | 6 Comments »

What’s on the menu at the Waldorf-Astoria birthday ball to honor the U.S. President in 1939?

February 16, 2026

The President of the United States had a lot on his plate in January 1939. Besides the lingering economic crisis stemming from the Great Depression, war was roiling in Europe, with World War II on the horizon.

But January was his birthday month, and it would have been perfectly appropriate to take a break to attend one of the birthday balls held in his honor in cities across the country.

As this menu states, the Manhattan birthday ball was held at the Waldorf-Astoria on January 30, 1939, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 57th birthday.

It’s a fitting cover with quite a wine and liquor selection. But the supper menu itself seems a bit on the lean side. Scrambled eggs with bacon vs. creamed chicken?

A presidential birthday ball seemed to be a tradition, at least with FDR; newspaper archives document birthday balls going back to his first year in office in 1933.

The vast majority of Americans would be unlikely to attend, though 3,800 New Yorkers did pay between $5 and $250 to make it into the Waldorf, including Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.

But the general public could get in the spirit. Before the date of the ball, newspapers printed appeals to the public to raise funds for the charity the President chooses.

For all of FDR’s balls, he chose a research organization on infantile paralysis—a much-feared disease at the time that paralyzed the President himself years earlier.

Brooklyn held their own smaller ball, this one at the posh Hotel St. George in Brooklyn Heights. Newspaper accounts of the Manhattan ball note that FDR’s mother attended. But FDR himself or Eleanor? Apparently they were no-shows.

FDR did send a presidential message from the White House, which was broadcast inside the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom at 11:15 p.m., just before a giant birthday cake was brought out—one item not added to the supper menu!

[Menu: NYPL Digital Collections/The Buttolph Collection of Menus]

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Posted in Brooklyn, Politics | 14 Comments »

Tracing the life and legacy of an ironworker through a coal chute cover in Brooklyn Heights

January 26, 2026

A fashionable townhouse in 19th century Brooklyn would have had many stylish features—like a tall front stoop, iron railings on the stairs, and a ground-level side door through which servants could come and go unseen.

A townhouse like this would also have a coal hole.

You’ve probably seen these in many older residential areas of New York City. It’s a small, street-level chute where coal deliveries could be made directly into the basement, to be fed into a furnace to keep the home toasty.

These coal chutes had iron covers. And when a cover still extant and in view is embossed with the name of the foundry that produced it, it becomes a porthole into Gotham’s manufacturing past.

The one in the photo at top was spotted in front of a house near Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights.

“Bryan G. Green,” it reads, with an address at 229 Pacific Street not far away in Boerum Hill. Based on Google view, 229 Pacific Street looks like it is attached to the red brick shell of a 19th century building that could have been used for manufacturing. No trace of Bryan Green’s foundry seems to remain.

But clues about this ironworker emerge with a little research. Born in England in 1865, he listed his occupation on an 1890s census form as “brass finisher.” Only until the 1910 census did Green transform into the proprietor of an iron works company.

According to Don Burmeister’s manhole cover website, “Bryan G. Green was a transplanted Englishman who had a thriving Iron Works on the edge of Brooklyn Heights in the first decades of the 20th Century. Just the time to supply the growing need for covers for the ubiquitous coal chutes in the front of many of the new and updated buildings in the thriving new borough.”

“The address on the covers varied over the years, but the building that now stands at 215 Pacific was probably at the core of the foundry,” wrote Burmeister.

A Brooklyn Daily Times article notes that Green had a building constructed for his business, Central Iron Works, on Pacific Street in 1905 at a cost of $8,500. He apparently lived on Pacific Street then with his New York–born wife and three children, and his name pops up in newspaper archives as a member of various organizations, including the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce.

Walter Grutchfield states that Green, who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1880s, ran his foundry from 1901 to 1927.

The latter year is when ads in Brooklyn newspapers began to appear that read “Brian G. Green Son.” In his sixties now, Green apparently had his son, John, join him in the business. Or maybe he handed it down to his son—who kept his father’s name in the ad as a testament to his strong reputation.

Bryan G. Green died in Brooklyn two years later, per a Brooklyn Eagle death notice. At the time, his address was listed as 300 Carroll Street. Green’s funeral service was held at a chapel at 187 South Oxford Street, after which he was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery.

And the foundry? The ads stopped in 1927, and I’ve yet to uncover any trace of what happened to it. The coal chute cover near Pierrepont Street and at other sites across Brooklyn Heights are Bryan G. Green’s legacy.

[Second and third images: The Brooklyn Citizen]

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Posted in Brooklyn, Random signage | 10 Comments »

A decades-old subway relic hangs from the ceiling in Brooklyn’s neglected Court Street station

December 8, 2025

Brooklyn’s Court Street subway station sure needs some help. Descend into it from the entrance at Montague and Clinton Streets, and you’ll take an iffy elevator and mucky stairs to a sub-mezzanine platform that feels like the bowels of Brooklyn.

The subway tiles on each side are outlined with dirt. Water damage has rendered the plastered ceiling cracked and flaky. What must have once been colorful mosaic plaques depicting Brooklyn Borough Hall, according to nycsubway.org, are in desperate need of scrubbing.

This former BMT station is part of a three-station Borough Hall/Court Street stop that serves several lines, hence the Borough Hall images.

These neglected old-school stations are like museums of subway relics. And this station has one that’s an emblem of the 1970s MTA: an electric sign overhead that is supposed to light up when a train is about to approach.

I’m not exactly sure how these worked. Would a station manager flip a light switch from a control room or booth somewhere else in the station when a train was about to pull in?

It must have been a helpful sign in the pre-GPS era, before riders could check the MTA app to see when their train was due to arrive. I can imagine impatient commuters of decades past standing on that platform, their eyes upward, waiting for the arrow to illuminate.

The relic itself was a delightful find. But does it work—did it actually light up? As an R train approached, I looked at the sign. No light.

But it’s a fun remnant to focus on while waiting for your train. Others just like it still exist in mostly outerborough subway stops, where the MTA has yet to install the digital signs that count down the minutes until your ride arrives.

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Posted in Brooklyn, Random signage, Transit | 13 Comments »

What a remarkable candid photo of a “soap fat man” in Prospect Park says about Brooklyn in 1878

December 1, 2025

His name is lost to history, his face is obscured by his raised arm, and the unpleasant work he did has long been made obsolete by modern technology.

But this candid image of an aproned man carrying a bucket of soap fat on his back tells us something about Brooklyn industry. And it also speaks to the talents of the the inventive photographer who captured this image and thousands of others of Brooklyn in the Gilded Age.

First, the soap fat man. Before the late 1800s, most people made soap at home using cooking fat and grease, according to the Brooklyn Public Library in a Brooklynology post from 2021.

But as Brooklyn manufacturing boomed after the Civil War, soap-making factories sprang up along the East River. They hired “soap fat men,” typically immigrants, who “collected fat waste from local residents, hotels, and butchers across the borough and beyond,” states the post.

It’s hard to know exactly what moved George Bradford Brainerd to turn his camera toward this soap fat man.

Brainerd (at right) was a civil engineer with the Brooklyn Water Department as well as an amateur photographer who devised new methods to make photography portable and develop images. A new book, Candid New York: The Pioneering Photography of George Bradford Brainerd, adds helpful context about his inspiration.

“With his love of street folk, Brainerd thought he would make a record of a neighborhood soap fat collector, a Chinese American, who was easily spotted with his ragged, dirty clothes, and trademark tin pail cinched to his back,” writes author Erik Hesselberg.

“Although taken on the fly without a steadying tripod, Brainerd captures the almost balletic grace with which the worker glides down some steps in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, all the while balancing a pail of greasy waste on his back.”

“Developing the image, he would later say, represented ‘one of the happiest moments in his life,’ as he finally caught his subject ‘walking with his foot off the ground.'” The soap fat man’s booted foot is “supple like a dancer’s slipper,” says Hesselberg.

Brainerd’s early street photography focused on objects and landscapes—old houses, park features, Coney Island, the infrastructure of a major city in the late 19th century.

But his interest in people led him to turn his eye toward apple vendors, rag pickers, newsboys, dock workers, laundresses, beggars, and other examples of humanity in Brooklyn from the late 1860s to 1887, when he died at 41.

Interesed in learning more about Brainerd and seeing some of his incredible photos? Join Ephemeral New York and author Erik Hesselberg at a free event where we’ll delve into Brainerd’s work and how it reflects Gilded Age Brooklyn. This free event is in partnership with the Center for Brooklyn History and takes place Thursday, December 4 at 6:30 p.m. Open this link for more info!

[Top photo: George Bradford Brainerd Photograph Collection, Brooklyn Public Library/Center for Brooklyn History]

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Posted in Brooklyn, Music, art, theater | 8 Comments »

Reading the sides of old factory buildings from the platform of a Brooklyn elevated train

November 17, 2025

You can learn a lot about a neighborhood from the hand-painted ads that linger on its buildings. In Williamsburg, some of these faded ads from an earlier New York have to do with factories.

It makes sense. Once a sleepy village and then a suburban town on the banks of the East River, Williamsburg transformed into a center of industry in the mid-19th century during its short-lived turn as an independent city.

That manufacturing boom continued through the early days of the 20th century. Sugar refiners, meat purveyors, brewers, and makers of household goods put up dignified brick structures where immigrants worked and goods were produced.

You can see a few of these brick factories from the platform of the elevated train that travels along Broadway. At the Hewes Street stop, faint hand-painted ads on the factory facades surround you in all directions, ghostly clues to their former products and services.

The first one that caught my eye on a recent M train ride was this ad for a shoe factory (top photo). The letters underneath look Hebrew and are unfortunately partially marred by crude graffiti.

“Brooklyn was once home to a large and profitable shoe manufacturing industry,” wrote Suzanne Spellen in a 2014 post on Brownstoner. Sure enough, 345 Hewes Street (above)—the building on which the shoe ad appears—was part of this lucrative business.

The Thomas Shoe Company erected this factory in the 1890s, occupying it until 1912 when it was sold to a shirt maker. It quickly changed hands and became the factory of Israel Rokeach, who made scouring powders and salad oils, per a Brooklyn Eagle article.

In 1917, a fire broke out on the third floor, then home to knitting mill. “Although the outer walls of the building resisted the intense heat, the inside of the factory was almost completely burned out,” reported The Brooklyn Daily Times. Its interior ostensibly rebuilt, 345 Hewes Street is now a school.

Across the tracks on the side of 440 Broadway is a richer yet more weathered building ad (above). I made out supplies, plumbers, tinsmiths, steam and gas fitters. Below it I see factories and breweries. “Pipe cut to sketch” tells me this ad was put up by some kind of hardware concern.

The always informative Walter Grutchfield can fill in the blanks. This was the business of John McElraevy and George W. Hauck, whose partnership focused on outfitting factories. “Apparently McElraevy had a plumbing supply house at this address prior to going into business with Hauck,” wrote Grutchfield on his website.

Both men lived in Brooklyn, per Grutchfield, and the company address was listed at 440 Broadway per a Brooklyn business directory in 1904. (Above, 1930 illustration of the building)

“McElraevy & Hauck sold their Broadway property to Action Apparel for $0 on 23 Oct 1978,” he wrote. “For a few years (through 1985) the company continued in the Brooklyn telephone directory at 2 Heitz Place, Hicksville, NY.”

On another wall of McElraevy & Hauck’s building is a different painted white ad that’s even harder to read from the subway platform or the street. Factories and breweries are the last two words on the list, above.

I’m not worried about the former shoe factory ad. The school has been there long enough that if they wanted to paint over the ad, they likely would have by now.

But 404 Broadway is currently for sale. Could it soon be turned into a pricey residential loft building whose new owners wipe away what remains of a totem of Williamsburg’s deep manufacturing past?

[Fourth image: Etsy]

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Posted in Brooklyn, Random signage, Transit | 11 Comments »

Inside the eerie, unfinished 1930s subway station under a South Williamsburg street

November 10, 2025

New York is physically two cities. One is at street level, a grid of mostly brick and steel. The other is underground, a subterranean world of tunnels and tubes—not all of which can be accessed.

One of these unaccessible underground spaces is the unfinished Depression-era subway station in the vicinity of South Fourth Street in Williamsburg.

South Fourth Street is a ghost station; you could live in this stretch of Williamsburg near the elevated J, M, and Z tracks and never know it’s there. There’s no paved-over entrance, no sidewalk markings, and it doesn’t exist on any official map.

To call it an abandoned station is not exactly correct, as it never opened. “It’s never seen revenue service before, and in fact, it doesn’t even have a rail track running through it,” wrote Second Avenue Sagas in 2010. “It exists in fragments—poured concrete, unfinished stairwells, no lighting, no through tunnels—and is a remnant of an era of larger plans.”

Second Avenue Sagas and other sources pinpoint the South Fourth station as an extension of the Broadway IND station, which serves today’s G train. From the north end of the G stop platform, you can supposedly see glimpses of the unfinished stairways no passenger ever traversed, according to Joseph Brennan on his Abandoned Stations web page.

The idea that a phantom subway station lies beneath the heavily traveled streets of Williamsburg feels secretive and exciting. It’s like a portal to another New York, where city planners dreamed big while passengers paid just a nickel per ride.

But why the station was created and subsequently deserted echoes the fate of so many New York City infrastructure projects. They tend to be clashes between ambitious ideas of connection and growth that fall apart when faced with the cold reality of a lack of funds.

South Fourth Street’s story began in 1929, when New York’s population of five million was on the upswing and more expansive mass transit needs were anticipated.

Building on an announcement five years earlier that new subway routes would be built, transit officials came up with what was dubbed a “Second System” that extended some subway routes from Lower Manhattan into Brooklyn. (Map above, of IND Second Station plans, has South Fourth Street at the nexus of planned Houston Street and Lower Manhattan lines.)

The timing of the Second System couldn’t have been worse. With the arrival of the Depression, public financing dried up, wrote Brennan. Eventually federal funds came through, and construction commenced on some of the proposed Second System stations, including South Fourth Street.

The idea for the station sounded auspicious. It would have six tracks and serve as a transfer station, relieving the crowds at existing transfer stations between the boroughs and making travel between Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens easier.

Expecting the new station to open soon, workers installed support columns, created platforms, and put in track beds. But work paused at the onset of World War II…and never restarted.

As far as I can tell, no neighborhood organizations demanded that the station open. I couldn’t find any record chronicling a fight to save the station and the rest of the shelved Second System plans.

It almost seems like the whole project died with a whimper, and as time went on, the South Fourth Station was forgotten—except by subway junkies, graffiti artists, and intrepid urban explorers.

Until 2010, that is. That year, two artists who go by Workhorse and PAC launched an art show dubbed the Underbelly Project featuring the work of 103 street artists, “mostly big murals,” wrote Jasper Rees in the New York Times. Rees was given a tour of the station-turned-gallery. (Mural from the Underbelly Project, above)

“The place was pitch black, but standing with a powerful flashlight on a platform, PAC said, he had been able to make out a landscape of several more platforms, each lined with rows of columns, alternating with sunken track beds,” wrote Rees, adding that this shell of a station was “about the size of a football field.”

Not long after the Underbelly Project launched, the NYPD arrested 20 people who attempted to get into the station-gallery, per a November 11 New York Times article. Almost all were charged with trespassing.

Fifteen years later, the fate of this subterranean art show is unclear, and probably only very daring urban explorers have reached the unfinished station since the the show, as it’s reportedly sealed off by the MTA.

Thanks to an undated video shot by the Underbelly Project, you can see this abandoned space and the art that greeted the few New Yorkers able to see it. It’s a mysterious place of connection not by subway tracks but through art and imagination.

[Top and second photos: Hopetunnel.org; third image: 1929 Board of Transportation IND Expansion map; fifth image: Street art by Graffiti Master KNOW-HOPE (Addam Yekutieli) by Stuart McAlpine via Wikipedia; sixth photo: Hopetunnel.org]

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Posted in art, Brooklyn, Lower Manhattan, Maps, Transit | 7 Comments »

What happened to the flashy amusement park nicknamed the Coney Island of Canarsie?

August 4, 2025

It was just a few miles on the Brooklyn shoreline from the real Coney Island—an amusement mecca of Greco-Roman towers, dance pavilions, and electric lights fronting a new boardwalk beside Jamaica Bay.

Opening to a crowd of 30,000 New Yorkers in May 1907 in the sparsely populated South Brooklyn area of Canarsie, Golden City, as its developers named it, satiated the fantasies of summertime fun seekers.

Built to rival the great amusement venues at Coney, Golden City’s nine acres of extreme rides and attractions dazzled the imagination.

There was the Coliseum Coaster, the “Over the Rockies” scenic railway, the Double Whirl (a ferris wheel with a revolving base), “Down the Niagara,” which sent riders on boats through rapids and whirlpools, and “Love’s Journey,” which had couples sitting side by side through dark tunnels while confetti was thrown at them.

Perhaps the most insanely creative ride was “Human Laundry,” where patrons “were washed in a giant tub, then spun dry, thoroughly dried by wind, pressed between upright rollers, and sent down a laundry chute slide to the street,” explains the website Lost Amusement Parks.

Like all great pleasure parks of the early 20th century, the wild rides were just the beginning. Dance halls, a bandstand, motorcycle daredevil shows, exotic animals, a funhouse, a carousel, vaudeville performers, and a skating rink rounded out the offerings.

“In addition to the rides, the park staged a number of live shows at ‘The Barbary Coast’ amusement hall, allowing Broadway stars to try out new material before bringing the act to the major stages in Manhattan,” states the Brooklyn Public Library.

The park’s most popular live action show, ‘The Robinson Crusoe Show,’ was a 22-minute telling of the Daniel Defoe novel that cost the park $60,000 to stage,” per the Library.

Sixty grand was a lot of money in 1907, and the entire park was estimated to cost at least half a million bucks to build and operate.

But Golden City’s developers bet that there was room for another amusement park in a city dominated by Coney Island, the Rockaways, and smaller pleasure palaces like the Fort George Amusement Park in Upper Manhattan and Starlight Park in the Bronx.

For several years, they were right. The completion of an elevated train to Canarsie and extension of surface lines in the early 1900s made it easier for day-trippers from all over Brooklyn to pay the nickel fare and get to Golden City faster than if they boarded a train for Coney.

“To many an ordinary man with a large family to take on an outing the saving in carfare will be a material consideration,” commented the Brooklyn Daily Times in May 1907.

Improved rapid transit and the influx of visitors made Canarsie, formerly a fishing hotspot, a resort-like area ready for big development. “Cool—Canarsie shore—Clean,” stated a 1916 ad featuring area hotels and restaurants. “The mecca for the pleasure seeker.”

By the late 1930s, however, Golden City sat empty, its visitors gone, concessions shuttered, and buildings condemned. What happened?

For starters, running an amusement park open only during warm-weather months is a challenge. The park was initially popular, and the developers announced that they were expanding it by 50 acres, according to Lost Amusement Parks. The price to get into the park rose to 25 cents—which perhaps wasn’t enough to break even.

Then there were fires. “In 1909, a fire that began in one of the park’s restaurants quickly spread, causing $200,000 worth of damage and destroying the restaurant, dance hall, photography gallery, and office,” states the Brooklyn Public Library. “The park was able to resume normal operations, but was the victim of fire again in 1912 when the Tunnel of Love was destroyed.”

The Great Depression put the final nails in the coffin. “The park was already losing money when a 1934 fire damaged the park so badly that management refused to rebuild,” explains the Brooklyn Public Library.

In 1938, New York City bought the Golden City site, with the understanding that the developers who owned it would hang onto it through September of that year. But Parks Commissioner Robert Moses “had his steam shovels scoop up and haul away the beer gardens, shooting galleries, and other amusements,” the developers alleged per a Brooklyn Citizen article in 1941.

Moses then remade the site into the Belt Parkway. Did any remnants from Golden City survive?

Just the carousel, apparently. Carved by the Brooklyn firm Artistic Carousel Company and installed at Golden City in 1912, it was salvaged by a Long Island amusement park called Nunley’s when Golden City closed.

After Nunley’s went out of business, the hand-carved painted horses were restored to their original beauty. What’s now known as Nunley’s carousel appears to be owned by the Long Island Children’s Museum—a Golden City relic of Brooklyn’s golden era as the cheap thrills capital of Gotham.

[Top image: Lost Amusement Parks; second image: Lost Amusement Parks; third image: Brooklyn Citizen; fourth image: ebay; fifth image: ebay; sixth image: Long Island Children’s Museum; seventh image: Center for Brooklyn History/Brooklyn Public Library]

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Posted in Brooklyn, Holiday traditions, Uncategorized | 25 Comments »

The last remnants of a legendary Brooklyn department store born in the Gilded Age

July 14, 2025

You’ll notice them in Brooklyn’s Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station as you walk through the long passageway leading to the exits.

Interspersed between the white subway tiled walls are a series of dark blue and yellow panels. The panels have kind of a restrained, Art Deco style to them, with five stars and the letter L in a circle in the center.

This downtown Brooklyn stop is for the A, C, and G trains, not the L. So what’s with the letter, and why are these panels in this otherwise ordinary station?

The Ls stand for Loeser—as in Frederick Loeser & Co., the official name of what was once Brooklyn’s largest and most fabled Fulton Street department store (above, in 1910).

Launched as a trimmings shop in 1860 and co-owned by German immigrant Frederick Loeser, the store everyone eventually called Loeser’s transitioned into a full-on dry goods emporium a decade later.

Loeser’s timing was impeccable. In the later decades of the Gilded Age, the rise of consumerism and increased factory production created a mass market of ready-made fashions and home goods for the well-to-do Brooklynites populating the city’s new brownstone neighborhoods.

Just as legendary dry goods emporiums like Lord & Taylor, Arnold Constable, and B. Altman’s sprang up along Manhattan’s Ladies Mile shopping district between Broadway and Sixth Avenue and 14th Street to 23rd Street, Brooklyn’s version of a premier shopping enclave was centered on Fulton Street.

Here, enormous stores like Abraham & Straus, along with smaller millinery shops, shoe boutiques, and specialty concerns, dazzled shoppers.

As a posh importer, retailer, and maker of mostly women’s fashion and accessories, Loeser’s topped them all. When the business moved into its final location in March 1887, the new store at 484 Fulton—with electric lights, telephones, and elevators—was eagerly covered by newspapers.

The first floor of the five-story building held departments containing “silks, velvets, dress goods, white goods, embroideries, laces, fancy goods, gentlemen’s furnishing goods, gloves, hosiery, ladies’ merino underwear, handkerchiefs, collars, cuffs, jewelry, toilet sets, leather goods, parasols, ribbons, stationery, and perfumery,” wrote the Brooklyn Citizen.

The paper gushed about the large “show windows” on the Fulton Street side and noted that thanks to a more modern system, “no cash boys will be needed,” a reference to the messengers who ferried payments between customers and clerks in 19th century retail establishments.

Loeser’s reigned in downtown Brooklyn, putting up an extension building on Fulton Street and Elm Place in 1899 (third photo), states Suzanne Spellen at Brownstoner. But behind the scenes, the business was changing hands. Frederick Loeser died in 1903, and a partner took over the store.

The panels in the subway stop likely went up in the late 1930s, shortly after the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station opened and Loeser’s built a passageway leading into the store directly through the station.

By the 1940s, Loeser’s was sold to an investment syndicate. Sixty years after Frederick Loeser began his retail empire, his flagship store was in trouble. In the postwar era, families were moving out of Brooklyn, and demographic change led to financial difficulties.

In 1952, another Brooklyn department store baron, A.I. Namm, bought Loeser’s trademark and operated under the name Namm Loeser. Five years later, Namm Loeser closed its doors for good. In the ensuing decades, other department stores on Fulton Street would follow.

And the Loeser’s Gilded Age building? Incredibly, it still stands, remodeled and stripped of its original beauty and detail.

Meanwhile, the extension constructed in 1899 is swathed in construction netting and scaffolding. But if you squint you can still see the letter L inside the terra cotta ornamentation that decorates the facade (above).

These terra cotta Ls make a fitting counterpart to the subway panel Ls—one from the Gilded Age, the other just before World War II, bookending the golden era of department stores in New York City.

[Second image: MCNY, X2011.34.1934; third image: New York Historical; fourth image: Brooklyn Citizen; fifth image: Brooklyn Eagle]

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Posted in Brooklyn, Defunct department stores | 13 Comments »

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