A little history

Sorry for the delay in posting--we've been busy doing things like picking mouldings and door frames. There has been good progress on the house over the past two weeks; we have a new foundation in the back, complete with concrete and steel beams. We have some pictures but I'll let Matt post them as he's better at explaining what it is you're looking at.

One of the main reasons we embarked on this crazy project, aside from wanting a home of our own, was to help restore a part of Brooklyn history. So we're committed to figuring out who else has called our house Home and unearthing as many stories as we can. We're just at the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, having done some Google searches and searches of the on-line archives of the New York Times and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, as well as one quick foray to the Brooklyn Historical Society. We've a ways to go, but here's what we know so far...

The house appears to date to at least the 1830s, which is earlier than we originally thought. It's listed in the book Old Brooklyn Heights, which catalogs the structures that existed at least a century before the book's publication in 1961. Interestingly, the house had a different street number back then, as the numbers in the neighborhood were all re-done and standardized in 1871.

1830: House was owned by Philip Brasher.

By 1875, the Hastings family had moved in. They and their relatives occupied the house until the early 1900s.

Waitstill Hastings, the patriarch, was originally from Massachusetts and was the founder of the Springfield Fire and Marine Insurance Company. He was also an oil merchant.

In the 1880 census, Waitstill is listed as occupying the house along with his wife, Hannah, Ernest and Lizzie Birdsall, Eliza Tinill, Thomas Turnball, and two domestics. Ernest and Lizzie were somehow related to Waitstill and Hannah but we're still trying to clarify exactly how.

1888: Waistill died at home. We also found a picture of the house from this year, and the bumpout on the third floor is clearly visible, so while that part of the house is not original, it is definitely old!

By the late 1890s, references to the house generally mention Ernest and Lizzie Birdsall, rather than Waistill and Hannah Hastings (though we know they were all part of the same family). The family was quite prominent on the social scene, particularly their daughter, Alice. She is frequently listed in the society pages, and had her debutante presentation to society on January 6, 1901. Later that year, Hannah Hastings died at home.

For a while, we thought the house was occupied by a Cornell-educated doctor around 1915 (Go Big Red!). But now we're not as certain, so we'll hold off on telling the tale of Dr. Louis Freedman until we have more evidence that he really lived in our house.

There are a lot of holes for the early-mid 20th Century, in large part because the Brooklyn Daily Eagle is not digitized past about 1901. However, we do know that by 1960, the house was occupied by Stanley and Eleanor Lyle Ross, one of whom was the editor of El Diario (NYC's Spanish newspaper). Eleanor was also an author. She died at the house on Feb. 6 of that year.

And by the 1970s, the owner previous to us had taken over. He raised his daughter there but fell ill quite some time ago and the house ended up in the state you've seen in our pictures. It's not clear if the division into multiple apartments was something he did, or if it predates him.

So as you can see, we have a lot of digging to do still! The next step is to start searching census records. Stay tuned as hopefully we will learn a lot more...