My Archive Spring 2019

Bushwick Avenue, north from Montrose Avenue. October 25, 1934. At right, outside of the Coffee Pot cafe, is the entrance to the BMT Canarsie Line (today’s L).

Meserole Street and Bushwick Avenue, 1934. Both buildings in the background, located on the north and south west corners of Bushwick Avenue and Meserole Street, bear the street names of the intersection in decorative corner-blocks. On the signs, Bushwick Avenue is referred to as "Boulevard," likely a colloquial name for this portion of the street when these buildings were erected in the late 19th century.

In the early 1900s, about 70% of children who attended public schools on the Lower East Side were immigrants or children of immigrants. These students had needs that were different from those of students who attended New York City schools in, say, the mid-1800s. They were coming from homes where English was not the primary language and from families with their own cultures and traditions. So Lower East Side schools became a kind of laboratory for ideas about how to welcome immigrant children into American life. Schools taught the so-called three Rs – reading, writing, and arithmetic – but also what some educators believed were lessons in “Americanization.” Part of the curriculum? The pledge of allegiance, how to celebrate patriotic holidays, and even Christian hymns. It was a curriculum influenced by then-common views of the benefits of assimilation. But schools were more than a place for immigrant kids to learn about America. They also became a laboratory of ideas about how immigrant kids could one day make it in America. And that meant a whole slew of classes that would have been unfamiliar to students only a generation earlier.

The Williamsburg Houses were the largest and most expensive project built under the auspices of the PWA at their completion in 1937. The complex was realized by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) and received funding from the Federal Public Works Administration (PWA). An American Institute of Architectures regards the Williamsburg Houses as “the best public housing project ever built in New York." According to plans from 1935, the project cost a total of 12.5 million dollars to complete. Siting for the property was decided by a slum clearance committee, which was formed in 1933 under the PWA to study housing conditions throughout the city. The committee decided "where the most good could be done in wholesale clearance work," eventually settling on a nine-block area bound by the street of Maujer, Scholes, and Leonard and Bushwick Avenue as an optimal clean slate to build the Williamsburg Houses.

Most Holy Trinity Church, ca. 1920-1940. In the latter half of the 19th century, Williamsburg had a significant German Catholic population. The first Most Holy Trinity church was a wood-frame building at Graham and Montrose Avenues, erected in 1853. A new French Gothic church by architects William Ditmars and William Schickel was built between 1882 and 1885. The massive church includes twin 250-foot steeples and stained glass windows imported from Austria. In 1990, the steeples were deemed structurally unsound and sheathed in lead cladding as a precautionary measure.

Congress Brewing Company Building, 1916. The complex of the Congress Brewing Company included a brewery and ice plant and encompassed 75,000 square feet of floor space. Established as the Williamsburgh Brewing Company before 1881, the beer purveyors legally changed their name to the Congress Brewing Company in 1895. Little can be discovered about Congress Brewery or why it closed circa 1916.