Residences on Bushwick Avenue, typical of Bushwick’s most desirable street of the late 19th century. — Photo by Paul Cox

The eleven architects, historians, and realtors who make up New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission are busy people and don’t get out to Bushwick much. It’s up to local residents to find and nominate some of the unique, if shabby and often endangered, old buildings scattered along our eclectic streets. As part of this effort, teacher and historian Adam Schwartz has been documenting likely candidates with help from his 11th and 12th grade students at the Academy of Urban Planning.

"There’s always a bit of a classist element to landmarking. The first historic district in Brooklyn was in Brooklyn Heights. It takes a long time to get around to an area like Bushwick," Adam tells us, and indeed there are only four landmarks in the whole neighborhood. His students are helping the process along by finding and photographing buildings for a report to the Commission. 

Of the twenty or so candidates picked out so far, many stand along Bushwick Avenue, the faded thoroughfare once known as the Boulevard. In between teaching his students photography and giving himself a crash course in architectural history, Adam led one of his trademark walks for Urban Oyster last Saturday to introduce some of the gems along this one-time backbone of Bushwick high society. 

The steeple of the landmarked Reformed Church of South Bushwick sustained damage in the storm of September 16th. (Paul Cox)

We began as did urban Bushwick, in the confines of Bowrensville, the first residential development to break up the fields of an old pastoral community in the 1840s. This development grew between Bushwick Avenue and Broadway, catering to the first waves of German migrants that would thereafter make the neighborhood their own. 

The one landmark already here is from a later stage in the German presence: the four buildings of the Ulmer Brewery (1874-1890), which received recognition earlier this year as a last surviving remnant of Bushwick’s greatest industry. Also on this choice block is the former Arion Singing Society Hall (1887), now converted to lofts but with its exterior ornamentation intact. Nearby at Bushwick Avenue and Jefferson Street, the St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church and School (1892) stands in a semi-decayed state. This trio present a unified tableau of German-American industry, culture, and religion, which is no coincidence. All three were standout works of the Eastern District’s master builder, Theobald Engelhardt, who left his Gothic and Romanesque Revival trademarks down the length of the Boulevard in its heyday. 

Before continuing in this vein we stop by a very different structure that has also caught Adam’s eye: the Rheingold Gardens building, dating back to 2004. Neo-Gothic it’s not, but Adam is interested in these 250 units of RBSCC-built senior housing because the Commission is increasingly on the lookout for environmental landmarks. Built on the brownfield site of the old Rheingold Brewery, this building made its own sort of history with the first major green roof in the city, a 2400 square foot expanse planted with ten varieties of the creeping succulents known as stonecrops. 

Setting off down the Boulevard proper, we pay homage to the Frederick Cook mansion at the corner of Willoughby, learning from our guide that this towering home of the self-styled arctic explorer was actually built as the residence of William Ulmer, whose brewery we’ve just seen. His home doesn’t bear the landmark status of his business, but it surely can’t be far behind. If Bushwick Avenue can be said to have an architectural icon, then this is it. 

The Bushwick Leaders High School compound was the original convent of the Little Sisters of the Poor. (Paul Cox)

The second existing landmark in the neighborhood is just down the row, the DeKalb Avenue branch of the Brooklyn Public Library (1908). This early Carnegie library conforms to the prescribed style of the philanthropist: it’s freestanding, well provided with natural light, and built in one of the approved architectural styles (Classical Revival, in this case). Across the street we admire a much larger yet more humble compound, the former convent of the Little Sisters of the Poor. This charming Home for the Aged now houses the Bushwick Leaders High School, its onetime chapel serving as a vaulted gym, and is a definite for the landmarking wish list. 

Landmarking isn’t a panacea, though, and we’re reminded of this down the street at the corner of Himrod. The Reformed Church of South Bushwick (1853) is a landmark structure, but its latter-day Caribbean congregation can’t keep up with the cost of repairs – least of all after last month’s storm, which has left the classic Christopher Wren-inspired steeple in precarious condition. 

We continue on to note the modest but stylish residence at number 959, the home of Mayor John F. Hylan, the Tammany Democrat known to the papers as "Red Mike" and "Jonef Hylan." He spurned Gracie Mansion for this row house in his home neighborhood, from whence he surveyed an anti-Prohibition "Wet Parade" in support of the breweries in 1921.

Around here we enter the stretch of the avenue once known as Doctors’ Row, for the elegant residences and private practices of countless doctors who set up shop here. A few of the survivors still bear the names of their men of medicine ("Dr. Puderbach" on the gate at number 999), while others have the entwined serpents of Mercury worked into their motifs (the garden window of the ornate number 1020). Most evident are the separate entrances for the waiting rooms and the houses themselves. One of our fellow walkers, Leslie Lieth, still remembers visiting the family doctor here with her grandmother. "Even after she developed Alzheimer’s, I think the last thing she held onto was the names of the streets down Bushwick Avenue," Leslie says. "I’d drive her down here and she would name every one."

We end our southern route at the corner of Gates Avenue, home to a few final points of interest. The Ridgewood Masonic Temple dominates attention at the intersection now, but across the avenue from it stands an oddly shaped outlier that is a fragment of the even more impressive Eastern District Turn Verein headquarters (1902). This was Theobald Engelhardt’s tribute to the German schools of physical and moral education – the original Gymnasium clubs – where the architect himself had trained as a boy. 

On the third corner is one last building Adam would like to see landmarked, a handsome townhouse converted to low-income housing by a local church organization in the 1980s. This building at number 1041 is especially significant to Adam because it was the first in the neighborhood to be rejuvenated after Bushwick’s time of decay. It reveals not only the genteel history of Bushwick Avenue in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but also the resolve of successive generations to continue to live in, beautify, and preserve their piece of the city.