Why this Blog Exists

To make the case for expanding the Park Slope Historic District

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Louis Bonert: 4th Street and 6th Avenue, 1903 sale

We've already identified the building at the northeast corner of 6th Avenue and 4th Street as a Louis Bonert "double" apartment house (i.e. housing eight families), constructed in 1897. The following Brooklyn Eagle article records the sale of this building six years later, in 1903. The article doesn't add to our knowledge of the "vital statistics" for this building, to use Francis Morrone's term (i.e. builder/architect/date). But the article is noteworthy for its contemporary assessment of Bonert as having "constructed some of the finest and most artistically finished apartment houses in this fashionable district":

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 27, 1903, p. 11 ("Brokers Report a Fairly Busy Week")

The building, in yellow "fancy brick" with limestone trim over a brownstone basement, is indeed very fine, as we noted earlier. Note the gently rounded window bays, alternating with slightly angled bays, chimney stacks, and central stairway windows over the double-granite-columned entrance portico:

343 6th Avenue - unprotected

Note to the reader: With this 1903 Brooklyn Eagle article, we have exceeded the limit of the online Eagle at the Brooklyn Public Library, which runs only through 1902. The rest of the Eagle's run can be accessed at the wonderful "Fulton History" website. The articles do no load the way they do at the Brooklyn Public Library, so we cannot provide a hyperlink directly to the article as we have been doing with the BPL material. But the issues can be accessed via the search box at the Fulton History website. Many thanks to Fulton History for putting online material that the BPL has been unable to make available. The search key we used is highlighted in the article above ("Louis Bonnet", a typical misspelling of Bonert's name).

Note also that there is an error in the address cited in the article. The Bonert building at the corner of 4th Street is actually 343 6th Avenue, not 243 as cited above.

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