1960 Park Slope

We finally had a chance to review the exhaustive New York Times coverage of the 1960 Park Slope airplane disaster. A lot of great old photographs accompany the articles; the Here's Park Slope blog has a comprehensive then-and-now portfolio. What strikes us is how little the neighborhood has actually changed in the 50 years since the tragedy, thanks in part to the creation of the Park Slope Historic District.

While the buildings are largely the same, the photograph below reflects some of the other changes that the Slope has undergone in the last 50 years. The picture below shows the intersection of 7th Avenue and Park Place, the subject of one of our "Lost Park Slope" posts from a while back:

7th Avenue and Park Place, 1960
New York Times photograph

The building on the right is the truncated remnant of the Doherty Building at Flatbush and 7th; the B67 bus stop is right there. On the left stands #10 7th Avenue, one of the earliest houses in Park Slope, and one of a row of simple Italianate dwellings built circa 1865.

If you look closely, you can make out the sign for a business named "Paradise" on the ground floor of #10 7th Ave. What do you want to bet that the "Paradise" was one of the many saloons that once lined the avenue?

Perhaps the most poignant photograph, for us, shows 126 Sterling Place after part of the doomed jet had sliced through its cornice:

126 Sterling Place - 1960
New York Times photograph

The brick wall was repaired, but the cornice was never restored. 126 Sterling Place, one of a row of three identical apartment houses, is on the left in the photograph below.

126-122-118 Sterling Place

We have no knowledge regarding who designed or built these apartment houses, or when. Perhaps our ongoing research in the Real Estate Record and Builders' Guide will someday yield substantive information about them.

Louis Bonert: Five 8-Family Double Flats in Sterling Place

In 1909 Louis Bonert traded five four story, 8-family "double flat" apartment houses in Sterling Place for a large parcel on the other side of Prospect Park, in a deal recounted in the New York Times:

New York Times, August 4, 1909, p. 10 ("In the Real Estate Field")

The apartments are still there today, on the south side of Sterling Place, just off Flatbush Avenue:

164-180 Sterling Place - unprotected

168 Sterling Place - unprotected

The buildings exhibit some of the stylized hoods over the central stairway windows that we have come to associate with Bonert from his apartment houses in 3rd Street and in 6th Avenue:

180 Sterling Place - detail

The doorways are a riot of classical detail. We can make out swags and egg-and-dart molding, but our limited architectural vocabulary cannot begin to describe everything here. What are those pointy things on the upper corners called?:

164 Sterling Place - detail

Bader's roadhouse, which occupied a large parcel at the corner of Ocean Parkway and Coney Island Avenue, just outside Prospect Park, was a popular destination for excursions, apparently as much for the outsized personality of its proprietor as for its convenient location and popular prices:

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 4, 1897, p. 20 ("Havens for Cyclists")