April 20, 2004

Statement of the Historic Districts Council
Before the Landmarks Preservation Commission

Re: Designation of the F. J. Berlenbach House at 174 Meserole Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn

The Historic Districts Council is the city-wide advocate for New York City’s historic districts and for neighborhoods meriting preservation. HDC is very pleased to have the opportunity to testify in support of the proposed designation of the F.J. Berlenbach House.

The Historic Districts Council supports the designation of this fascinating house. Nineteenth-century Williamsburg was dominated by a German immigrant population, like much of the Lower East Side across the Grand Street Ferry and later the Williamsburg Bridge, and the craftsmanship of this population and the later prosperity of many residents led to some extraordinary buildings. Although the ethnicity has changed and a street in the area bears the secondary name of Avenue of Puerto Rico, many of these buildings still stand intact and often well-maintained.

174 Meserole Street is among the finest of these. It is indeed, as the blurb describes it, a kind of Queen-Anne style survivor—this style indeed shared the approach and often the significant forms of the elaborate romantically historicizing architectural styles of late nineteenth-century Germany. The details are remarkable: this façade reproduces in wood details and forms typical of masonry or brick buildings of the period. The builder was a carpenter, and the skill shown in these motifs is probably due to skills acquired abroad by his workers or himself. Native-born architects, like the son of the original builder, typically made designs drawn from local models or manuals and relied on skilled immigrants to carry out the designs. The father-and-son relationship is interesting here, and all in all the process presumably followed by the collaborators here forms a fascinating example of generational succession and assimilation.

The relationship of the parties and of the materials of the designs suggests interesting questions. Since such details as the masks and swags on this building so closely resemble those of masonry work of the period, could these craftsmen have been among those that made the models that guided carvers and reproducing machines in masonry and also molds for work in cast stone or terra cotta? In any case, with whatever intentions, the house represents a remarkable billboard for the skills and achievements of father and son.

This building, first heard by this Commission in 1990, is not a lone survivor or solitary monument to the skills of immigrant Williamsburg. On looking up 174 Meserole Street in the fourth edition of the AIA guide one finds on page 758 this address linked with number 178, another handsome but not so exceptional wood-fronted house two doors down, but with a picture of number 178 and a description of both as “tenements.” One wonders if the description has been confused with that of two glorious actual tenements, one of them illustrated, listed under one address at the nearby corner of Graham Avenue and Meserole. These too are not alone. Late 19th-Century Williamsburg, as shown by these buildings and the recently calendared Hecla Iron Works, is a store of fine architecture that is partially but far from adequately protected by zoning changes now under way. New changes and new populations are coming on, and the Historic Districts Council hopes that the Commission will continue to revisit these areas in its review of areas outside Manhattan. In the meantime, we urge you to designate this extraordinary structure.