Brownsville

Margaret Sanger’s birth control clinic and other historic sites in Brownsville

Eye On Real Estate

February 7, 2018 By Lore Croghan Brooklyn Daily Eagle
This mural on Herzl Street proclaims, “Welcome to Brownsville!!!” Eagle photos by Lore Croghan
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It’s an address every feminist should know: 46 Amboy St.

Margaret Sanger opened America’s first birth control clinic on this Brownsville street a century ago, in the storefront of a rowhouse near the corner of Pitkin Avenue.

The other day, we were thinking about the status of women’s reproductive rights in America, which prompted us to make a pilgrimage to the clinic site.

We wound up spending the whole day walking around Brownsville and looking at beautiful old buildings. There was so much to see.

When real-estate nerds think of Brownsville, New York City Housing Authority developments are the first thing that come to mind. There are 18 different NYCHA properties in the neighborhood. About one-quarter of Brownsville’s residents live in them.

There’s also a lot of old-fashioned architectural eye candy.

Commercial corridor Pitkin Avenue is lined with landmark-worthy buildings including the impressively renovated and adaptively reused Loew’s Pitkin movie theater.  

Brownsville also has a landmarked century-old library, a landmarked swimming pool and bath house at Betsy Head Play Center and handsome rowhouses with eye-catching porches on numerous streets.   

Jail and eviction for Margaret Sanger

So. Here’s the story of activist Margaret Sanger’s Amboy Street clinic, which opened in October 1916.

Sanger — who coined the expression “birth control” — was from an Irish-American Catholic family in Corning, New York. She was one of 11 children.

As an adult, she lived in Greenwich Village. But conversations she’d had with Brownsville residents made it clear they would welcome a birth control clinic, so that’s why she opened one there, a posting on the Margaret Sanger Papers Project’s website says.

Sanger’s sister Ethel Byrne, who was a nurse, and a Yiddish interpreter named Fania Mindell opened the clinic with Sanger. They operated the clinic for 10 days. Then they got arrested by vice-squad cops and a female undercover police officer.   

Hundreds of women went to the clinic during its brief existence. They received instructions on how to use contraceptives and got a pamphlet Sanger wrote called What Every Girl Should Know.

After the clinic’s closing Sanger tried to reopen it twice. But the police made 46 Amboy St.’s landlord evict her.

The website TheClio.com has a good photo of 46 Amboy St.’s exterior that was taken when Sanger’s clinic was open.

The building doesn’t look like that now. Either the facade was radically altered or the building was torn down and a new one constructed in its place.
The property currently belongs to Princeland Realty LLC with Raymond Zaytoune as member, city Finance Department records indicate.

Though 46 Amboy St. looks different than it did a century ago, standing beside it made us feel awed and thankful for badass women like Sanger, Byrne and Mindell who worked to change America for the better.

The ‘Jerusalem of America’

Back when Sanger built her Amboy Street clinic, Brownsville was heavily populated by Jewish immigrants.

In the late 19th century, a developer named Aaron Kaplan started building tenements in Brownsville and marketing them to Lower East Side garment workers, Kenneth Jackson and John Manbeck’s book “The Neighborhoods of Brooklyn” says. Brownsville became known as the “Jerusalem of America.”

Today, one visual reminder of that heritage is a plaza called Zion Triangle, which stands alongside the former Loew’s Pitkin movie palace.

This park has a World War I memorial with a winged victory statue by sculptor Charles Cary Rumsey, meaning a goddess with wings who holds a sword and shield.   

Other visual reminders that Brownsville was the Jerusalem of America include former synagogues that have been converted to other uses.

One former synagogue, which belonged to Congregation Chevra Torah Anshei Radishkowitz, is located at 139 Amboy St., a couple blocks away from the site of Sanger’s birth control clinic.

There are Hebrew inscriptions and a Star of David on the former synagogue’s facade.

The building now belongs to St. Timothy Holy Church, which purchased it for $50,000 in 1968 from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, New York, Finance Department records show.

According to the book “Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto” by Wendell Pritchett, Catholics bought the synagogue building for $45,000 in 1965 from Congregation Chevra Torah Anshei Radishkowitz.

Its sanctuary had more stained-glass windows than any other synagogue in the neighborhood, Pritchett notes in the book.

 

A tale of two bank buildings

The buildings on Pitkin Avenue are terrific.

The former Loew’s Pitkin at 1501 Pitkin Ave. is a dazzling anchor to this commercial corridor.

Our favorite property on the avenue is a century-old building that wraps around the corner of Mother Gaston Boulevard.

It’s red brick with wonderful windowsills and has bow windows right above the street corner.

The name of a prior occupant, the State Bank, is inscribed over a doorsill. Its address is 1797 Pitkin Ave.

It’s being renovated and turned into a medical center.

According to Finance Department records, it belongs to Doral Realty Holdings LLC with David Lipschitz and Ruchy Lipschitz as members. The LLC paid $3.2 million for the building in 2014.  

Another beautiful building is the former East New York Savings Bank at 1620 Pitkin Ave. on the corner of Thomas S. Boyland Street.

The white stone building, which was constructed in the 1930s, now houses a Banco Popular branch.

In 2006, Banco Popular North America sold the building to Urban-Scape LLC for $2.2 million, Finance Department records indicate.

The LLC is controlled by Aslan Bawabeh, who owns numerous Banco Popular buildings, Finance Department records show.

P.S. Near the corner of Pitkin Avenue at 107 Watkins St., there’s a nifty firehouse that was constructed in 1905. It’s the home of Engine 231 and Ladder 120.

If the commercial corridor were to be turned into the Pitkin Avenue Historic District and included on the National Register of Historic Places, property owners would benefit, a 2015 Pratt Institute’s Programs for Sustainable Planning & Development study suggests.

The study notes that this type of historic-district designation would enable landlords to obtain federal and state income-tax credits for building renovations.    

 

 

A Carnegie library designed by William B. Tubby

A few blocks away from the old State Bank, there’s a castle plucked from a fairy tale and dropped onto a street corner. Or that’s what it look like.

The Stone Avenue Library is a Jacobean Revival city landmark. That’s an architectural style we don’t often encounter in Brooklyn.   

The library was designed by distinguished architect William B. Tubby and built in 1913-1914. It is located at 581 Mother Gaston Boulevard on the corner of Dumont Avenue.

It was conceived as a library for children. To this day, much of the space in the branch is devoted to children’s books and computers for kids’ use.

The Stone Avenue Branch is one of the many Brooklyn libraries whose construction was funded by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.

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