THE HISTORY IN YOUR BATHROOM WALL (1950)
******************************************************************************************************************************** Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes. The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations. Do you know the history of YOUR house? ******************************************************************************************************************************** Olga Roswell managed to receive “very poor” marks in her French class. She was “interested,” though, in Shakespeare, was “fair” in history, and she performed “fairly good” in mathematics. All of this academic patchiness, came to us from the St. Michael’s Girls’ School in Bridgetown, Barbados, via Olga’s “Christmas Term, 1950” report card. And this report card Olga managed to “conveniently” leave behind while she was visiting her Aunt Caroline in Brooklyn the following year. The report card, actually, fell out of the 2d floor bathroom wall during our extensive home renovations, and its discovery and associated story is now local lore and has become a treasured part of the history of our house at 738 Macon Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant. As such, the story has been featured in one of our Brownstone Detectives House History Books in the chapter about the family that owned the house. And Aunt Caroline’s former profession, unknown to us at the time, would soon become the missing piece of the puzzle that – once realized – caused everything to make sense. FINDING STACEY MAUPIN TORRES. Almost a year ago, as part of the work the Brownstone Detectives does in locating and interviewing former home owners and their descendants, we tracked down a descendant of James and […]
WHERE WAS THIS PICTURE TAKEN? (1924)
Calling all junior Brownstone Detectives! Today we have a mystery for you to solve! We invite you to come along with us as we grapple with another enigma – discerning the exact source and location of a common celluloid snapshot! EXAMINING THE EVIDENCE Have you ever come across an old family photograph and wondered when and where it was taken? You study the dog-eared snapshot and a few things immediately stand out: • A woman leans against an iron fence. • Behind her is a distinct-looking row of buildings. • A streetcar whizzes by in the background. Not much to go on, you decide, and so you think, “There must be thousands of places where this could have been taken!” And there are. But there are also many ways of whittling that list of places down and possibly even finding the exact spot where your family member (and the photographer) stood when that picture was taken. And all it really takes is a little deductive reasoning, my dear Watson! So, put on your junior Brownstone Detectives caps, set your brains to “quizzical,” and let’s go on an adventure together – through Brooklyn of the “Roaring ’20s”! ANALYZING THE CLUES First of all, we must analyze the clues we’ve listed above. Since this is a family member, we already have some background information about the woman in the picture. The woman is your great-grandmother, Sarah Bilson, and she was married to Harris Bilson. They had two kids, one of which was […]
