Ephemeral New York

It’s the blue belle of Brooklyn; a former country villa that stands alone at 271 Ninth Street, between walkup flats and a featureless one-story Post Office.

Passing this dowager beauty, which has stood on the block between Fourth and Fifth Avenues since the Antebellum era, is like being in a time machine. Everything about it is a wonderful anachronism: the mansard roof, the lacy ironwork over the bay windows, the front yard with rosebushes and lavender.

How did such a spectacular house come to be—and then manage to stick around for more than a century and a half? The story begins in the middle of the 19th century.

Imagine today’s Park Slope in the decades prior to 1850. Before elegant brownstone rows sprang up, the area was mostly pasture or bucolic countryside in the farming town of Flatbush—not yet part of the city of Brooklyn.

But the 1850s were transformative, and what we now call Brooklyn began growing into its new role as an accessible-by-ferry suburb of Manhattan. A farmer descended from the Adriance family—whose holdings stretched from present-day Third Avenue into Prospect Park—sold off lots for development.

One buyer in 1854 was a successful Wall Street merchant named William Cronyn (some references spell it Croynyn). Between 1856 and 1857, Cronyn built his suburban villa far from urban ills: a French Second Empire delight “reflecting the prosperity of the original owner,” as the Landmarks Preservation Commission put it in a report on the house in 1978.

“Of frame and brick construction covered with stucco, the three-story house features a central half-story cupola with a clerestory [windows above eye level] which lights the interior staircase,” noted the LPC report. “Below the cupola is a slate mansard roof with end pavilions and ornamental iron cresting” typical of this fanciful style, popular in the 1850s-1870s.

The Cronyns only stayed until 1862. As the house switched hands and residential development accelerated after the Civil War, neighbors arrived. “During the late 1860s, other sites on this block along Fifth Avenue, Eighth Street, and then Ninth Street began to be developed,” states the LPC report.

Apparently the neighborhood had something of a crime problem as well. On August 11, 1871, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported the story of a diamond merchant who was a houseguest of the Shanks family—the occupants of the house at the time. One afternoon, the merchant was beaten, robbed, and found moaning on the curb at Ninth Street and Fourth Avenue.

“This is the latest and boldest assault of a series that have been made in Gowanus during the past two or three months,” the reporter stated.

In 1879, Daniel H. Gray, who worked in sulpher refining, bought the blue belle. In 1885, he transferred ownership of the house to his daughter, Mary Gray Cone, who lived in this dwelling until 1896, as South Brooklyn became an enclave of brownstones for white collar residents and later, flats and tenements for working-class folks.

At the turn of the 20th century, the house entered a new era. “Charles M. Higgins acquired the property in 1898 as the headquarters for his India ink company, which occupied the building until the mid-20th century,” per the LPC report.

“The ink factory was located to the rear of the house facing Eighth Street. This change in use for the building reflected the change in the area to include commercial uses as well as residential ones.”

Higgins was an interesting character, at least based on all of the letters he wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle over the years. He signed his letters using a different title depending on the issue: as part of the Brooklyn Ethical Association, or the South Brooklyn Board of Trade, or the Anti-Vaccination League of America.

Born in Ireland but raised in Brooklyn, Higgins died in 1929. In his last decade, he left the borough a fitting legacy. “Higgins was responsible for the Minerva statue in Green-Wood Cemetery, and is buried behind her, on the hill,” wrote Suzanne Spellen of Brownstoner.

In 1981, Charles Sibirsky, a jazz pianist, and his wife bought the blue belle and opened a music school, according to Spellen. “Slope Music” is embossed on a half-moon window above the slender front door. I imagine this is when the yellow flowers arrived on the roof, making the house even more whimsical.

Some people might see the blue belle and think of the Addams family. Others might feel as I do, that this stunning survivor is a charming ghost from the borough’s past—a witness to all the changes as the area went from Flatbush farmland to residential Gowanus, South Brooklyn, and now Park Slope.

And luckily, it’s been landmarked since 1978.

[Fourth photo: 1940, NYPL Digital Collections; Sixth image: Brooklyn Daily Eagle; Seventh photo: LPC Report, likely 1978]

Tags: 271 Ninth Street Brooklyn Park Slope, Blue French Second Empire House Brooklyn, Blue Old House Ninth Street Brooklyn, Most Charming House in Brooklyn, Park Slope History Houses, Park Slope Old Blue House Ninth Street

This entry was posted on September 18, 2023 at 4:40 am and is filed under Brooklyn. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.