Tag Archives: Landmarks Preservation Commission

May 9, 2016 · 4:05 pm

Extra, Extra, Read All About It!

A. G. Byne, “The Old Fashioned Garden of the Lady Moody House in Gravesend,” in Mildred Stapley, “The Last Dutch Farmhouses in New York City,” Architectural Record, vol. 32, no. 1 (July 1912), 35.

The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission has released its designation report for the house at 27 Gravesend Neck Road, forever known as “Lady Moody’s House,” but officially called the “Van Sicklen House” for the family who built it in the early-to-mid-1700s and occupied it until the start of the 20th century. Read the fascinating report online at:

http://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/2145.pdf

There are pictures beginning at page 16. Perhaps someday the house will be restored to look as it did in the 1912 photograph above. For now, at least, it is safe.

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Filed under Hicks family, Lady Moody House, Van Sicklen family

Tagged as Lady Moody House, Landmarks Preservation Commission, Van Sicklen House

September 13, 2015 · 7:47 pm

That Time Lady Moody’s House Was In a Movie

It absolutely floored me. It was Sunday, seven years ago. Or maybe eight. I lay slumped on the sofa thumbing a book. TCM murmured on the television. I dozed more than I read, and only half-eyed the screen. Whichever classic film was on had ended, and some black-and-white short followed it to fill the hour. I yawned and counted the pages left to go. Suddenly, a tenor, warbling the sappiest ballad I’d ever heard — words about truth or love or hearts or death above a trembling piano — snapped me awake. I often wonder what made me focus when I did. Thinking back, it could only have been the ghosts of Gravesend whispering “Look up. Look up, and see.” Behind the singer pictures flashed, still images of bathers in the surf, drinkers in a bar. They looked like magic lantern slides, those photographs on glass that Victorians projected on parlor walls. And this is the one that floored me:

The image glowed for all of four seconds before the next slide popped up. By the time I realized what I’d seen it was gone. But through the magic of DVR I rewound the film and paused on the image. There was no doubt: it was Lady Moody’s House, the building still standing at 27 Gravesend Neck Road (currently for sale and due for designation review by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission on October 8, 2015). What the heck was it doing in this movie?

I started the film from the beginning and learned it was “The Nickelette,” a 1932 Warner Bros. production poking fun at the early movie-going experience of the nickelodeon: “When movies were silent and money talked, a nickel bought an evening’s entertainment. Let’s enter one of these ancient nickelettes.” Eddy Gilligan, the “silver tone tenor,” belts out the melodramatic 1913 hit, “The Curse of an Aching Heart” (music by Al Piantadosi; lyrics by Henry Fink), to underscore fifteen appropriately old-fashioned, if unrelated, pictures. The Moody House slide comes twelfth.

At the time, I managed to find the film online. I saved it and shared it with some fellow Gravesend fanatics (we’re a small but noble group). But then I put it out of mind. That was several computer crashes ago. I lost the file and the emails in which I had shared it. (I since back up regularly to that white, puffy cloud.) I even forgot the title of the film.

Recently I recalled one of the people with whom I shared the news and he had, incredibly, preserved my message. The link to the online version of the film is defunct, but now it is available on DVD, part of a six-disc set in the Warner Bros. Archive Collection called Vitaphone Cavalcade of Musical Comedy Shorts. I bought it, naturally, and captured the screen shot seen here (for which I pray the Warner Bros. honchos won’t sue me!).

P.S. 95 does not appear to the left of the house; it was constructed in 1914-15, so the image had to have been made earlier. Still, it must date from after 1905, by when William and Isabelle Platt, owners of the house, had added dormer windows to the second floor. Compare the screen capture with a positively identified view of the building in the collection of the Brooklyn Historical Society, taken at a slightly later date, and you’ll agree it’s the same house:

Screen capture from the 1932 Warner Bros. production, “The Nickelette.” This image of the Lady Moody House at 27 Gravesend Neck Road was taken between 1905 and 1914.

This lantern slide of the Hicks-Platt House (a.k.a. Lady Moody’s House) is dated circa 1905, but it must be later, since P.S. 95, constructed in 1914-15, looms to the left. {Collection of the Brooklyn Historical Society.}

But the question remains: How did this picture of Lady Moody’s House wind up in a movie? I have a theory. One of the early twentieth-century occupants of the house was an actress, Carlota Cole — sometimes spelled “Carlotta,” and sometimes known by her stage name, “Charlotte Townsend” — who lived there with her brother, Bert, between 1912 and the early 1920s. (Bert M. Cole bought the house from the Platts.) As this write-up from the Brooklyn Eagle attests, Carlota enjoyed some popularity, and even worked with John Drew Jr. (1853 – 1927), uncle to John, Ethel and Lionel Barrymore (hence Drew Barrymore’s name):

Brooklyn_Eagle_1909_03_10_Wed__Carlota_Cole

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Wednesday 10 March 1909, p. 20, col. 6.

I haven’t found evidence of it yet, but it is entirely possible that Carlota also worked for Vitagraph Studios, the pioneering movie company founded in Brooklyn in 1897. The Vitagraph lot was in South Greenfield, a forgotten neighborhood in the vicinity of Avenue M and the Brighton Line (today’s B/Q subway). In her history of the Wyckoff-Bennett Homestead, Living in a Landmark (Francestown, N.H., 1980, p. 116), Gertrude Ryder Bennett recalled how the “dunes, beaches, woodlands, quiet lanes and country homes” of southern Brooklyn served as locations for Vitagraph films:

One year, the company built the fronts of several houses on the shore of Gerritsen’s mill pond. Time disintegrated them[,] but while they stood, the people in our neighborhood walked there with box cameras after the actors had finished work, and posed in doorways pretending to be popular movie stars. . . . Around these little false-front shacks the mill pond made an exquisite wilderness background with its great willow trees close to the water’s edge and miles of meadow land stretching beyond the pond. Today that site, filled in, is the baseball field of Marine Park on the north side of Avenue U surrounded by an urban community.

Vitagraph even shot a scene on the porch of the Wyckoff-Bennett Homestead (Gertrude believed it was from The Prisoner of Zenda). Isn’t it possible that they also used the Lady Moody House as a backdrop for some other project? Warner Bros. bought the Vitagraph Company in 1925. Could this lantern slide have been among the stock? A leftover promotional still from some forgotten flicker? And just the sort of nostalgic image needed for making “The Nickelette?”

Carlota Cole does not appear in the “Vitagraph Family” list of actors in Anthony Slide’s The Big V: A History of the Vitagraph Company (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., revised edition, 1987), so maybe that isn’t her, dressed in white, on the arm of her beau at the picket fence. But these are clearly actors, posed, perhaps, as newlyweds about to cross the threshold. (Or maybe he’s trying to stop her departure?) And it is unmistakably the house. In any case, isn’t it wonderful that I looked up when I did to catch it? Who else would have noticed?

Save Lady Moody’s House!

On October 8, 2015, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) will hold a public hearing to determine if the house at 27 Gravesend Neck Road — known as Lady Moody’s House — meets the criteria for landmark status. Despite what many locals believe, the house is not an official landmark. That means it is not protected by law, and could, conceivably, be torn down by some uncaring developer. (If you’d like to be its guardian, the house is currently for sale!) However, the house has been on the LPC’s radar since 1966, when it was “calendared.” That provides a modicum of protection in that any application for demolition should send up a red flag, spurring the LPC to action. But they’ve had half a century to decide. After the October hearing, a public meeting in early 2016 will determine the next step, which — fingers crossed — will hopefully lead to designation of this most iconic of Gravesend houses.

What follows is my open letter to Meenakshi Srinivasan, chair of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, urging her to act now. I beg you all to drop a line, however brief, to the LPC, by the October 1st deadline (whether or not you plan to attend the hearing), stating your support for the house. The more of us they hear from, the better. Take a look at the LPC’s informative fact sheet about the house (even I learned some things!), then write to backlog95@lpc.nyc.gov. I’d love to read your thoughts if you’d care to copy me (webmaster@gravesendgazette.com).

Oh, and don’t miss the gallery of wonderful images at the bottom of this post!

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle featured the Lady Moody House on the cover of its 1947 booklet of Gravesend history.

The Brooklyn Eagle featured the Lady Moody – Van Sicklen House on the cover of its 1947 booklet of Gravesend history.

August 29, 2015

Meenakshi Srinivasan, Chair

New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission

1 Centre Street, 9th Floor, North

New York, NY 10007

Dear Commissioner Srinivasan:

Ask anyone in Gravesend, Brooklyn where Lady Moody lived. Invariably they’ll point to the house at 27 Gravesend Neck Road, just next to Public School 95. How do they know she lived there? A teacher told them. Or their grandmother. And who was Lady Moody anyway? Oh, she helped George Washington escape the Redcoats through a tunnel running from her basement to the cemetery across the street. And during the Civil War she hid slaves in that tunnel on their way north to freedom.

None of this happened, of course: Deborah Moody died late in 1658, nearly seventy-five years before the birth of Washington, and over two centuries before the Civil War. The general public, knowing instinctively that Lady Moody bore some significance, but lacking specifics, attaches her — and the house at 27 Gravesend Neck Road — to the seminal events of American history.

The facts are these: Deborah Moody (ca. 1586-1658) was the wealthy, freethinking widow of a baronet. By 1639 she was in Puritan Massachusetts, where her Anabaptist leanings branded her “a dangerous woman.” To avoid censure she moved in 1643 to New Netherland, where she petitioned the tolerant Dutch to grant her and some followers a spot on western Long Island where they could worship as they pleased. They called their settlement Gravesend, the patent to which ensured they could enjoy “liberty of Conscience . . . without molestation or disturbance from any magistrate or . . . ecclesiastical minister that may pretend jurisdiction over them.”

Moody’s fellow patentee, the surveyor James Hubbard, designed the town’s central plan: a sixteen-acre square bounded by present-day Village Road North, Village Road East, Village Road South, and Van Sicklen Street, and cut into quadrants by the intersection of McDonald Avenue and Gravesend Neck Road. In each quadrant ten house lots bordered a common yard for holding livestock. Records show that in 1646 Lady Moody was assigned a double lot in the northwest quadrant, corresponding (in part) to the modern street address of 27 Gravesend Neck Road, Brooklyn (block 7123, lot 64).

Lady Moody must have built a house on her property between 1646 and 1658. Is the house standing there today the one she occupied? A structural evaluation conducted in 2005 by Robert Silman Associates, Consulting Engineers, suggests the present building incorporates three phases of construction: The part most visible — Phase 2 — is an eighteenth-century “random rubble [stone] building supporting hand-hewn wood floor beams and simple log beam roof trusses.” Phase 3 reflects the early twentieth-century changes made by then-owners William and Isabelle Platt, who excavated a full basement under the ground floor, added dormers to the roof, and stuccoed the exterior to conform with the prevailing Arts and Crafts aesthetic. But evidence of an earlier structure, one possibly dating from the seventeenth century, is visible in the basement, where there are four stone bearing walls, three of which support the current above-ground walls. The fourth lies buried beneath the main house and its rear extension. This “out-of-place” wall led Silman Associates to hypothesize that the Phase 2 house is a reconfiguration of an older building, a Phase 1 house that was enlarged in the 1700s.

This 1893 watercolor of an African-American laundress by Charles W. Bauhan --

This watercolor by Charles W. Bauhan — “Wash-day. Gravesend L. I. Sep. 4 / [18]93.” — was painted looking east from a spot now in the schoolyard of P.S. 95. It captures the west gable end of the Lady Moody – Van Sicklen House rising above the fence. {Collection of Joseph Ditta}

Was this Phase 1 house Lady Moody’s? Or was it built by one of the later seventeenth-century owners of her land? We may never know. But its expanded form — the rubble-stone Phase 2 house — is probably the work of the Van Sicklen family, who came into possession of the property in 1702. Most eighteenth-century houses in sandy, coastal Gravesend were of wood-frame construction. Stone houses tended to be built near ridges, where appropriate-sized boulders were plentiful. To build a stone house at a location where rubble was scarce required significant manual labor, and the Van Sicklens, who, like most Dutch farmers of the period owned slaves, likely employed those slaves to transport rock to the site.

The Van Sicklen family occupied the house for the rest of the eighteenth century and through most of the nineteenth. Eventually it descended to Cornelia Van Sicklen, whose husband, Thomas Hicks, acquired it in 1842. (His carved initials survive on a ceiling beam near the eastern ground-floor fireplace of the house.) Hicks died in 1884, and his wife followed in 1893. The house sat vacant for a time, and then served briefly as meeting place for the fledgling Gravesend Methodist Episcopal Church in 1899. In 1904 the Hicks estate sold the house to William and Isabelle Platt, whose renovations resulted in a romanticized Dutch farmhouse set in a lush garden, which Mrs. Platt profiled in the June 1909 issue of Country Life in America. The Platts were the first to call this the “Lady Moody Homestead,” a name it has kept for more than a century.

By 1910 the Platts put the house up for sale (William Platt was a real estate speculator who was then involved in developments on Staten Island), and so began the perennial cries from preservationists and press that the Lady Moody House be rescued by the City or a civic group, or moved to Prospect Park or even to the grounds of the 1939 World’s Fair. Its fate seemed secure after it became a V.F.W. post in 1945, but that was a short-lived incarnation. The house reverted to private status, and was bought in 1955 by Nunzio Maisano, who covered the front in imitation stone veneer. Ironically, this facing hides the real thing. (It wouldn’t be too difficult to restore the house to the attractive state in which the Platts left it; the original door, removed by Maisano, survives in care of Eric J. Ierardi, president of the Gravesend Historical Society.)

Nunzio Maisano’s descendants held the house for nearly fifty years before selling it. Now it is on the market again, and time is running out. (Couldn’t the City acquire the house as a gift to the neighboring school for use as a meeting place or exhibition space? Both the Historic Districts Council and the New York Landmarks Conservancy have expressed interest in the house. Why not tap them for assistance and grants?)

The Landmarks Preservation Commission calendared the property in 1966, but a hearing that year did not result in designation. Nor did subsequent hearings in 1970 or 2004, due to owner opposition. But the Commission has designated other sites when faced with similar resistance (e.g., the Hendrick I. Lott House at 1940 East 36th Street in Brooklyn), and in cases where the fabric of a structure has been significantly altered (e.g., the asphalt-shingled Sandy Ground cottages at 565 and 569 Bloomingdale Road on Staten Island). And the recent designation of the Stonewall Inn, birthplace of the modern LGBT movement at 51-53 Christopher Street in Manhattan, illustrates that the Commission is cognizant of the historical associations of a building, even when its architectural integrity has been compromised.

Despite the changes it has weathered, the Lady Moody – Van Sicklen House remains the sole surviving eighteenth-century stone farmhouse in Brooklyn. It is one of two extant Dutch-American houses within the boundaries of the original Gravesend town square, where as late as the 1920s there were seven. It sits directly opposite the landmarked Van Sicklen Family Cemetery, which holds the remains of many generations who occupied the house. At the very least, it stands on the property of the remarkable Lady Deborah Moody, the first European woman to found a community in North America, a settlement chartered on the principle of religious freedom some hundred and thirty years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I trust you will seize this opportunity to recognize publicly, formally, and legally, the significance of this site tied inextricably to the themes of Brooklyn history, Women’s history, American slavery, and religious freedom. Without landmark protection the house is doomed.

Thank you for your valuable time.

Sincerely,

Joseph Ditta

Author, Then & Now: Gravesend, Brooklyn (Arcadia Publishing, 2009)

: Map of the Gravesend village square showing in red the house lot allocated to Lady Moody in 1646.

: Map of the Gravesend village square showing in red the location of Lady Moody’s house lot in 1907.

: This 1893 view of its west gable end is possibly the oldest known photograph of the Lady Moody – Van Sicklen House. {Collection of Joseph Ditta}