In the early 1900s, a stretch of land in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, near the waterfront was lined with mansions.
While the neighborhood is now known for its collection of single-family homes, at least two of those mansions survived and still exist today as reminders of a bygone time when Bay Ridge served as a vacation destination for wealthy New Yorkers, including merchants, businessmen, politicians and celebrities.
One is a large old stone home that sits on Narrows Avenue between 82nd and 83rd streets. Locals affectionately call it “the gingerbread house,” but its official name is the Howard E. and Jessie Jones House; it was named after its original owners, who were wealthy shipping merchants.
Built in 1917, the two-story, six-bedroom house was designed in the Arts and Crafts style, a rarity in the city, according to Lisi de Bourbon, a spokesperson for the city Landmarks Preservation Commission.
The home, designed by architect J.
Sarsfield Kennedy, is constructed of boulders, and has a roof that looks like thatch but is actually asphalt. The home’s unique architectural style is what earned it landmark status.
“It looks like something out of the countryside of England because of its thatched roof,” said Ron Schweiger, Brooklyn’s official borough historian. “There’s nothing else like it in the city of New York.”
According to Jerry Fishman, who owns it, the home was actually a cottage house
to a larger, pink, Mediterranean-style mansion that sat across the street on Narrows Avenue. That mansion was torn down in the 1950s or 1960s, and five homes now stand in its place.
Fishman, who rarely gives interviews about the home, told The Real Deal that the larger estate belonged to the father of the household, and the gingerbread house belonged to the son.
Fishman and his wife, Diane, bought the gingerbread house in 1985, but the home had been part of his life and the subject of much pining since his childhood.
In 1948, when Fishman was all of 6 months old, he was pushed past the gingerbread house in a stroller (he grew up around the corner on 84th Street).
Years later, he attended Fort Hamilton High School, which sits on 83rd Street, across the street from the gingerbread home.
“I had to have the house. I flunked English because I was looking [out the school window] at the house all the time,” he said.
Fishman even took Diane to see the home on their very first date. “I met my wife 37 years ago, took her here on our first date and told her we were going to have the house,” he recalled. “This house has always been a special place for us. It’s interesting and strange and inviting, and I knew it would go with me and my wife. And I got both of them.”
Fishman said the fascination with his home, which became an official city landmark in 1989, extends far beyond Brooklyn and even beyond New York City. He once received a newspaper clipping from Prague, which listed it as one of the 10 most beautiful places in the world.
In the more than 20 years since he bought the home, it has generated its own community lore. Fishman has even had to debunk some of the neighborhood rumors.
For example, there is an original turning platform in the garage — to turn a parked car around, so it wouldn’t have to be
backed out of the garage — but it no longer works. And, he noted, there is no bowling alley in the basement (that’s another mansion in the neighborhood).
Meanwhile, the other surviving mansion is nearby on Shore Road at 99th Street.
It’s a Mediterranean-style home with a
Spanish-style red-tiled roof, and it surrounds a courtyard.
Now, it’s a Catholic girls’ school, but in the early 1900s it was the vacation home of railroad tycoon “Diamond” Jim Brady. The house is rumored to have doubled as a speakeasy and a casino during Prohibition after Brady died, according to the Brooklyn Historical Society’s Bay Ridge/Ft. Hamilton Neighborhood History Guide.
Brady bought the mansion in 1895 and lived there with the Broadway actress Lillian Russell. She was famous for starring in many of Gilbert & Sullivan’s comic operas, including “H.M.S. Pinafore,” “Patience” and “The Sorcerer.” Russell starred in 13 Broadway shows between 1883 and 1912.
According to the book “Brooklyn: People and Places, Past and Present,” by Grace Glueck and Paul Gardner, Brady and Russell’s relationship was “strictly platonic,” and they simply shared a love of diamonds.
However, her friendship with Brady lasted longer than all of her three marriages.
The book says Brady used to walk down the Coney Island boardwalk in “diamond-studded sandals.” Brady died in 1917 and left the bulk of his fortune to Johns Hopkins Hospital, according to the New York Times.
“There’s a rumor that after he died, the house became a speakeasy and a casino. Then it took on a new name as a Catholic school,” said Schweiger, the borough historian.
The rumor that the mansion was a speakeasy and casino has never been confirmed, but Prohibition was certainly in full force after Brady’s death and before the home was converted into a school.
The Catholic girls’ school that now calls the mansion home, Fontbonne Hall Academy, opened in 1937. Like the gingerbread house, the school is a remnant of the old
Bay Ridge.
“This was the playground for the rich and famous of Manhattan — where they came to be in the country,” Fishman said. “Great mansions were always here in Bay Ridge, but unfortunately, they all have come down because of the price of land.”
Instead of illustrious mansions on acres of property, the residential neighborhood now has blocks of single-family homes.
Shore Road today is lined with a mix of large homes and apartment buildings. “Starting in the 1930s and ’40s, developers started coming in, tearing the mansions down and building high-rise apartment buildings,” Schweiger said. “Very few of the mansions are left on Narrows.”