9/12/2023 0 Comments Ghost ezra telegram![]() ![]() While 19th century historian Henry Stiles makes a reference to a house being moved from Middagh Street to Pineapple Street in his book A History of The City of Brooklyn, no further details are provided so it is difficult to prove this references 13 Pineapple Street. An 1832 article in the New York Evening Post described frame houses “moved on rollers from one street to another” as being a common occurrence. ![]() Whether saving a house from the construction of a new road or moving it to a more desirable spot, the skilled labor to move a frame house would have been available. House moving was not unheard of in the 19th century. 33, an address it would retain until a street renumbering in the 1870s.Īs to whether the house was moved from another location, while the claim is not as unusual as it might sound, little concrete evidence has been found to support it. It isn’t until the 1830s that 13 Pineapple begins appearing by address and then it was known as No. Alas, those early listings don’t include an address, merely signifying a resident as being on or near the street. Photo via New York Public LibraryĬity directories can sometimes offer clues to residential patterns, and Brooklynites are listed living in houses located on Pineapple Street from the earliest directory of 1822. There’s often a kernel of truth to at least some of the tales, and such is the case with 13 Pineapple Street. The fun of old house folklore is figuring out where and how such stories emerged. “A silvery gray, shingle-wood Colonial shaded by trees robustly leafed, it was built in 1790, the home of a sea captain,” he wrote of the house, perhaps inspired by the glimpse of it obtained from his back porch at 70 Willow Street. The most notable of those is the Capote nod in his essay “ Brooklyn Heights: A Personal Memoir,” published in February of 1959 in Holiday magazine. Most are stories repeated by area residents who either lived near or in 13 Pineapple Street. The stories that do emerge - a connection to a ship captain, a ghostly presence, a 1790 construction date, a wife insisting on the size of the house being doubled, and a tale of it being moved from another location - all seem to have begun, or at least begun to appear consistently in print, after 1930. Few contemporary accounts from the 19th century have emerged, nor even many stories from the early 20th century, when so much history was being delightfully embroidered. What is intriguing about 13 Pineapple Street is that much of the folklore surrounding the house dates from the 1930s to the 1960s. Photo by Susan De VriesĪ house with some colorful tales attached to it is not unusual in fact, it’s expected in a building that has almost 200 years of history behind it. In the case of 13 Pineapple Street, some of that folklore was enshrined into the collective consciousness by none other than Truman Capote. Each dive into a Brooklyn Heights building involves complicated research and sorting through endlessly entertaining folklore. With a neighborhood that has been documented over the centuries by writers, artists and historians, and was even the first historic district designated in New York City, it might be safe to assume that each Brooklyn Heights house has a well-traced story charting its architectural and social history. Located on one of the charming fruit streets of northern Brooklyn Heights, 13 Pineapple stands apart from its brick and brownstone neighbors, a wood-frame, Federal-style reminder of an earlier time in the neighborhood. Even in a neighborhood filled with architectural delights, the generously wide, gray-shingled facade seems to hint at an interesting past. It’s a house that invites a second look from the passerby.
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