John Freeman Gill

NEW YORK — When Lisa Radcliffe bought a tumbledown, neo-Georgian-style garage in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn in 1999, she made an intriguing discovery. The interior of the original structure, built in 1916 to house three cars for a chocolate magnate, was unadorned, its ground-floor walls lined with glazed white brick.

Yet attached to the rear of this utilitarian building at 241 Waverly Ave. was an incongruously grand, 23-by-29-foot addition decorated with such fine mahogany paneling that stepping inside the space felt, Radcliffe said, like “you’d walked into a statesman’s drawing room.”

The walls were damaged from roof leaks, and one of the warped sections, originally a secret panel, had pulled away to reveal behind it a 6 1/2-foot-tall steel door with a built-in combination lock. Radcliffe hired a safecracker and camped out in the room with her young daughter.

“We sat here for three days while he worked on the safe with a stethoscope,” she recalled. “It was really hot, and he would sweat and get frustrated and throw his stethoscope and say all sorts of expletives.”

When the lock finally clicked and the safe door was thrown open, they found inside not the riches of the kingdom but an empty, 40-square-foot vault lined with heavy, bottle-height shelves — and another safe, about the size of a breadbox, built into a wall inside the larger one. The safecracker drilled out the lock of the smaller safe and found that it, too, was empty.

Radcliffe surmised that the sumptuous mahogany-paneled addition had been a Prohibition-era speakeasy, and that its proprietors had concealed their alcohol in the vault and their cash inside the smaller safe. Her speakeasy theory was buttressed by tales from her new neighbors.

“For years, people would stop by and say their grandparents had met there, had danced there, had drunk there,” she recalled. “Everyone in the neighborhood seemed to know this story from two generations back.”

The five blocks of Waverly Avenue between Myrtle and Gates avenues are enlivened by more than 30 carriage houses, garages and stables, many dating to the 19th century. And while the story behind No. 241 is one of the most vivid, it is far from the only colorful hidden drama that has played out over the past century and a half behind the street’s double-width doors. Indeed, as the fortunes of the neighborhood have risen and fallen and risen again, an eclectic assortment of characters and businesses has taken up residence in these unsung ancillary buildings.

Though originally designed for coaches and cars, these spaces have repeatedly been repurposed as industrial workshops, artists’ studios, underground clubs, and, in more recent years, homes for families with a taste for the untraditional.

A skinny, north-south thoroughfare, Waverly Avenue developed in the late 19th century as a service street for the mansions then going up on the grander boulevards that flank it, Clinton Avenue and Washington Avenue. Previously called Hamilton Street, the strip was rebranded in 1875 because, an alderman explained, homeowners there sought “to escape the odium” of its reputation as a stable street. But as the grandeur of the adjacent residences increased, so did the quality of the service buildings on Waverly.

Among the finest was the set of two-story, red brick carriage houses built beginning in 1903 for two sons of the oil-rich Charles Pratt, a partner of John D. Rockefeller and founder of the nearby Pratt Institute, a private university now known for its architecture and design programs.

In 1904, a lavishly illustrated feature in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle trumpeted the completion of “Herbert L. Pratt’s splendidly equipped new stable” at 185-187 Waverly, calling the 75-foot-wide double carriage house “the finest private stable Brooklyn has known.” Work on a matching coach house for Herbert’s brother, George D. Pratt, next door at 195 Waverly, was also underway. Both structures survive today in excellent condition.

Distinguished by their intricate brickwork and limestone trim, these elegantly forthright carriage houses were designed by the firm of William B. Tubby, a favorite architect of the Pratt clan. Tubby had previously drawn the plans for the Pratt Institute library on Hall Street and the mansion of the patriarch’s eldest son at 241 Clinton Ave., which is now the residence of the Roman Catholic Bishop of Brooklyn.

Herbert Pratt, a future president of Standard Oil, was proud enough of his state-of-the-art coach house to invite his close friends to admire it at a private unveiling. The chief attraction was his new carriage of blue and French gray, which the Eagle deemed “in all probability the handsomest and best coach yet turned out in America.” Behind the graceful vehicle’s monogrammed doors, travelers could luxuriate in a Morocco leather interior while availing themselves of ice chests and velvet-lined drawers full of silver.

The building itself was spacious and well organized. The carriage house proper boasted a livery room and space for six large equipages. Between the iron girders of its ceiling, an ash panel served as a cleverly concealed elevator that could be raised and lowered with a massive wheel-and-cable system to convey feed to and from a second-floor hayloft.

In the rear wall of the carriage house was a doorway, flanked by wood-and-glass harness cases, that gave onto an attached, well-ventilated stable with skylights and six horse stalls. “Here is a stable,” the Eagle concluded, “that is the last word of the special architects who solve such propositions.”

To manage his equine affairs, Herbert Pratt hired a celebrated English coachman named Powell, who lived upstairs in a well-appointed three-room apartment in front of the hayloft. In this period, a coachman’s duties included the embellishment of his employer’s carriage house floor with designs in colored sand. Powell, it seems, was something of a stable genius, and his stenciled patterns were elaborate, according to the Eagle, incorporating sandwork images of a coach horn, a horseshoe and a whip, as well as a multicolored picture of a man driving a tandem with dogs running beside it. (Alas, none of these floor decorations survive.)

In the ensuing few years, Waverly remained a lively stable quarter. A short trot down the hill from the Pratt stables, police horses of Brooklyn’s mounted traffic squad — among them steeds named Custer, Gunfire and Togo — were headquartered in a fortresslike, medieval-style building on Waverly near Myrtle Avenue. Nearby, a horse auction was held biweekly at a large horse mart at Waverly and Park Avenue.

But as the popularity of automobiles accelerated, the era of stables was left in the rearview mirror. A public garage for cars was operating on Waverly by 1906, and five years later even the luxe Pratt carriage houses were converted to garages.

The Pratt chauffeurs were occasional scofflaws, newspaper accounts of the time indicate. Abner Gleason, George’s driver, was ticketed by a bicycle patrolman in 1909 for speeding on Atlantic Avenue as he raced to beat the Long Island Rail Road train to the Nostrand Avenue station, where his passengers hoped to catch the train to Glen Cove, Long Island. In 1911, William Milne, Herbert’s chauffeur, also landed in court. Milne lived at 187 Waverly, where he had either supplanted the coachman Powell or shared the second floor with him while the Pratts transitioned from carriages to horseless carriages.

Before long, however, it was moving vans rather than cars that preoccupied Herbert and George Pratt. In 1914, both brothers succumbed to the magnetic social pull of Manhattan, forsaking their Clinton Avenue mansions in favor of apartments at 640 Park Ave.

Into the breach galloped J. Stuart Blackton, a nouveau riche film pioneer, who bought Herbert’s colonnaded mansion at 213 Clinton as a Christmas gift for his wife, Paula, for whom he also bought George’s Waverly garage as a stocking stuffer. Blackton had become intrigued by moving pictures as a young artist-reporter, when he was sent by The New York World to sketch and interview Thomas Edison. After buying movie equipment from Edison, Blackton amassed a fortune as a co-founder of Vitagraph studios, a prolific early film production company that was ultimately sold to Warner Bros.

In 1937, Herbert Pratt bisected his garage, selling No. 187 to the Sterling Ambulance Co. and No. 185 to his brother Frederic B. Pratt, then president of Pratt Institute. The school acquired the building in 1948 and installed a new School of Leather and Tanning Technology, complete with laboratories and a model tannery. “Imagine if you can a home, a community, a world without leather!” entreated a Pratt publication. “Our books lie torn and limp. Many feet are bruised and broken. ... Pratt, answering the cries from industry, established the only training school in the Western Hemisphere.”

The program closed in 1954, but the Pratt connection to the coach houses continued long after both family and school ceased to own them. Among the many Pratt students and teachers who have lived in the buildings is Nils Eklund, a garrulous, Swedish-born artist who began renting the second floor of 187 Waverly in 1967. Eklund’s home includes not only Powell the coachman’s handsomely wainscoted apartment but also the hayloft. For the past half century, he has painted in the rustic space, cheek by jowl with the picturesque antique elevator wheel and cables.

In the era when Eklund moved in, the Pratt carriage houses were full to bursting with people who made things for a living, often by hand. On the ground floor, a Russian immigrant named Ruben Borah roasted almonds and cashews for distribution. (“There was a nice smell of roasted nuts while I was painting,” Eklund recalled.) Next door at No. 185, a precision-tool maker made surgical equipment upstairs. On the ground floor, the Fiore pizza company manufactured dough, eventually expanding into No. 187.

In the early 1970s, Eklund rented the brick-walled basement of that building as a Super-8 film studio. Before giving up the lease, he threw a blowout party attended by a schoolteacher named Roland Brown, who was so taken with the basement’s funky ambience that he began renting it himself, turning it into a rollicking after-hours club known as Brown’s Guest House.

“There was a room way in the back with a Chinese theme and red lights and porno films,” said Eklund, whom Brown nicknamed Cool Breeze. “There was a stripper and a guy who ate glass. It was like being in a different world, a different culture, a different country.”

One person who was not enamored of the club’s wall-shaking, wee-hours music was George McNeil, a noted abstract-expressionist painter, who lived at No. 195. “Having a disco next door was a source of great distress to my parents because you could hear it going thumpy-thumpy-thump,” said Helen McNeil-Ashton, the artist’s daughter. “There were brawls and a shooting on the street outside.” (Was the painting that the elder McNeil titled “Demonic Disco” inspired by his clamorous neighbors? One can only speculate.)

McNeil used his building’s skylit stable as a studio, often working on the floor, which was paved with stones that slanted toward a drain designed to carry off equine liquids. Today these hoof-worn stones present a literal layering of history, as their surface is spattered with McNeil’s colorful, abstract-expressionist paint.

“He referred to the building as his carapace, his protection,” his daughter recalled, and Waverly residents certainly could use protection in the 1970s and ’80s, for the strip was fairly desolate and nearby Myrtle Avenue acquired the nickname Murder Avenue. But quite apart from those drawbacks, most buyers were simply uninterested in carriage houses then, said Naida McSherry, who began selling real estate around 1982. McSherry bought a coach house herself at 264 Waverly in 1995 and converted it from an Italian restaurant into an exuberant, antiques-filled home.

Today, carriage houses are a hot commodity. In 2017, Mario Sorrenti, a fashion photographer known for his work on the Calvin Klein Obsession campaign, bought 185 Waverly for $3.65 million. Sorrenti covered his stable with a 438-square-foot skylight, creating a dazzling, light-filled photography studio.

Though he chose to preserve his handsome Flemish-bond brick building, neither Sorrenti nor his neighbors are required to do so. Despite the carriage houses’ rich historical connection to both the Pratts and the architect Tubby, the Landmarks Preservation Commission made the curious decision to exclude the buildings when it designated the Clinton Hill Historic District in 1981, even as it protected numerous Waverly coach houses and garages south of Willoughby Avenue.

A proposed northern expansion of the district that included 185-195 Waverly was submitted to the commission in 2007 by the Society for Clinton Hill, but the area was deemed unworthy of protection due to a “lack of consistent sense of place.” Nor has the commission designated the buildings as individual landmarks.

As a result, the Pratt coach houses could be unceremoniously demolished if a developer were to purchase them and conclude that what the world truly needs is one more shiny condo.

“Show horses and fine harness horses are transitory,” the Eagle declared in 1900. “Stables, on the other hand, are permanent. They are made of brick, stone and mortar, which ... must remain fixed.” A quaint notion, and one that seems markedly at odds with the stampede of development that has thundered across Brooklyn in recent years.

This article originally appeared in

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John Freeman Gill

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The Many Lives of a Carriage House