I was recently forwarded a Brownstoner article about the fight to save several historic mansions built along a stretch of Bushwick Ave. The crux of the piece was centered around the imperiled Lipsius Cook House on the corner of Myrtle Ave. First occupied by the German American beer heiress Catherina Lipsius and later the discredited explorer Frederick Cook, the home fell into disrepair in recent years. Next door, a six-story apartment building rose from the ashes of a historic KFC, dwarfing the once prominent, but now disheveled residence, whose overgrown yard was peppered with trash. Scanning the article further, I clocked another familiar address: 751 Bushwick Ave., the decrepit yet characterful mansion where I had lived for seven decrepit yet characterful years in my twenties, from about 2012 to 2018.
Before my Bushwick era, “The Mansion,” as we called it, had been profiled in the Real Estate section of the New York Times. Beyond pushing a broad claim—that “for those seeking the newest Bohemia” Bushwick was “arguably the coolest place on the planet”—the coverage enthused about the “prim black-and-white” house and the “renaissance men and women” who lived there. There was the “young math genius” who was “ensconced in the apartment in the steeple,” the punk drummer who “work[ed] part time at Film Forum,” the artist who had decorated her room with “half a dozen ukuleles” and “figurines clustered to represent such disasters as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.”
No follow-up profile would be written (until now) after I moved in and The Mansion entered its next phase—less outwardly punk, with a newly minted Renaissance man in the upstairs bedroom. In lieu of a half-dozen ukuleles, there were a half-dozen grindr hookups, and a flat screen to blot out the memory of those creepy figurines.
Bushwick was also entering a new phase. New nightlife hotspots—Happyfun Hideaway, Mood Ring, and Bossa Nova, now mainstays of the neighborhood—all opened during that time, and the area started to feel less peripheral and more and more central to the global repositioning of millennial creatives into these underperforming yet “up-and-coming” urban neighborhoods.
Considering my old home’s impending demise, I thought back to my fantasies for 751. I imagined two opposing fates: either, the house would go up in flames à la Triangle Shirtwaist, leaving me dead, or it would devolve into a Hunger Games–like contest, leaving me the last man standing after my fellow lease-holders succumbed to the black mold, rat infestation, and daily deprivation of nine people sharing two bathrooms. (To the victor go the squatter’s rights.) Mansions aren’t supposed to be collective housing—they’re supposed to be huge houses owned by one rich person—and in living out scenario #2, I would be preserving not only the building itself, but its original intention, the mansion of one German American, albeit rich in imagination only.
But then there was Bushwick Ave. to contend with, a loud and menacing thoroughfare where I witnessed countless fender benders, a cat hit-and-run (I bagged the body and wrote “dead cat” on the trash bag), and a similarly traumatic pedestrian hit-and-run (no bagging necessary). A proposed route for Robert Moses’s canceled Bushwick Expressway linking Long Island with the Williamsburg Bridge would have relegated cars overhead, which, in view of the current reality, might not have been the worst thing. Then again, who wants to live in a mansion under a freeway?
Whether you’re a NIMBY, YIMBY, or a FURBY, there is a subjective quality to preservation. The past is always fading away, escaping our grasp—that buzzy Times article is now littered with dead hyperlinks to websites of past residents’ bands.
And so I indulged in Moses-parting-the-Red Sea-style ideations, envisioning more bold interventions to transform the neighborhood. Instead of a divisive expressway, what about a rotary system to encourage smart European patterns of circulation? Or reinstating streetcars, as progressives love to suggest for other cities? Bushwick Ave., with its oversized sidewalks and tony history, could be the Sunset Boulevard of Brooklyn—celebrities in convertibles, blockbuster billboards, hotel pools (remember the “New York is the new LA” article?)! The Myrtle Broadway JMZ turned into Shibuya Station—tidy streets and timely bullet trains instead of trash and travel delays (antipreservationists love to cite Japan). The “coolest place” in the world not because of real estate speculation masked as youth culture or reactionary politics masked as historic preservation but because of a future-forward, intermodal vision for the entire city (mayoral candidacy incoming).
But the more I researched the history of the neighborhood, the more I started to believe in the value of preserving 751 Bushwick Ave., not as a reaction against encroaching development but for the opportunity to create an educational experience (and selfie museum), with each of the nine bedrooms representing key moments in the tumultuous history of the neighborhood.
One of the more prominent rooms would be restored to German American architect Theobald Engelhardt’s original vision for his prosperous client. A room in the basement would function as a speakeasy to educate patrons on Prohibition’s toll on Bushwick’s breweries, which at one point produced a quarter of all beer in the United States. One for the blockbusting era of the 1960s, with an animatronic predatory real estate agent warning of a new influx of people from Puerto Rico. A very poignant room with no light but the sound of sirens and shouts recalling the July 1977 blackouts and the widespread looting and fires that followed, exacerbating Bushwick’s precipitous decline through the 1980s. A room dedicated to the Nuwaubian Nation, a Black Muslim separatist group led by Dwight “Dr. Malachi” York, who owned 751 and several other properties on the block until decamping in the early ’90s to a more appropriate cult setting in rural Georgia. (A nearby eye-catching Nuwaubian outpost, the All Eyes on Egipt Bookstore, is still in business.) Then on to the Renaissance Era and the young math genius’s room in the steeple, its slanting walls covered in chicken-scratch equations. Last but not least, my bedroom, where an actor will play me lying in bed, scrolling on my phone, smoking a spliff, and watching House Hunters.
There seems to be a certain inevitability in the way a city changes shape over time and how we change along with it. Cities naturally develop a complex patina of past, present, and future in spite of the wishes of a megalomaniacal developer or the dramatic actions of a local preservationist clique. Whether you’re a NIMBY, YIMBY, or a FURBY, there is a subjective quality to preservation. The past is always fading away, escaping our grasp—that buzzy Times article is now littered with dead hyperlinks to websites of past residents’ bands. Nothing lasts forever, but everything—to paraphrase a line from my conversation with documentarian John Wilson in NYRA #36—eventually becomes interesting. So I look forward to 2035, when I approach Myrtle Broadway on the bullet train, hail an e-horse, and neigh, “751 Bushwick Ave., please.” I dismount and walk up the stairs to see my old room meticulously reconstructed, point to the reenactment of a handsome twenty-something on his phone in bed, and say, “That was me, the renaissance man from the article in the paper.” What they don’t know is that I wrote it.