Before my mother died in 1980, she asked me to take her back to Brooklyn to see the home she lived in from the time she was about 13 to 23 years-old. When we got to the location she was sad to see that the entire block of buildings had been torn down; in the years that followed new homes were built on that block – a scene that has played out all across Brooklyn. While doing my genealogy research I was actually able to find a photo online of her old childhood home but, by then, she had already been gone for many years so I couldn’t share it with her.
(Click on any photo to enlarge it.)
516 Central Avenue (above, from about 1940.)
Four families lived in the apartments above the drug store on the corner of Central & Jefferson Avenues, in Bushwick, including my mom with her parents, as well as my grandfather’s nephew with his wife and daughter, Elvira, who would later become my Godmother.
516 Central Avenue (below, from about 2020.)
Several blocks away from her home, at the southwest corner of Central Avenue and Schaeffer Street, was the church my mom attended: 14 Holy Martyrs Roman Catholic Church, organized in 1887. And, while I knew of that church, I had never seen it because it had been torn down as well and replaced by a modern church of a different denomination when 14 Holy Martyrs merged with another Catholic church.
Imagine my surprise when I recently browsed an online mapping program that shows vintage photos of various locations throughout New York City. And there on the corner of Central and Schaeffer were old, faded, sepia toned images from 1925 of 14 Holy Martyrs church.
I subsequently went onto another site that contains images of nearly
every NYC structure for property tax purposes, from 1939 to 1941, and
there was the church after the area had been built up a bit.
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