A famous writer recalls his boyhood on an 1850s working-class Williamsburg block

If you think Williamsburg is popular now, you should have been there in the early 1850s.

At that time, the number of residents had ballooned to 35,000, the riverfront was bustling with industry, and this Kings County town ambitiously incorporated itself into a city (before changing course and becoming part of the neighboring city of Brooklyn three years later).

During these booming years, two real estate investors teamed up to buy and develop parcels of land in the center of Williamsburg, some of it farmland. They hired a surveyor, cut a slender new road they called Fillmore Street after the sitting U.S. President, and planned to construct two rows of mostly three-story homes designed in the elegant Italianate style.

Though they sound like the kind of fine houses upper class residents would be interested in, and they were billed before they were built in a June 1852 edition of the New York Times as future “magnificent dwellings,” the houses weren’t intended for Williamsburg’s wealthy business owners.

Instead, the walkups on what was later renamed Fillmore Place were multi-tenant “flats” meant to be owned or rented by the working-class folks who came to Williamsburg to fill jobs and enjoy a lower population density than that of New York across the East River.

Who were the early residents of this brand-new enclave, which soon had gaslights installed and sewer hookups? “In the mid-19th century, most of the owners were English, Irish or German, and worked as artisans or were petty merchants,” states the Brooklyn neighborhood association WGPA. “The residents renting apartments on Fillmore Place at this time were of a similar background, usually artisans, clerks and laborers.”

Life on Fillmore Place appears to have been a step above the options available to most working-class New Yorkers.

While the buildings “were erected as multifamily dwellings and occupied by working-class tenants, their architecture has more in common with the fashionable middle- and upper-class single-family row houses of the period than with the substandard tenements that were becoming more common in the poorer sections of the city,” states the Landmarks Preservation Commission Report for what’s now known as the Fillmore Place Historic District.

Though the houses weren’t large and only one flat existed on each floor, each room likely had a window facing “either the street or a generously sized rear yard,” per the LPC report—which is more than the typical tenement offered in an era before tenement reform laws.

As a result of this apparently decent quality of life, Fillmore Place’s residents tended to stick around. Even the opening of the Williamsburg Bridge in 1903, which brought in thousands of new residents and saw the tearing down of row-house neighborhoods in favor of tenements, didn’t drastically alter the fabric.

The houses along Fillmore Place, “were not directly affected by the opening of the bridge and remain perhaps the most intact enclave of buildings erected during Williamsburg’s initial period of urban. development,” states the LPC report.

More than a century later, this slightly slanted street still retains a small-scale 19th century feel. No wonder it became an official historic district in 2009. While one-block Fillmore Place is bounded by Driggs Avenue, Roebling Street, Grand Street, and Metropolitan Avenue, the historic district extends to include a row of walkups from 662 to 676 Driggs Avenue.

One of those walkups was home in the 1890s to Henry Miller—author of Tropic of Capricorn, among other novels. Though Miller only spent the first nine years of his life at 662 Driggs (below), his description of Fillmore Place, his “favorite street,” as he called it in a 1971 New York Times essay, can give you an idea of what life was like here at the tail end of the 19th century.

“The house I lived In was between North First and Metropolitan Avenue, then called North Second Street,” Miller wrote in a 1971 essay for the New York Times. “Opposite us was Dr. Kinney, the veterinarian, and on the rooftop next door to his place Mrs. Omelio kept her 20 to 30 cats. Diagonally opposite us was Fillmore Place, just one block long, which was my favorite street and which I can still see vividly if I close my eyes.”

In his 1936 short story collection Black Spring, “Miller wrote “’there were three streets—North First, Fillmore Place, and Driggs Avenue. These marked the boundaries of the known world,’” via the neighborhood website Greenpointers.

“His description of Fillmore Place in Tropic of Capricorn perfectly captures many people’s love for the historic little block: ‘[it was] the most enchanting street I have ever seen in all my life. It was the ideal street—for a boy, a lover, a maniac, a drunkard, a crook, a lecher, a thug, an astronomer, a musician, a poet, a tailor, a shoemaker, a politician,’” wrote Miller, excerpted by Greenpointers.

[Third image: New York Times; seventh image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

Tags: Brooklyn Historic Districts, Fillmore Place Brooklyn, Fillmore Place Henry Miller, Fillmore Place Historic District, Fillmore Place Williamsburg, Henry Miller Fillmore Place Driggs Avenue, Williamburg Historic Streets, Williamsburg in the 1850s