The Little Station in
the Woods Page 4
Epilogue Link: Some more subway station
houses may be seen at
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Some have suggested
that the Avenue H station house was always a railroad station and that it
housed the T.B. Ackerson real estate office as a dual use or that it may
not have been the real estate office at all, but carried the name of the
company as an on-site ad.
In support of
this argument is the observation that, with its generous porches, it looks
like a railroad station. However, there are several arguments against this. As
I’ve noted, there appears to have been a separate station/ticket office
existing contemporaneously. Additionally, the style of the building is said to
have been a popular cottage style of the era, originating in New England. I
know, for example, that there is an old home on one of the original roads of
Babylon, Long Island that is a virtual ringer for the Avenue H station house,
wrap around porches and all, and that there was never a railroad at that
location.
In my desire to
have a definitive answer to the question of the building’s original and
intended purpose, I went to what I hoped to be “the horse’s mouth.”
After the
Ackerson Company built Fiske Terrace, it built another large planned community,
Brightwaters, on the south shore of Long Island, just west of Bay Shore. This
large community of homes, some of them mansions, centers on a 4,000-foot canal
and additional streams and decorative bridges on the Great South Bay.
What
Brightwaters still has that Fiske Terrace has not is an office of the Ackerson
Real Estate Company, the same company that built these works nearly a century
ago.
I recently
visited the Ackerson office in the hope that someone might have access to
records that would settle the origin and use of the Avenue H station house once
and for all. Armed with a photo of the station with the “T.B. Ackerson” sign
prominent, I learned that the folks there were well aware of their company’s
two big developments, but, alas, no one there could help me.
The folks there regretted, though, that I couldn’t have spoken to the late Ward
Ackerson, T. B. Ackerson’s son, who knew about every detail of the company’s past
and surely would have been happy to answer my questions.
Those who research history,
myself among them, are sometimes confident that the details of something
that happened almost 100 years ago will be about as accessible now
as they were five, ten or twenty years ago. So I wasn't prepared to
learn that I had missed Mr. Ackerson by a single year. It seems he
passed away in 1998 at the age of 96, perhaps taking with him the secret
of a piece of Brooklyn history that took place when he was a little
boy.
Kevin Walsh's forgotten-ny.com
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