Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

Drawing by Daniel M. C. Hopping. From the book American interiors, 1675-1885: a guide to the American
period rooms in the Brooklyn Museum by Marvin D. Schwartz.

Museum libraries and archives are rich storehouses of textual and visual information. This is very true of the Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives which function as the “story tellers” of the Museum by providing histories about objects in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. Hidden within the Libraries and Archives are a myriad of stories concerning the Schenck houses, which were recently renovated and reinstalled on the fourth floor of the Museum.

Photograph by Reverend William Edward Schenck. From Account of my trips to Holmdel, N.J. & Flatlands, L.I. by William Edward Schenck.

One can find several fascinating books, photographs and other documents in the Libraries and Archives that tell about the Schenck family and the houses they lived in. Highlights include photographs from the Historic American Building Survey and an original journal by Jane Malbone Schenck who wrote about what her life was like in Brooklyn in the 1800’s. A selection of these documents are currently on view in the Library display cases on the second floor of the Museum.

These documents are of great interest to many, including architectural historians of Brooklyn who want to know what Brooklyn looked like when the Schenck houses were built more than 330 years ago. These documents tell us about the houses, the transfer of owners and families and the re-emerging of the architecture through refurbishments and significant structural transformations. The photographs tell us about the transformation of the surrounding landscape from sweeping meadows to a Brooklyn neighborhood. They also provide evidence of how the houses have looked as they have been installed at the Brooklyn Museum.

Jan Martense Schenck House reinstallation. Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Decorative Arts.
Exhibitions: Schenck House reinstallation, 1971.

2008 is the 185th anniversary of the founding of this institution as a library (the Brooklyn Apprentice’s Library) and we are planning a series of talks about the history of the Library and the rare and unique collections held in this repository. We will be focusing on the materials related to the Schenck family in this upcoming series. Please email us at library@brooklynmuseum.org if you would like to know more about the talk or Schenck related materials in the Libraries and Archives.

For a complete history on the Schenck Houses, see Kevin Stayton’s book, Dutch by design : tradition and change in two historic Brooklyn houses : the Schenck houses at The Brooklyn Museum, available in the Museum Libraries. Additional installation images of the Schenck house can be found in our online exhibition index.

Slideshow created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR. Having trouble seeing the slideshow? Photos are also on Flickr.

These slides show the Jan Martense Schenck House as it is being installed in its new location on the 4th floor. In the first few slides, you see the side view of the Nicholas Schenck House, grandson of Jan Martense.

The first step was to lay out the floor boards on a new substructure The boards were originally white pine (Pinus Strobus).

The next step was to erect the posts and braces that form the structure of the walls. These were made from oak (Quercus).

The posts (vertical elements) and beams (horizontal elements) were joined with mortise and tenons that were pinned.

Rigging and scaffolding was used to lift and position the very heavy timbers.

After the wooden sub-structure was built, the interior walls and window frames were inserted.

The attic floor is held up by supports called H bends.

Because the ceiling in the new gallery is higher than its former gallery , a new roof substructure had to be built, matching the pitch of the original roof.

Because of the new height, new roof shingles needed to be added and painted to match the shingles from the 1960 installation.

After paint cross section analysis and on advise of the Curatorial Department, the house was painted red, including the trim as would have been the convention in the 17th c.

Lisa Bruno
Objects Conservator

When John published his post about his own Dutch house in Brooklyn, he also kindly provided a list of all the Dutch houses in the area that are still standing. Clicking the markers in the map below will take you to the address and information about each house.

View Larger Map

John has also provided several web resources:

Old Dutch Houses of Brooklyn, Maud Esther Dillard (Brooklyn, 1945)

Lefferts Historic House (Prospect Park Website)

The Wyckoff House Museum

Lott House Restoration and Information

In my own travels on the web for this project, I noticed that Christopher Gray wrote this article for the New York Times about John and his house:

Streetscapes/2138 McDonald Avenue, Brooklyn; Preserving a Sense of Dutch Heritage in Gravesend

The Brooklyn Museum Schenck houses are now open! Catch what Carol Vogel has to say in the New York Times.

The Brooklyn Museum’s Schenck family houses have had a profound personal effect on me. In 1990, I was the editor for a book on the Schenck houses called Dutch by Design, written by curator Kevin Stayton. I found that book and the houses it was about so fascinating that I not only taught myself Dutch but I also wound up buying an old Dutch Brooklyn farmhouse of my own.

The book had five chapters. Kevin had countless fascinating illustrations lined up for chapters 1,2, 4, and 5, the chapters dealing specifically with the houses themselves. But almost no illustrations were planned for the middle chapter, a general history of the Dutch in Brooklyn. I suggested that we find Dutch houses still standing out in the streets of Brooklyn and use photos of them as illustrations. “Sure,” said Kevin. “Go knock yourself out.”

Finding the houses was not as difficult as it might seem. A book published in 1945, Old Dutch Houses of Brooklyn by Maud Esther Dillard, provided pictures and addresses of all the Dutch Brooklyn houses standing then, and I had only to see if they were still there. Most, sadly, were gone, but some, miraculously, had survived—and in the strangest places.

Hubbard House, circa 1915

Take 2138 McDonald Ave., the so-called Hubbard House, an 1830 Dutch farmhouse down under the elevated tracks of the F train in Gravesend. There, in 1990, I met Theresa Lucchelli, a wonderful cat-fancying former cocktail waitress who had lived in the house since 1904 and remembered Gravesend as a rural paradise. I asked her if was okay with her if I approached the Landmarks Commission about making the house a landmark. “Sure,” she said. “Go knock yourself out.”

Hubbard House, 2002. Compared to the 1915 photo, the house looks somewhat different. The lean-to on the left side in the photo of 1915 had a second story added to it in 1924.

Theresa died at the age of 95 in 1997, and the Landmarks Commission never has done right by her house. But after her death I bought and renovated the place with help of a private group known as the New York Landmarks Conservancy, and now I sometimes sit by the fire there of an evening as the F train rumbles past and reflect that I owe it all to the Schenck family houses at the Brooklyn Museum.