The Brooklyn Eagle’s Dennis Holt kicks off a series of Brooklyn history stories culled from the 1884 edition of Lain’s City Directory with a look at Henry Street between Middagh and Cranberry Streets:
Brooklyn Eagle: We begin this series with observations about the block on Henry Street between Middagh and Cranberry streets in Brooklyn Heights. We started with that block because it is the current home of this newspaper. But we also chose the block because it is the best preserved block of Henry between Old Fulton Street and Clark Street. Much of the west side of that street that stood in 1884 is no longer there, and all of the east side is gone.
And this part of Henry Street was not what people in 1884 used to consider “the Heights.” This section was more of a working class part of town, corresponding to what one found back then on Fulton Street. In fact, the south side corner of Henry and Cranberry was the site of a fire hose factory, the Eureka Fire Hose Co., and Joseph Spottum, the janitor, lived somewhere in it.
