Note: Since I overdo the links sometimes, the two most important background ones here and this on the China Tea Trade and this on the China clippers.
I start this post with five older fotos; the one below showing crew tidying up lines on McAllister Responder dates from January 2007. Until now, I’ve always focused on the foreground, not the background. Of course, all those blue warehouses are now being replaced by Brooklyn Bridge Park.
Another example–Francis E. Roehrig (now Aegean Sea but ex-Jersey Coast and John C. Barker and as Francis E. a hero post-Bouchard accident) has always been focus of this foto for me rather than what’s in the background.
Again, I’ve focused until now on the foreground, on the 140′ icebreaking tug Sturgeon Bay instead of on the rich architecture of Brooklyn Heights,
in summertime obscured by a jungle of foliage, making it easier to focus of East River traffic like Express Marine’s Duty, below. However, what I learned last week is that Brooklyn Heights has fascinations all
its own. Like this house standing on Pierrepont Place, the house of Abiel Abbot Low, son of Seth Low of Salem, Massachusetts. A. A. Low moved to Brooklyn Heights after spending six years in Canton’s markets dealing with Wu Bingjian aka Howqua. From Brooklyn Heights, Low could observe
the goings and comings of his fleet of China clippers over at South Street when it was a seaport in the years between the First and Second Opium Wars. Finding out more about the Lows ( and in subsequent generations their connections to the mayor of Brooklyn, Columbia University and FDR . . . ) those are adventures and work that lie ahead. Last week I learned that what’s in the background might as well be an interesting focus as what is background.
Meanwhile . . . the drum calls to Coney Island, with the parade just four days off. Here and here are links for 2009; first and second for 2008. More tomorrow. Plan to be in Coney on Saturday?
All fotos by Will Van Dorp.
5 comments
Comments feed for this article
June 15, 2010 at 12:51 pm
Mage Bailey
Great backgrounds, great info on the Cutter, wonderful house, and nope, we won’t be there for the parade. Darn it.
June 15, 2010 at 3:24 pm
Claude Scales
When I turn to my left and look out my window, I’m looking at the Low townhouse. The Lows lived in the house to the north, the adjoining house to the south, which is more prominent in your photos (you were standing across Montague Street from my building when you took them) belonged at the time of A.A. Low to Alexander white, whose fortune came from the fur trade.
Thanks for this appreciation of my neighborhood and its history. I’ve posted a link to it on Brooklyn Heights Blog: http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/19381
June 15, 2010 at 6:51 pm
Berta Zea Gineres
An excellent article full of history. Thank you for showing it.
Regards
June 16, 2010 at 10:54 am
RickSp
Will, Great photos. I had no idea that the Low house was still standing.
I just finished reading a book by A.A.’s brother, Charles – “Some recollections by Captain Charles P. Low, commanding the clipper ships “Houqua,” “Jacob Bell,” “Samuel Russell,” and “N.B. Palmer,” in the China trade, 1847-1873 ” Lots of fun.
http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924023257763
June 16, 2010 at 10:40 pm
Claude Scales
Sorry, but I got things mixed up in my earlier comment. The Low house was on the south, next to the Montague Street entrance to the Promenade, and the White house was to the north, next to what is now a playground but was formerly the site of the Pierrepont mansion. So, it is the Low place, with its “arcuated conservatory” (so described in Clay Lancaster’s Old Brooklyn Heights) that appears ion the foreground of your photo.