PIECES OFTHE PAST
Locals delight in unearthing historic artifacts from deep inside their properties
A H, the perks of an old house: parquet floors, pocket doors, wainscoting. Plus shriveled-up baby shoes, a 225-year-old gravestone and a secret tunnel, of course. Anything’s possible in the bowels of the area’s historic homes — whether it’s in the walls, under the floorboards, beneath layers of paint or tucked into the rafters.
That’s part of their charm, says Michael Thornton, 40, an associate curator for the New-York Historical Society and the son of antique collectors who had long dreamed of finding treasures in his own house. Now, Thornton spends his days thinking about objects from the past — and occasionally identifying them, as he did for a curious homeowner in Crown Heights who approached the society after unearthing a rusty metal sphere during a construction project. It was an authentic Revolutionary War-era cannonball.
Then, when Thornton and his wife Sarah cleaned the attic of their 1909 Maplewood, NJ, house two years ago, they noticed floorboard planks with familiar words on them, including Vermont Street, Springield Avenue and Tuscan Street — all modern-day local street names. Turns out the attic floor was made of street signs, likely from the 19th century, used as scrap wood. “The people who did this thought it was trash or free material,” he explains.
But to Thornton, Sarah and even his daughter Frances, the weathered red-and-white signs are special. “It might never be possible to fully restore them or clean them up, but I would like to display them,” he adds.
For many New York homeowners, these quirky discoveries are an added bonus of living in an older property. But uncovering the origin stories of buildings is a full-time job for Brian Hartig, who started his Brownstone Detectives firm after tracing the roots of his own 1892 Bed-Stuy townhouse and the odd objects he found during its renovation.
Children’s alphabet blocks — letters J, K and L — sat under floorboards in the kitchen; a paper fan decorated with Teddy Roosevelt’s face was obscured by a piece of built-in furniture on the ground floor; he found a report card from a Catholic school in Barbados behind a cabinet and a handful of .22-caliber shells in the cellar.
Another day in the cellar, he spotted a small door he’d never noticed underneath the home’s vintage icebox,
where a tray used to hold ice cubes would have been.
“I opened it up and the tray wasn’t there, but there was a satchel. And I thought, ‘Oh, gosh. OK. This is where either the pistol is, or the gold, or, I don’t know, a human head,” says Hartig, 53.
Instead, he found brakes, steering mechanisms and an official Metropolitan Transit Authority badge from the satchel’s owner, who worked as a subway motorman for the city for 20 years and retired in the early 1990s, according to Hartig’s research.
“I think on his last day, he just came home and put it under the icebox,” he adds.
The discoveries have a new home: a curio cabinet, on display in Hartig’s front parlor.
Real estate appraiser Jonathan Miller, 57, has witnessed countless historic finds over his 30-year career reviewing properties in the tristate region; the most common, he says, are old newspaper clippings inside walls and the signatures of builders scrawled on beams.
But sometimes the revelations are more substantial. When Miller moved his family into a house in Darien, Conn., built in 1825, a note left in the cellar warning future owners not to drive over a certain part of the front yard alerted them to a 50-foot-long secret tunnel leading from their basement under the lawn and across the road. The structure, according to records Miller combed through and a town historian he consulted, was once part of the Underground Railroad. And though Miller has never been inside the tunnel himself (and he keeps it closed as a safety precaution), he and wife Cheryl, 58, appreciate the home’s connection to the past.
“That’s what we wanted,” he says. “I love the history.”
To a history buff, finding an artifact inside your own home can be invaluable. But will it inflate (or deflate) the selling price of the property? Miller doesn’t think so — unless it can be used “as a potential marketing opportunity” when a house eventually goes up for sale.
“All it does is cement the story of the home. People love stories, so that sort of greases the wheels of a transaction,” he adds.
Brown Harris Stevens agent Cassie Glover, 44, is marketing her own West Village townhouse at 85 Charles St. for $12.95 million. During a three-year gut renovation she and her husband, 50-year-old Paul Glover, conducted in the house, they found original 1868 marble fireplaces in a basement room filled with junk, floor-to-ceiling purple paint from a previous owner who threw legendary parties in the 1950s and ’60s and, in the kitchen, a 1976 cookbook created by the Charles Street block association, which she kept for its inimitable charm.
“It’s typed on a typewriter, the names of the families who submitted [the recipes] are with it,” she adds. “In a big city, this is a very small-town kind of thing.”
Some gems from the past are less poignant — and more startling. John Menne, 40, got a shock when he started poking around in the attic of his late-1800s Victorian in Kingston, NY, just a few months after he bought the place in 2016.
“I was shining a flashlight into some of the rafters and I saw a really small pair of shoes,” he says. They were made of leather that had shrunken and shriveled. “They were really creepy!”
He left them on the floor. Later that day, he took a serendipitous trip to a local museum where a display of very similar shoes explained the Dutch custom of hiding children’s shoes in attics for health and luck.
“So I freaked out thinking, ‘Oh no, I’ve only owned this house for six months. I better run back and put those little baby shoes back under the rafter before anything goes bad,’ ” he says. One shoe is there today, he adds (the other has disappeared, possibly carried off by a critter). When he redoes his roof, he’ll make sure it returns to the same spot.
In Brooklyn, a morbid relic gave Richard Schilling quite a shock. In his two-family Borough Park home, he expected some errant leftovers: His family and about nine tenants have lived there since 1923.
But he didn’t expect the 225-yearold infant’s gravestone, which he found in his garage this June, propped up near Halloweenthemed seasonal items.
“So I thought, ‘Oh, maybe is this a Halloween decoration? And when I tried to lift it, I was like ‘Whoa.’ I immediately felt it was stone and it was too heavy to lift,” says Schilling, a 53-year-old banking professional.
His best guess is that it was left in the garage by one of the tenants.
He punched the name of the deceased (Lucas Pond, who died when he was just one month and 22 days old) into FindAGrave.com and connected it to a rural cemetery in Connecticut. He reached the graveyard’s sexton, who drove all the way to Brooklyn to retrieve the headstone in early July, Schilling says. It’s now settled in its rightful place.
For his part, preservation artist Christopher Wall, 49, routinely finds objects during work at his historic restoration firm Cathedral Arts Restoration — vintage calendars, a cigar case and antique circus posters are among his favorites — but one made a big impression.
About 15 years ago, Wall dismantled a bathroom in an apartment on lower Fifth Avenue near Washington Square Park. As he pulled out a mirror, he spotted a message: The artisan who had installed it left his signature, the date (from 1914) and his own handprint, pressed into the material coating the mirror’s back. Wall was “blown away,” he says.
“He knew that mirror would come out someday, and I was the one who happened to be taking it out,” he adds. “It was a little direct message to me, personally, by someone far away in time.”
Inspired by that find, Wall now leaves his own mark inside special projects — affixing miniature time capsules behind walls that often include the day’s newspaper, some money, photographs and a note.
“May whomever finds it, at whatever future moment in time, be blessed with much good fortune,” he wrote in a recent letter, about to be encased in a Ziploc and sealed in a wall. “I cast this note into the mysterious and unknown future.”