Finding · May 29, 2026 · Primary-source deed
One of the very few surviving primary-source deeds for the neighborhood, scanned and made freely available by Columbia University Libraries (catalog ldpd_11290570_000). Executed on December 29, 1900 and recorded on January 5, 1901, the deed transfers a single row-house lot on Greenwood Avenue, in what the document calls the “Windsor Terrace District” of the Borough of Brooklyn, from George and Apolonia Riegel to Emma B. Riegel for the consideration of one dollar.
The transfer is between three Riegels. George Riegel and Apolonia Riegel — almost certainly husband and wife — sold; Emma B. Riegel bought. The consideration was nominal ($1.00), which in this era almost invariably indicates an intra-family transfer: parents conveying to a daughter, a husband to a wife, siblings clearing title between themselves. The mortgage encumbrance noted in the deed ($1,500.00, assumed by Emma B.) was the real economic consideration.
A row-house lot, twenty-three feet wide by one hundred feet deep, on the north side of Greenwood Avenue, seventy-seven feet west of the northwest corner of Greenwood Avenue and Prospect Avenue. NYC Section 16, Block 5274. The lot connects to its neighbor on the west through a party wall — the standard masonry-bearing interior wall shared between adjacent attached row houses. The presence of a party wall confirms that the lot held an attached row house (not a detached or semi-detached structure), with at least one immediate western neighbor of equivalent construction.
On the modern street grid, the parcel is on Greenwood Avenue between 16th Street (now Sherman Street) and Prospect Avenue, on the south side of the Windsor Terrace neighborhood, a few blocks south of the Braxton → Windsor Place rename block of 1888 (see that finding).
ALL that certain lot, piece or parcel of land, with the building thereon erected, situate, lying and being in the Borough of Brooklyn, “Windsor Terrace District”, City of New York, bounded and described as follows, to wit: BEGINNING at a point on the Northerly side of Greenwood Avenue, distant Seventy-seven (77) feet Westerly from the Northwesterly corner of Greenwood Avenue and Prospect Avenue; running thence Northerly, at right angles to Greenwood Avenue, One hundred (100) feet; thence Westerly and parallel with Greenwood Avenue Twenty-three (23) feet; thence Southerly, at right angles to Greenwood Avenue, and for part of the distance through a party wall, One hundred (100) feet, to the Northerly line of Greenwood Avenue; thence Easterly, along the Northerly line of Greenwood Avenue, Twenty-three (23) feet, to the point or place of beginning; together with the appurtenances and all the estate and rights of the parties of the first part in and to the said premises.
The phrase “Windsor Terrace District”, set in quotation marks in the original printed deed form, is itself the finding. By 1900, “Windsor Terrace” was no longer just an area name in newspaper auction notices (where it had been continuously used since April 1854). It was a recognized legal-geographic descriptor that NYC conveyance forms used to locate a specific subset of Brooklyn properties. The quotation marks around it in this deed suggest the term was understood as a colloquial or semi-formal district name — not the proper municipal boundary of a ward, but a designation contemporaries recognized.
The deed was executed December 29, 1900 and recorded with NYC on January 5, 1901 (a one-week recording lag, normal for the era). The recording reference is Liber 7 of Conveyances, Section 16, Page 674. The deed was “to be recorded and returned to Thomas Fahey, 99 Nassau Street, Borough of Manhattan, New York City” — Fahey was the attorney handling the transfer for the Riegels. The witness was also signed Thomas Fahey (the printed signature reads “Thomas Fakey” due to the loop of the script “h”). The notary acknowledging the deed was Warren S. Burt.
We don't know who built the row house at this Greenwood Avenue lot. We don't know who the immediate party-wall neighbor was on the west. We don't know whether George and Apolonia Riegel continued to live in the building after conveying it to Emma B., or moved out. We don't have a 1900 census matchback yet (the 1900 census coverage in our corpus is incomplete). All of those are tractable through Brooklyn ACRIS deed chains and the 1900 Federal Census Brooklyn Borough Kings County records, but require follow-up work.
The Columbia University Libraries hosts a scanned image PDF of the deed (archive.org/details/ldpd_11290570_000) with no embedded text layer. pdftotextreturned 98 bytes of noise. The document was OCR'd by passing the PDF to Gemini 2.5 Pro on Vertex AI with a structured-JSON prompt. The pipeline is at research/ocr_riegel_deed.py. Gemini self-rated transcription confidence as “high.” The handwritten signatures were marked as low-confidence — the witness reads either “Thomas Fahey” or “Thomas Fakey” depending on whether the looped letter is interpreted as “h” or “k.” Given the deed's closing instruction to “return to Thomas Fahey, 99 Nassau Street,” we take Fahey as the correct reading.
Source: Columbia University Libraries, catalog ID ldpd_11290570_000. “[Deed for land in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn] [electronic resource] 1900 December 29” (archive.org). 2 leaves, 33 cm., mounted on sheet 35 cm. Digital reproduction available under unrestricted online access. OCR via Gemini 2.5 Pro on Vertex AI (Google Cloud); pipeline at research/ocr_riegel_deed.py; structured fields at research/riegel-1900-12-29.json.