The Wild Files

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A plane fell out of the sky eight blocks north

United Airlines Flight 826 collided with a TWA Constellation at 10,000 feet over Staten Island and fell on Park Slope. The only initial survivor was Stephen Baltz, age 11, who held on through the night and died the next day. The scar from the wreck is still visible on the brickwork at 126 Sterling Place.

Source: /history — The Crash

Braxton Street became Windsor Place. No one wrote down why.

The block between 7th and 8th Avenues was originally called Braxton Street. Around 1900, in an administrative swap that has never been officially explained, Braxton became Windsor Place — and the actual previous Windsor Place lost its name and became plain 16th Street. Kevin Walsh of Forgotten NY confirmed the swap happened and noted he has no idea why.

Source: Forgotten New York, Kevin Walsh

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There's a private cemetery inside Prospect Park, and a movie star is hidden in it

The Friends (Quaker) Cemetery was laid out in 1849 — older than Prospect Park itself, which Olmsted and Vaux simply built around it. Ten fenced acres, 2,000-plus plain headstones, the only private land in the entire park, closed to the public to this day. Its most famous resident is Montgomery Clift, the actor, buried here in 1966 at his Quaker mother's request. Which grave is his? The cemetery won't say. Even on the rare tours, the family's wish stands: his stone is never pointed out.

Source: Forgotten NY · Atlas Obscura · NYC Cemetery Project

Isaac Asimov read science fiction pulps in a candy store here

Before he was Isaac Asimov, Isaac Asimov was a Brooklyn teenager who went to a candy store on Windsor Place in the 1930s to read science fiction pulp magazines for free. His family ran candy stores across the borough — they doubled as informal magazine lending libraries — and one of them was on this block. The author of Foundation and the Three Laws of Robotics figured out he liked science fiction by reading it in a Windsor Place candy store.

Source: /history — The Factory Years

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The little building that taught America to pour concrete

A few blocks west, on the Gowanus, stands New York City's oldest concrete building — the 1873 showroom of the New York and Long Island Coignet Stone Company. They made béton Coignet, a French patented concrete, and supplied the arches of St. Patrick's Cathedral and floor slabs for the Met and the American Museum of Natural History. The company folded in 1882; the five-acre factory vanished. The lone office survived, was landmarked in 2006, and now stands restored and oddly alone beside a Whole Foods parking lot — the last brick of a building boom it helped invent.

Source: LPC designation report · Brownstoner · Wikipedia

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The clock factory that burned, rebuilt, and ended up in Moscow

The Ansonia Clock Company opened a huge factory one block from Windsor Place in 1879 — and in October 1880 a fire tore through it, roughly $750,000 in losses. They rebuilt within a year and ran for half a century, making clocks for railroad stations across America. Then in 1929 the machinery was crated up and sold to Amtorg, the Soviet trading company, and shipped to Moscow to seed the Russian watch industry. The building is now co-ops called Ansonia Court.

Source: /history — The Factory Years

Veggiegalaxy / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The bar that wouldn't serve women until Shirley MacLaine ordered one

Farrell's opened in 1933 — the year Prohibition ended — in a former ice-cream parlor on the corner of Prospect Park West and 16th Street. For four decades it served men only at the bar; women sat in back and their dates ordered for them. That ended in the 1970s when actress Shirley MacLaine walked up and ordered a beer. Her date that night was Pete Hamill, the Windsor Terrace kid who grew up to be one of New York's great newspapermen. The bar still pours its beer ice-cold into a 32-ounce paper “container” you can carry out the door.

Source: Wikipedia · BKMAG · Irish America

There's a buried brook under the street, still running

Vechte's Brook — a tributary of the Gowanus Creek that drained the western slope of what's now Prospect Park — was paved over in the 1800s when the neighborhood developed. It never stopped flowing. Listen at a sewer grate on a quiet morning; the city announced a $68M Bluebelt project in 2026 to address the flooding it still causes.

Source: /history — Below Windsor Place

Thousand Islands honeymoons were a Windsor thing

The Hulsaver-Stiehler newlyweds honeymooned in the Thousand Islands. So did at least three other Windsor couples in the 1920s. The St. Lawrence River archipelago — a 19th-century Gilded Age resort destination on its way to becoming a working-class summer trip — was the second-most-cited honeymoon destination in our archive, behind "Great Lakes" and ahead of Niagara Falls.

Source: Pattern across multiple Brooklyn newspapers, 1915–1928

One family stayed at 42-A for 101 years

Catherine Vackner moved in as a young bride in 1925. Her great-grandchildren signed the deed over for $2.1M in January 2026 — exactly one hundred and one years of one family at one address. Most blocks don't see that anymore. Brooklyn definitely doesn't.

Source: ACRIS deed chain · 42-A Windsor Place

Two babies born at 98 Windsor Place on the same day

Arline Rossman. Rosemary Beavers. Different families, same address, same Wednesday. The odds aren't astronomical (it's a four-family building) but the timing is the kind of thing the neighbors never forget.

Source: Brooklyn Eagle, Oct 30 1952

Two architects from Iowa married at 47 Windsor Place

Frieda May Nickel and Christian L. Boettger, both architects from Davenport, Iowa, came to Brooklyn to marry. The Times Union reporter noted the sweet peas in her bouquet, the bridal roses, and that the honeymoon would be by the Great Lakes. Iowa to Brooklyn to Michigan — a 1915 itinerary.

Source: Times Union, May 23 1915 · The Chat, May 29 1915

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Kent, England met Springfield, Mass at Windsor Place

Edith Louise Morris (Kent, England) and Cyril Frederick Bennett (Springfield, Massachusetts) married at the Church of the Holy Apostles in Windsor Terrace in September 1928 — the wedding got covered eight times across four Brooklyn papers in two weeks. The combination of trans-Atlantic + cross-country must have been news.

Source: Brooklyn Eagle + Times Union + The Chat, Sept 9–15 1928

A bride's brother walked her wedding party in uniform

A Windsor Terrace wedding in November 1944. The bride's brother — a PFC home on leave from the war — stood in the wedding party still in his Army-issued uniform. The Brooklyn Citizen covered it with the kind of front-of-mind matter-of-factness that defined the home-front weddings of that year.

Source: The Brooklyn Citizen, Nov 21 1944

Frederick von Rodeck came back from Guam to marry Dorothy Dowd

By the spring of 1946 the soldiers were coming home. Frederick von Rodeck — fresh from the Pacific — returned to Brooklyn to marry Dorothy Dowd at Windsor Terrace. The notice ran small. The ending was enormous.

Source: Brooklyn newspapers, 1946

Catherine Vackner was in the room when her grandson was born

Charles Alfred Gabbert Jr. was born at 42-A Windsor Place in 1952. His grandmother Catherine Vackner was in the room. The Vackners would hold that house for another 74 years. Three generations under one roof for half a century.

Source: Brooklyn Eagle, March 9 1952

A concert pianist and a professor of English met at Windsor Terrace

Elizabeth Franklin, a concert pianist, married a professor of English. Both came from outside the neighborhood. The Brooklyn papers covered the wedding three times in one week — unusual depth for a marriage between two arts professionals in the middle of the Depression.

Source: The Chat + Times Union, July 8 1936

She married an air-conditioning engineer in 1940

Beatrice Pearl Hamlin's wedding notice listed the groom's profession as “airconditioning engineer.” Air conditioning was barely a decade old as a residential technology and almost no one had it. He was someone who built the new thing for a living.

Source: Times Union, August 26 1940

Dr. McCague officiated; the groom was a businessman

C. M. Weldner married Caroline Cox at 27½ Windsor Place on December 23, 1902 — Dr. McCague officiated. The 27½ address itself is part of the wild file: a fractional house number that hasn't existed since the early 20th century when the block got renumbered.

Source: Brooklyn Citizen, Dec 23 1902

Their honeymoon was Havana

Gladys Govern married Robert Frederick Witteman in November 1932 — wedding at the Church of the Apostle, reception at the Hotel Granada. They honeymooned in Havana, which in the depths of the Depression was either an act of nerve or an act of style. Probably both.

Source: Brooklyn Eagle, Nov 2 1932

The reception was in the Dragon Gallery of the Hotel St. George

Anna K. Eckhardt and Henry W. Schwiebert married at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church and held their reception in the Dragon Gallery of the Hotel St. George — at the time the largest hotel in New York City, with 30 stories and a famously themed banquet hall. The Dragon Gallery is gone. The hotel is condos. The wedding photograph isn't.

Source: The Chat, June 27 1925

She married an Aviation Corps lieutenant in 1920

Augusta Helen Schnaars wed Lt. Elmer N. Walton at 45 Windsor Place on January 20, 1920. His listed employer was the Aviation Corps — the predecessor to the U.S. Air Force. In 1920 "aviator" still meant something like "daredevil with a steady job."

Source: Times Union, Jan 18 1920

Wedding at Immaculate Heart, reception at the Hotel Bossert

Marjorie O'Hea and Cornelius Joseph McQuillen — both Windsor Terrace — married at the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and threw their reception at the Hotel Bossert, the Brooklyn Heights hotel where Babe Ruth held court and where the Brooklyn Dodgers' 1955 World Series victory party would happen 22 years later. Easter lilies and Talisman roses, the notice specified.

Source: Times Union, April 19 1933

The Rev. Fred Stiehler officiated his own son's wedding

Frances E. Hulsaver and Edward Raynor Stiehler married at 278 Windsor Place on June 16, 1922 — and the officiant was listed as Rev. Fred Stiehler, the groom's father. Honeymoon: Thousand Islands. Bride wore tulle veil and white lace. One of those one-line details in a newspaper notice that opens an entire family.

Source: The Brooklyn Daily Times, June 16 1922

The reception venue was named “Candleright”

Elizabeth Franklin (concert pianist) and Walter B. Scott (English professor) married at the Church of the Holy Apostles in July 1936. The reception was held at a venue named Candleright — a misprint? a real place? We have not been able to find it. If you remember it, tell us.

Source: Times Union, July 8 1936

His parents bronzed the coins from his pocket

Stephen Baltz, 11, was the only person initially to survive the United 826 plane crash. Thrown into a snowbank, conscious, he told the nurses at Methodist Hospital that New York had looked, from the air, “like a picture out of a fairy book.” He died the next day of pneumonia and jet fuel inhalation. His parents took the coins from his pocket, bronzed them, and donated them to the hospital’s poor box. They’re still mounted on a plaque in the chapel at NYU Langone Brooklyn.

Source: /history — The Crash

Debi Mazar opened a restaurant at 199 Windsor Place

The actress (Goodfellas, Entourage) and her Tuscan chef husband Gabriele Corcos opened The Tuscan Gun at 199 Windsor Place in the 2010s. They filmed episodes of their Cooking Channel show Extra Virgin on the block. The food press showed up. The restaurant has since closed but the address is part of the record.

Source: /history — The Factory Years · Observer 2016

The Cregg family ran a bookstore with nine siblings on staff

The Bookshelf — a bookstore on Windsor Place near 9th Avenue — was run by the Cregg family from Horace Court. Steve Finamore's oral history names nine siblings: Jeannette, John, Mary, Elaine, Terrence, Kathy, Patrick, Gerry, and Philip. It stocked pulp fiction and neighborhood news in equal measure and was, by every account, the kind of place a block was lucky to have once.

Source: Container Diaries (Steve Finamore)

The 90-year-old church caretaker died with two tree vendors

When United 826 fell on Park Slope, the dead on the ground included Wallace Lewis, the 90-year-old caretaker of the Pillar of Fire Church at Sterling Place — and two men who had been selling Christmas trees on the corner. The plane had narrowly missed a Catholic school with about a thousand children inside.

Source: /history — The Crash

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Two best friends died three weeks apart in France. The neighborhood named its gate for both.

Emil Bartel and William Pritchard were Brooklyn boys, born the same year — 1895 — who enlisted together in the 13th Regiment and shipped to France with the Coast Artillery. Bartel died of his wounds on September 23, 1918. Pritchard was killed in action five weeks later, on October 28. In 1923 the city named the southwest gate of Prospect Park for both of them. Everyone calls it Bartel-Pritchard Square — but look at it: it's a circle. The two granite columns guarding it are modeled on an ancient Greek lighthouse.

Source: NYC Parks · Wikipedia · DNAinfo

Jim.henderson / Wikimedia Commons

The movie palace at the park gate has had three names and four lives

The theater on the circle opened in August 1928 as the Sanders — 1,581 seats, a Moorish interior, a Wurlitzer organ. It went dark in 1978 and sat empty for nearly two decades, the kind of derelict eyesore neighbors complained about for years. It came back as the Pavilion in 1996, then was gutted and reborn again in 2018 as a Nitehawk dine-in cinema. Same walls, three names, a near-century of Windsor Terrace and Park Slope filing in to sit in the dark together.

Source: Cinema Treasures · Brooklyn Paper · Nitehawk