Memory Lane: The man Who Gave Borough Park its Name
It is hard to believe, but Borough Park was once off-limits
to Jews, and the Boro Park club did not allow Jews membership.
William Reynolds was a developer like no other. A very
ambitious individual: he was the youngest elected State Senator in New York history;
he developed neighborhoods all around the city.
In 1895, William has just completed developing hundreds of
homes in Prospect Heights (including a mansion that he built for himself), and
was ready for his next challenge. He
found it in the Old Dutch town of New Utrecht—in which hundreds of acres of
farmland were being developed. He purchased the land, and divvied it up into
4,000 lots. Some of them he sold to others developers, and then set to work on
the rest, developing them himself.
He was not the absolute first developer; in 1887 Electus B.
Litchfield (owner of Litchfield Mansion in Prospect Park) had created a small
cottage community called Blythebourne—with a few small houses on a few streets.
Reynolds built around it. Blythebourne was a bit too English-sounding
for Reynolds, so the ex-senator called his community Borough Park. He also ensured
that the community was served by a train station on the Brooklyn, Bath, and
Coney Island West End line. The community had a small town feel, with detached
suburban houses with wide front porches. Reynolds’ blocks had a mixture of
large higher end homes in the popular Queen Anne and Colonial Revival styles of
the day, but was mostly blocks of smaller wood framed suburban homes, very
similar to nearby Flatbush. He even used the same architects. He had one of
them build him a house on 49th Street and 15th Avenue.
He used many ploys to generate excitement for his homes—such
as the time in October of 1901 that one of his homes was won by Robert L.
Huter, the barber of Blythebourne, as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reports: “Barber
of Blythbourne wins a $6,500 house, Mr., Huter who wields a razor for Borough
Park men Takes Reynolds’ First Prize.
“…because of fate’s favoritism at a real estate lottery geld
in the Borough Park Club House last night…. It was about one year ago last
night that senator William Reynolds, president of the Borough Park Company,
made an announcement that nine valuable prizes in real estate would be offered
to those purchasing one or more lots… the first premium, the richest stake of
all, was one of senator Reynold’s best houses on Fifty-second street between
Fifteenth and Sixteenth Avenues. It was up-to-date according to the most exact
interpretations of the word, and its twelve rooms are outfitted with everything
that a modern detached dwelling must have.”
Reynolds understood that any successful development must
have commercial space, so he preserved the stretch of 13th Avenue
between 50th and 51st streets, and erected a club there.
This was a place that many functions were held, and where Reynolds held court.
Jacob Fishman notes in the Chicago Sentinel that the inhabitation of Jews in
Boro Park was delayed by about a decade, until Boro Park capitulated and
allowed Jews to live there.
In an article in Brooklyn Life, in 1903, Reynolds himself
expresses his surprise that this neighborhood took off. “I never had any idea
that anybody outside of New York and Brooklyn, with the possible exception of a
few people in towns no farther away than Newark, would ever invest in Borough
Park, and then only with the idea of sooner or later occupying a neat
maisonette provided with suitable stale accommodations in our pretty park.
“These were only some of my misconceptions…four years ago
there were only about twenty houses in Borough Park…. while now there are over
seven hundred...and about one hundred more in the course of construction. The
prices have bounded to 100%-200% higher (skyrocketing real estate prices
evidently are more than one century old). When I opened Borough Park, I reserved the
parcel of lots along the railway, which gives us twenty-six minutes
communication with Park Row, for five-cents, without change of cars...”
Well, Boro Park Club went on to become a yeshivah, quite a
departure from the desires from the man who originally built it.
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