Avenue H Station House
1518 Avenue H | also 802 East 16th Street | Midwood | built 1906
Open on the map5 entries
The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1905
Developer T.B. Ackerson buys the Fiske Terrace estate that the Avenue H sales cottage was built to serve
Thomas Benton Ackerson, a former Knickerbocker Ice Company worker who founded the T.B. Ackerson Company in 1898, paid $285,000 on June 8, 1905, to George P. and Elizabeth Fiske for their Flatbush estate. The mansion on it has since been demolished. The forested slope became Fiske Terrace, the development whose sales office is now the Avenue H station house.
- 1905
Drawings for the Fiske Terrace sales office call for peeled-log posts and a fieldstone chimney
Plans for the sales cottage are dated June 23, 1905, and the Ackerson family gave them to the Brooklyn Borough Historian's office in 2002. The draftsperson, who signed R.H.B., specified posts of peeled logs, siding cut from rough log slices, and a fieldstone chimney with two ceramic flues. The interior was to hold three offices and a reception room warmed by a brick fireplace.
- 1906
A 1906 photograph shows the cottage as a Fiske Terrace sales office with Ackerson's Nassau Street address
A photograph from 1906 shows the building with a sign for Fiske Terrace over its porch and 140 Nassau Street, the address of Ackerson's headquarters. The development's brochure does not picture the cottage, perhaps because it was not finished in time for printing. Within about a year of opening, the building had outlived its use as a sales office.
“…a 1906 photo bearing a sign for Fiske Terrace above its porch and the address of Ackerson's headquarters, 140 Nassau Street…”
- 1907
The former real estate office opens as a station on the Brighton line
On August 23, 1907, the old sales cottage debuted as a transit station. The report notes the dramatic change in grade there: homeowners to the north campaigned during the early twentieth century for a below-grade line, while to the south trains run on an elevated embankment reaching the Brighton Beach terminus.
“On August 23, 1907, the former real estate office debuted as a transit station.”
- 2004
The Landmarks Preservation Commission designates the Avenue H station house a city landmark
The commission designated the exterior of the 1906 building on June 29, 2004, after a June 15 hearing at which ten speakers favored designation and none opposed. Its report called the building the only shingled wooden cottage in the city to become a station, and the only surviving station from Brooklyn's old network of surface train lines. The station was still in service.
“…is the city's only shingled wooden cottage turned transit station house.”
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