Hunterfly Road house
1700 Bergen Street | also 1700R Bergen Street | Crown Heights | built 1830
Open on the map4 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.
- 1662
Hunterfly Road, the old track the house later faces, appears in records as the Old Path to the Bay
The earliest documentary evidence of Hunterfly Road dates to March 1662, when it was called the Old Path to the Bay. The name Hunterfly is an Anglicization of a Dutch phrase meaning the low or swampy place. The Dutch developed the road mainly as a hay path, and it may have followed an earlier Indian trail to the wampum beds on Jamaica Bay.
- 1830
The three-bay shingled frame house is built along the line of the old road
Loring McMillen, an authority on the city's wooden architecture, concluded that the houses on Hunterfly Road were erected about 1830. No. 1700 Bergen Street is a three-bay frame house, shingled on the front and north side, with casement windows on the second floor. It is the most northerly of the three structures that follow the line of the old road.
- 1835
A map records the section of Hunterfly Road by the houses as closed under an 1835 law
A map in the Brooklyn Borough President's office indicates that the part of Hunterfly Road where the houses stand was closed under Chapter 132 of the laws of 1835, though the commission could not pin down when the closing actually happened. It found that the houses pre-date the closing, and that 19th-century maps show them built to conform to the road's line. The street grid for the area was laid out in 1838.
- 1970
The Landmarks Preservation Commission designates the Hunterfly Road house after strong community support
At a June 23, 1970 hearing, more than fifteen people spoke for designation, including students from Public School 243, and no one opposed it. The commission designated No. 1700 Bergen Street on August 18, 1970, and described it with its neighbors as a unique enclave. A newly formed society hoped to buy the buildings and turn them into a local historical museum.
Nearby
- Hunterfly Road Houses, 1702-04 Bergen Street1702 Bergen Street | 2 entries
- Hunterfly Road Houses, 1704 Bergen Street1704R Bergen Street | 2 entries
- Hunterfly Road Houses, 1706-08 Bergen Street1706 Bergen Street | 3 entries
- Weeksville Heritage Center158 Buffalo Avenue | 6 entries
- East New York Savings Bank Building1117 Eastern Parkway | 6 entries
- Parkway Theatre1498 Eastern Parkway | 3 entries