Van Sicklen House
27 Gravesend Neck Road | Gravesend | built 1725
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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.
- 1657
Quakers hold an early meeting at Lady Moody's house on this lot
The first Quaker meeting at Lady Deborah Moody's house, held in 1657, is counted by the Landmarks Preservation Commission among the earliest in the Americas. Moody had founded Gravesend in the 1640s, and her home stood on a town lot that included the site of the Van Sicklen House. Most architectural historians the report cites think the present house is a later one. After her death, her son Sir Henry Moody sold the double lot in May 1659.
- 1702
Farmer Ferdinandus Van Sicklen Jr. buys Lady Moody's old house lot
In 1702 Ferdinandus Van Sicklen Jr. bought the former Lady Moody lot in Gravesend, with its farmland, orchards and meadow, from Nicholas Stillwell Jr. The Landmarks Commission thinks the earliest part of the present house likely dates to his ownership. A 1731 tax list showed him owning 62 acres of land, three horses and five cattle.
- 1905
William and Isabelle Platt remodel the old farmhouse in Colonial Revival style
William E. Platt, a real estate developer, was the highest bidder at a court-ordered auction of the house in November 1904, and in March 1905 he filed plans naming himself as architect. He and his wife Isabelle added dormers with multi-pane casement windows, a cedar-shingle roof, a Portland-cement grouting over the stone, and a newly dug cellar. The commission says they hoped it had been Lady Moody's home and drew on New England and English models.
- 1946
The house becomes a veterans' post named for twin brothers killed in World War II
In 1946 the house became the Charles and Frank Trapani VFW Post, named for twin brothers who had died in World War II. The previous owner, Annie Anderson, an English immigrant who bought it in 1923 and later said she had met Lady Moody's ghost there, was in financial trouble by 1944 and the house faced demolition. She sold it in 1947 to Elizabeth and Allan W. Johnson.
- 1955
A shipyard riveter talks a developer out of demolishing the house
When the Greater New York Building Company bought the house in 1955 planning to tear it down, Nunzio Maisano, who lived close by and worked as a riveter at Bethlehem Steel's Brooklyn shipyards, persuaded it to sell him the house and a 51 by 100 foot lot. Two months later a kitchen fire in the upstairs apartment damaged the second floor, garret and roof. In the late 1950s he had the facade refaced with Formstone, and the house stayed in the family until 2005.
- 2016
The Landmarks Commission designates the Van Sicklen House
On April 12, 2016 the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the house, describing it as one of Brooklyn's oldest surviving Dutch-American houses and the only known 18th-century house in the borough built largely of stone. The stone front section dates from the early 18th century or earlier, with a frame addition behind it from the mid-18th century. It stands opposite the designated Gravesend-Van Sicklen Cemetery.
“…the only known extant 18th century house largely of stone construction in the borough…”
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