What makes a neighborhood of any city look like its inhabitants. There are many things, for example, pets or stories of the people who live there. But there is one more factor that has a great impact on the recognition of a particular neighborhood. We are talking about the local buildings. No matter whether they are residential buildings or industrial facilities, etc. After all, people work, study, play, eat, sleep, in a word, live in these buildings. And the older the buildings in a particular neighborhood, the richer its history.
For example, in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, you can find a whole bunch of such buildings, from brown brick houses that were built in the colonial era to residential projects with luxury apartments. Today we’re going to talk about one of these mansions, which is now lost to future generations as a work of quirky architecture, but read more on brooklyn-future.com.
“The Broken Angel” cob.
Illegally constructed in its time, the dilapidated mansion located in the middle of Brooklyn is now disappearing from the city’s architectural map. It has been known as a “crazy moonshine factory” or as “part of a spaceship” and was also called the “Broken Angel.” At the same time, the building has always managed to be a part of the outsider architecture in the Brooklyn neighborhood.
That is to say, as long as it remained as it was, it was almost impossible to see, in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, something even more bizarre and strange. The building was a monument to nonsense, an absurd remnant of an era that, mind you, never existed in real life. The building looked like a factory from the Industrial Revolution that had lost weight and decayed because it had been forced to take drugs for years.
Artist, architect, self-taught-these words refer to Arthur Woods, who, together with his wife Cynthia, bought the property at 4 Downing Street in 1979 for more than $2,000. This amount of money already makes the story of the Broken Angel house look like either a myth or a fairy tale. But it was real-the Woods raised two children there. And at the same time, they were transforming the house, as it turned out later, into an architectural landmark. That’s right, because it has always attracted curious visitors to Brooklyn, from all over the world.
This couple had a hippie sense of freedom, which was surprisingly combined with the Brooklyn work ethic. All of this motivated the young people to leave their mark on this earth, embodying it in brick, wood, and glass. An interesting fact is that for many years, the couple used only the materials they found in garbage cans or picked up by their own children somewhere on the street.
And as a result, they managed to turn the once-abandoned factory, without exaggeration, into an architectural work of art. By the way, the name “Broken Angel” comes from a small statue of a cherub found somewhere on Staten Island, which someone threw away and the couple found.
“The Broken Angel” in the movies
Anyway, construction of the building began in 1979. At that time, artist Arthur Woods had an irresistible desire to turn this old Brooklyn Trolley headquarters into a folk art monument. To do this, he decided to add some eccentric additions to the building. And he succeeded.
Moreover, the building even played an important role in the documentary film “Dave Chappelle’s Construction Party”, which was filmed in 2005. It couldn’t have been any other way, because the multicolored glass panels of a Gothic cathedral found their place on this four-story building. The bizarre architecture of the carnival amusement house with fake mirrors and some kind of painted aura that hovered around it only contributed to this. But before that, there was another movie.
The first 15-minute short film about this building, “The Broken Angel: The Last Chapter” was released in 1991. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This one was a documentary. In it, Cynthia and Arthur talk about their castle, which looks like a cathedral and serves as a home for these people and their children.
Fire as the beginning of decline
The film captured the construction of the house, the Woods children hauling bricks, and Arthur and Cynthia lifting and embedding all sorts of trinkets into the walls of the building. One gets the impression that everything is happening according to the rules of the Tetris game. So the Broken Angel rose higher and higher, becoming part of the urban landscape.
It was not without its troubles. Unfortunately, they had global consequences. The fact is that shortly after the film appeared in the house of the Broken Angel, a fire broke out. It was a local fire, no one was injured. But this fact was seized upon by the Department of Construction, which sent Wood, 75, and his 65-year-old wife an eviction notice.
In other words, the city authorities demanded that Woods bring the building into compliance with the required building codes to minimize the possibility of another fire. In addition, the Department of Construction offered to dismantle the illegal structure from the roof of the house. Woods had no choice but to comply. He teamed up with a young local developer and began converting the building into apartments. The man wanted to create a gallery here and a school on the neighboring plot. But the financial issues were not properly settled, the loan was not repaid, and the bank seized the property.
Then came decades of court battles to save his castle. Woods, even in 2013, received his last notice, which was an eviction document. <So he had no choice but to throw a party to celebrate the closing of the building. After that, the Broken Angel changed hands several times. And as of 2015, the building was in the final stages of being converted into a residential condominium.
“The Broken Angel” was doomed
To summarize, the Broken Angel has become a symbol of Brooklyn by its very existence, vividly demonstrating what the borough has been like for decades. Demonstrating that it was lively and expressive, imposing, albeit dirty, but at the same time making Brooklyn authentic, very far from the glitz and money of Manhattan, for example.
“The Broken Angel” was just one building among many, but its popularity and decline demonstrate the incredible changes that have taken place in New York in general and Brooklyn in particular. By the way, the same thing happened in Queens during the destruction of 5Pointz, the legendary mecca of graffiti. Unfortunately, the era cannot be defeated, “the Broken Angel” was doomed.
It’s hard to believe, but from 1979 to the early 2000s, this house was a project. That is, all these years, it was constantly in the process of being added to and built. The building that the Woods bought was a three-dimensional canvas on which the couple realized their idea, because they had one.
Nowadays, one of the problems of development is new buildings, these rectangles with right angles that have perfect and beautiful shapes. But the problem is that the futuristic, balanced and shiny spaces of today’s cityscapes are very similar to the boxes that were built in the suburbs of the 1950s. Despite their elegance and price. And yet, they all look the same, which suggests that human nature and self-expression are completely lost. Instead, even years after its decline, the Broken Angel disturbs the imagination and is still difficult to describe.
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