Dismantling of the Schenck House. Records of the Department of Decorative Arts. Objects. Installation: Schenck House, [11] press and photographs (1933-1964).

Dutch culture has had its fair share of influence on us here at the Brooklyn Museum. One of the largest objects in our collection, the Schenck House features prominently in our connections to Dutch-American history. This month the Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives are reflecting on the ways Dutch history has influenced our collections, we are currently highlighting published and archival materials documenting the ongoing influence of the Dutch.

Sunday News clipping on Schenck House restoration, May 12, 1963. Records of the Department of Decorative Arts. Objects. Installation: Schenck House, [11] press and photographs (1933-1964).

In celebration of the ongoing influence of Dutch arts and culture, the Museum Libraries and Archives are highlighting a recent archival accession, a collection of documents regarding the Jan Martense Schenck House. These documents have recently been processed and are now available [pdf] to the public for research. Included in this collection are images of the Schenck House on its original location in Brooklyn; letters from numerous Schenck family descendents who have visited and supported the Schenck House over the years; and newspaper clippings from the 1964 Museum installation. We have also produced a list of published resources [pdf] on the Schenck House and Schenck family genealogy in the Museum Libraries. If you would like to schedule a visit to see any of these materials, please send us an e-mail. We are open to the public for research on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.

Schenck descendant Edith Schenck DeLozier visiting the Schenck House in 1964. Records of the Department of Decorative Arts. Objects. Installation: Schenck House, [07] corresp: A-G (1961-1974).

If you are a Schenck descendant please let us know, as we always enjoy hearing from Schenck family members!

View of the Brooklyn Museum’s Eastern Parkway façade, showing the museum lit up for Hudson Fulton Centennial, 1909. B/w copy negative, 5 x 7in (12.7 x 17.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Museum building. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, S06_BEEi014.jpg)

The 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration illuminated New York City in hundreds of thousands of electric lights. This idea can’t quite have the same impact as it did one hundred years ago. In 2009, events such as Earth Hour are celebrated to turn off electric lights and lessen our impact on global warming. However, to understand how the Illuminations were perceived in 1909, it may help to consider that electric lighting was slowly making its way into residential homes, and at that point in time only three out of every ten homes in New York City had electricity. This 1909 advertisement for home electricity highlights the benefits of bringing electric light into homes.

Advertisement for Edison Electric Illuminating Company of Brooklyn, at the time of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration. Printed in the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences Bulletin, Volume 3, no. 16, December 25, 1909.

The 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration Illuminations throughout the city were unprecedented, “the result was an electrical display of great variety and wonderful beauty which excited the admiration of everyone and make a spectacle which had never been presented in New York before on so grand a scale.” The Brooklyn Museum participated in the celebrations by covering the building in 7,200 lights as seen in the first photograph of this post.

In addition to the Illuminations, the 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration included art exhibitions, concerts, street and water parades, attracting visitors from all over the world and the Museum Libraries hold many published historical resources on the Hudson-Fulton Celebration.  2009 also marks the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival, and a huge range of Dutch themed events scheduled throughout the year can be found through the NY400 website.

Museum libraries and archives are rich storehouses of textual and visual information. This is very true of the Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives which function as the “story tellers” of the Museum by providing histories about objects in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. Hidden within the Libraries and Archives are a myriad of stories concerning the Schenck houses, which were recently renovated and reinstalled on the fourth floor of the Museum.

Photograph by Reverend William Edward Schenck. From Account of my trips to Holmdel, N.J. & Flatlands, L.I. by William Edward Schenck.

One can find several fascinating books, photographs and other documents in the Libraries and Archives that tell about the Schenck family and the houses they lived in. Highlights include photographs from the Historic American Building Survey and an original journal by Jane Malbone Schenck who wrote about what her life was like in Brooklyn in the 1800’s. A selection of these documents are currently on view in the Library display cases on the second floor of the Museum.

These documents are of great interest to many, including architectural historians of Brooklyn who want to know what Brooklyn looked like when the Schenck houses were built more than 330 years ago. These documents tell us about the houses, the transfer of owners and families and the re-emerging of the architecture through refurbishments and significant structural transformations. The photographs tell us about the transformation of the surrounding landscape from sweeping meadows to a Brooklyn neighborhood. They also provide evidence of how the houses have looked as they have been installed at the Brooklyn Museum.

Jan Martense Schenck House reinstallation. Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Decorative Arts.
Exhibitions: Schenck House reinstallation, 1971.

2008 is the 185th anniversary of the founding of this institution as a library (the Brooklyn Apprentice’s Library) and we are planning a series of talks about the history of the Library and the rare and unique collections held in this repository. We will be focusing on the materials related to the Schenck family in this upcoming series. Please email us at library@brooklynmuseum.org if you would like to know more about the talk or Schenck related materials in the Libraries and Archives.

For a complete history on the Schenck Houses, see Kevin Stayton’s book, Dutch by design : tradition and change in two historic Brooklyn houses : the Schenck houses at The Brooklyn Museum, available in the Museum Libraries. Additional installation images of the Schenck house can be found in our online exhibition index.

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John has also provided several web resources:

Old Dutch Houses of Brooklyn, Maud Esther Dillard (Brooklyn, 1945)

Lefferts Historic House (Prospect Park Website)

The Wyckoff House Museum

Lott House Restoration and Information

In my own travels on the web for this project, I noticed that Christopher Gray wrote this article for the New York Times about John and his house:

Streetscapes/2138 McDonald Avenue, Brooklyn; Preserving a Sense of Dutch Heritage in Gravesend

The Brooklyn Museum Schenck houses are now open! Catch what Carol Vogel has to say in the New York Times.

The Brooklyn Museum’s Schenck family houses have had a profound personal effect on me. In 1990, I was the editor for a book on the Schenck houses called Dutch by Design, written by curator Kevin Stayton. I found that book and the houses it was about so fascinating that I not only taught myself Dutch but I also wound up buying an old Dutch Brooklyn farmhouse of my own.

The book had five chapters. Kevin had countless fascinating illustrations lined up for chapters 1,2, 4, and 5, the chapters dealing specifically with the houses themselves. But almost no illustrations were planned for the middle chapter, a general history of the Dutch in Brooklyn. I suggested that we find Dutch houses still standing out in the streets of Brooklyn and use photos of them as illustrations. “Sure,” said Kevin. “Go knock yourself out.”

Finding the houses was not as difficult as it might seem. A book published in 1945, Old Dutch Houses of Brooklyn by Maud Esther Dillard, provided pictures and addresses of all the Dutch Brooklyn houses standing then, and I had only to see if they were still there. Most, sadly, were gone, but some, miraculously, had survived—and in the strangest places.

Hubbard House, circa 1915

Take 2138 McDonald Ave., the so-called Hubbard House, an 1830 Dutch farmhouse down under the elevated tracks of the F train in Gravesend. There, in 1990, I met Theresa Lucchelli, a wonderful cat-fancying former cocktail waitress who had lived in the house since 1904 and remembered Gravesend as a rural paradise. I asked her if was okay with her if I approached the Landmarks Commission about making the house a landmark. “Sure,” she said. “Go knock yourself out.”

Hubbard House, 2002. Compared to the 1915 photo, the house looks somewhat different. The lean-to on the left side in the photo of 1915 had a second story added to it in 1924.

Theresa died at the age of 95 in 1997, and the Landmarks Commission never has done right by her house. But after her death I bought and renovated the place with help of a private group known as the New York Landmarks Conservancy, and now I sometimes sit by the fire there of an evening as the F train rumbles past and reflect that I owe it all to the Schenck family houses at the Brooklyn Museum.