Lost Apartments of the North Shore: the Baltimore Flats

 

17-23 Victory Blvd, ca. 1940

When my parents got married, they lived at 115 Stuyvesant Place. It's where I lived my first three years. They bought a house on Cebra Avenue when their rent went up to $137 and exceeded a mortgage. As a baby, my mom and I went to all sorts of stores in St. George and Tompkinsville. I had memories of eating in a luncheonette at the corner of Victory and  Bay, but I couldn't remember anything specific about it except that my mom was friends with a waitress. It was only doing some research a few years ago that I discovered pictures of it.

The luncheonette was called DeFranco's and it was in the corner of a string of apartments called the Baltimore Flats. They're a beautiful example of late 19th-century buildings, designed by Edward A. Sargent. Unfortunately, after part of them caught fire in 1980, it wasn't long before the entire block of flats was demolished.

DeFranco's Luncheonette, 1969 - My mom and I could be inside 

Baltimore Flats on fire - 1980

the Baltimore Flats, 1980 - awaiting their fate

1989 - rubble

2021

Lost Apartments of the North Shore: 210 Victory Boulevard

 

                                                            210 Victory Boulevard, ca. 1940
 

 

   I have only the slightest memories of this building, even though I grew up a few blocks away and probably walked past it hundreds of times before it was torn down in the early 2000s. I suspect the reason it never really registered in my mind is because it was set way back from Victory Boulevard and the property was no longer the nicely-maintained lawns and hedges depicted above, but a mass of uncontrolled trees and bushes. 

   When I was a kid, those set-back buildings had acquired a reputation for housing shady characters. A friend of mine lived in one of them - maybe even this one - and I visited once, and it was fairly creepy. 

   According to Dept. of Building records, in 2000, it was reported that the back of the building had collapsed and the front was in imminent danger of coming down. I've always been fascinated about the circumstances by which a perfectly decent building reaches a state where it's abandoned and left to ruin. Whole families lived there once. Hopes were hoped, dreams dreamed, and lives lived inside those walls. Now, it's not much more than a few photos. As such, I'm going to do a series of short posts about buildings similar to this one that once graced our streets and at some point - poof!- just seemed to vanish into the æther.

2013

1917 map

1996 NYC aerial map