Gov. Kathy Hochul on Friday announced the New York State Board for Historic Preservation’s recommendations to add 36 properties to the State and National Register of Historic Places — three of them within Brooklyn.
“These nominations reflect generations of community building, planning, and activities that give us a glimpse into our collective past as New Yorkers,” Governor Hochul said. “Identifying these resources and adding them to our historic register expands our ongoing understanding of our shared history and are important reminders of the innovation, passion, and lived experiences of New Yorkers who came before us.”
The Brooklyn locations recommended by the governor are the tanker Mary A. Whalen, docket at Red Hook; the former Talmud Torah Atereth Israel in Cypress Hills-East New York and the former William Ulmer Brewery Complex in Bushwick.
The best known of these three properties is the tanker Mary A. Whalen, formerly the S.T. Kiddoo, a rare example of an early 20th-century steel coastal oil tanker. The tanker, built in 1938, “retains the original configuration, original alternating strake shelf plating, original direct reversible diesel power plant, and a rare surviving `bell boat’ arrangement supplementing the telegraph for wheelhouse-to-engine room communications.” The ship was active at least until the late 1960s, when it ran aground off the Rockaways. A Coast Guard light was out, and its owners blamed the Coast Guard, sparking a well-known legal case.
Nowadays, the Mary A. Whalen is the headquarters for the organization Portside New York, which is restoring the ship. Portside also gives tours of the ship and presents educational programs and cultural events there. It has already been named to the National Register of Historic Places.
Talmud Torah Atereth Israel on Fountain Avenue, at one time an Eastern European Orthodox Jewish religious institution, is now home to an African American Jewish congregation known as the Ninth…
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