I was working the Red Hook-Amagansett-What-Have-You news desk on a slow day, trying to recover from the year-end Star-Revue party the night before. Things had been kind of slow at Sam’s on Court Street until George threw down a wad of bills with presidential mugs I wasn’t familiar with, whereupon Louie kept those drinks coming. Being free and all, how could I refuse?
Then the phone rang. It was George.
“Enright, I’m in Canarsie and there’s something weird going on here. I want you to find out who Jerry is.”
“Jerry Who?”
“Exactly.”
Click.
In a jiffy my phone dinged with photos of a two-story commercial strip on Rockaway Parkway adjoining the end of the L subway line, between Glenwood & Farragut Roads. The first photo was a long shot showing seven busy storefronts. Above them an architect had constructed a sort of Roman-Greco temple motif, but most of the Baroque arched windows had been plastered closed and painted pink. An odd look.
Still, it was just a stretch of typical Brooklyn businesses: Jamaican jerk chicken, jewelry repair, fried chicken, deli, cellular phones, check cashing and pizza. The next photo, however, indicated the true source of George’s curiosity: a close-up above the shuttered top floor windows, way above the fried chicken shop. There, on a slightly protruding masonry surface appeared these chiseled words: The Jerry Building.
Well, this should be easy, I thought. But a couple of hours later, I had come up empty. I found old photos, and a testimonial from a Canarsie old-timer, indicating that the nameplate was as old as the building, but there was nothing but puzzlement as to its inspiration, leading a Canarsie FaceBook group to conclude: “Who the Heck was Jerry?”
After digging through Building Department records, I was able to determine that the entire structure was designed in 1927 by a small but notable architectural firm, the Cohn Brothers, who created the imprint for over a hundred large apartment buildings and many commercial strips all over Brooklyn in the two decades prior to the Second World War. In fact, many of their buildings have been gushed over by architectural critics for the past fifty years. Benjamin & Abraham Cohn were Latvian Jews who arrived in New York in 1906 as teenagers, graduated college and opened a storefront shop at the corner of Stone Avenue (now Mother Gaston Blvd) and Pitkin Avenue in Brownsville The builder who commissioned the brothers’ Canarsie creations was Barney Goldberg, who had been active in the Rockaways, Jamaica and Huntington but had recently opened an office on Avenue U in Sheepshead Bay. Both Goldberg and the Cohens were well-respected.
However, Barney Goldberg was among the legion of developers who bribed a corrupt City permit gatekeeper to get their shovels active. As a result, Goldberg testified against the Tammany crook, a former veterinarian named Dr. William Doyle, at his federal trial in Manhattan – front page news in August of 1930 when the feds revealed his bribe-taking amounted to $275,000 the year before, or $4,745,000 in today’s coinage. It is comforting to know that in this great City, at least some things never change.
By the way, back in 1927-1930, when that row on Rockaway Parkway was built, a “Jerry Building” was a term used to describe the shoddy workmanship prevalent during the Roaring Twenties. Indeed, construction in Brooklyn had then reached epic levels that would never be seen again. In 1925 alone, over 40,000 new building permits were issued for Brooklyn by the Department of Buildings. Compare that with less than four thousand in 2022. “Jerry Building” is rarely heard today but its origin dates back a couple of hundred years to England. Some say “Jerry” was derived from the word Jericho, as in the biblical story that ended with “the Walls of Jericho came tumbling down.” However, given the pedigree of the Cohens and Goldberg, and the longevity of the Rockaway Parkway edifice, it seems safe to conclude that The Jerry Building was not chiseled as a warning to Canarsie residents to watch their heads as they went shopping.
But could it have been a memorial to a recently deceased “Jerry”? The architects and builder had no Jerry next-of-kin, and scouring the ranks of nearby fire houses and precincts, no line-of-duty deaths by a Jerry could be found. However, expanding my search citywide, I did find one possibility. On September 13, 1928, Jeremiah C. Brosnan was a 52 year old patrolman with 24 years on the job. He had suffered a shattered leg which led to his being assigned to the prisoner ward of Fordham Hospital in the Bronx. Two gunmen conned their way into the ward and killed him with a shotgun blast to the head. The story was splashed across the front pages of Brooklyn newspapers and coverage continued for months, leading to multiple shootouts with his killers, and more police deaths and injuries.
And yet. There is no press story about a dedication of the building to the memory of Officer Jerry Brosnan, which leads me to wonder: is this the true origin story for the nameplate affixed to the top of 1397-1413 Rockaway Parkway almost a hundred years ago? Or does some other explanation exist that I have been unable to exhume? In consultation with the publisher, I have been authorized to offer a prize to the reader who can provide reliable testimony to solve this mystery.
The prize? I am not at liberty to divulge that. But let’s just say, if you like Ben & Jerry ice cream, you should get your Sherlock Holmes hat on.
