Walkabout: Brooklyn’s Amazing Automobile Industry, Part 2

“Automobile Row on Bedford Avenue became almost as well known throughout the United States as Automobile Row on Broadway…In those days, Bedford Avenue was the Sunday afternoon walk of the most substantial portion of Brooklyn. It was the Easter Parade street, the auto parade street, the center of life and recreation. It was Automobile Row!”

These were the fond memories of Charles Bishop, one of the pioneers of Automobile Row in the first half of the 20th century. He and his father, Eli Bishop, were two-thirds of one of the most successful automobile dealerships in Brooklyn: Bishop, McCormick and Bishop, which operated out of a series of showrooms on the corner of Bedford Avenue and Halsey Street. Eli Bishop had started out in the real estate business, and was responsible for a great deal of the development of the Bedford area, but had turned to the automobile in the first years of the 1900s, realizing that this could be big, perhaps as big as real estate. He was right.

The automobile took America by storm. And how could it not? Personal and business transportation that didn’t involve horses, which were inconvenient in a city setting, cost money to feed and board, and were messy, was a gift from the gods. As car technology improved, and Henry Ford’s assembly line took hold of a new industry, it was soon possible for the average middle class family to afford a car, motoring became a national pastime, and the love affair with cars, which has never abated, began.

In the beginning of the automobile industry, there were dozens of motor companies. It seemed that every inventor, engineer, blacksmith or carriage manufacturer went into the automobile business. Brooklyn’s Automobile Row developed on Bedford in part because Bedford traversed Brooklyn from north to south, passing through many growing neighborhoods. Bedford also had a lot of available undeveloped land, and, as Mr. Bishop explained above, Bedford had become a popular street for walkers. It was also a popular street for bicyclists, and stores and dealers who had been established as bike sellers and servicers found themselves becoming automobile dealers and garage and service stations.

The first auto dealers and service stations began congregating on Bedford around 1905. Charles and Eli Bishop being among the first, selling Dodge Brothers automobiles, and later taking on lines by Ford, Paige, and Cole. In 1911, the first automobile show took place at the 23rd Regiment Armory, the huge enclosed space on the corner of Bedford and Atlantic Avenues, convenient to public and private transportation. The armory would house the show until World War II.

By the 1920s, Automobile Row was no longer Bedford Avenue, although it was still the center of activity. The problem of horse storage gave way to the problem of auto storage, and large garages sprang up on the side streets to the east and west of Bedford Avenue, especially in Crown Heights, which was not as fully developed as Bedford. These can be seen in a 1929 map of the area between St. Marks Avenue and Eastern Parkway. Showrooms were built along Bedford, all with large display windows, often just one or two stories tall. Over the years, the names of those dealerships and the lines they carried changed, but until the 1950s, you couldn’t throw a stick on Bedford without hitting the plate glass window of a car dealership.

And it wasn’t just Bedford Avenue. Atlantic Avenue has long been a very commercial roadway, with factories and commercial businesses dominating, especially in light of the Long Island Railroad tracks which were at one time, completely at ground level. By the time of the car, they had been submerged or raised high above, depending on where you were, leaving the avenue to become a mecca for garages, service stations and auto parts and services companies. There were also car showrooms, the most prominent being that of Packard, whose large building still stands on Classon and Atlantic, today a self-storage facility.

Although many of the showrooms and dealerships were concentrated between Halsey Street in Bedford Stuyvesant and Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, there were dealers and auxiliary businesses on Bedford as far north as Myrtle Avenue and as far south as Empire Boulevard. In 1913, Charlie Ebbet built his famous ballpark for his Trolley Dodgers near Bedford Avenue and Empire Boulevard. We all know that for Brooklyn, this became a shrine, a place of worship for the home team. It was also a great business draw for the auto industry.

Dealerships, garages, service stations and car parts businesses began to develop along Empire and on the surrounding streets, all the way up to Eastern Parkway. When Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvin Vaux laid out Eastern Parkway, they would have been horrified to know that fifty years later, the Bedford intersection was no longer a leafy promenade with gracious homes, it had become a corner with a busy traffic crossing, several gas stations, and a couple of auto dealerships.

In 1920, the most prominent of the showrooms on Bedford Avenue was built; the Studebaker Company showroom and garage, on the corner of Sterling Place. Designed by the Manhattan firm of Tooker and Marsh, the building was a monument to one of the automobiles most successful companies, an old company that was started in 1852 by the Studebaker brothers of South Bend, Indiana. They made their first fortune making wagons and carriages for the Union Army, and went into the automobile business in 1902, with the production of an electric car. Their first gasoline engine was in 1909, and they went on to become one of the largest and most popular automobile companies in America.

The Bedford Avenue showroom represented the company’s investment in the lucrative Brooklyn and Long Island market, and was built when the company was expanding throughout the country. They would also build a very large multi-story garage facility nearby on Dean Street, near Franklin Avenue, today being developed by our own Jonathan Butler as a small business incubator and restaurant establishment. From the 1920s through the 1940s, Studebaker was big.
The showroom on Bedford was state of the art, with large display windows on the ground floor, offices above on the mezzanine, and garage and storage space above. The building had been designed with special steel supports to carry the weight of heavy automobiles. An elevator on the Sterling side of the building took cars to and from the upper stories. The building sported large Studebaker signage, with the Stude logo prominently in terra-cotta on the face of the building. It was not only an impressive showroom, it was an impressive building of any kind, and still dominates the street.

So who was on Bedford’s Automobile Row? Most of the car companies are only memories, with names that are forgotten by all but the most enthusiastic antique automobile lovers. At one time or another, between 1905 and 1950, the following automobile companies had showrooms on Bedford Avenue: Chalmers, Locomobile, Cino, Paige, Ford, Cole, Marion, Allen-Swan, Nash, Apperson, Franklin, Dodge Brothers, Stutz, Pierce-Arrow, Hupmobile, White, Hudson, Maxwell-Brisco, Overland, Mitchell-Lewis, Velie, Studebaker, Stewart, Fiat, Ford Trucks, National Motor Car, Marmon Motors, Chrysler, Maxwell, Oakland, Lexington, Moon and Cadillac. I’m sure there were more, but those are the ones I found in ads and articles from that time period.

The end of Automobile Row came with the Depression, followed by World War II, followed by the great migration to the suburbs, and the loss of the Dodgers. The fate of the Studebaker building is a mirror to what happened to the entire industry. By 1934, Studebaker had acquired several other car companies, including Pierce-Arrow. They were now selling used cars as well as new cars in the Bedford showroom. The company started to falter, less able to compete with the Big Three; General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, which had gobbled up, or forced most of the rest of the independents out of business. Most of the names above were history by the late 1930s. Studebaker began closing and selling off their showrooms and garages. By 1939, this showroom closed forever, and in 1941 was converted into a dress shop. Today, it is affordable and subsidized housing.

The other showrooms, garages and service stations along Bedford and on the surrounding streets suffered a similar fate. The smaller ones became stores, offices, or churches in an increasingly working class neighborhood. Many were torn down and remained empty lots until the last ten years, when new condos and apartments were built on their sites. Many are still empty lots, and some, like the building on the corner of St. Marks and Bedford, are bricked up, waiting for new use. One of the showrooms on the corner of Eastern Parkway and Bedford is now a Chase bank branch. The old Bishop, McCormick and Bishop showroom, a multi-story building of some beauty, is now the headquarters of Concord Baptist Church Family Services.

Many of the service stations still exist, although vastly modernized. The Firestone service station on Empire Boulevard, near Bedford is still the original building, the outlines of which still sport their Art Deco origins. On the side streets, many of the garages still exist, as well, now converted to public parking, Zip Car repositories, and in several cases, art galleries. The 23rd Regiment Armory, home to all those auto shows, is being used as a large homeless shelter. While we’ll never go back to the days when special police traffic stations had to be put up on Bedford to control the massive amount of traffic on the street, the area remains an intriguing, and developing area. Automobile Row may be gone now, but for a while there, it was another reason why Brooklyn for a great many people, was the world.

I’m leading a tour of Bedford Avenue’s Automobile Row this Sunday at 11 am. I’ll be joined by my tour partner Morgan Munsey, and we’ll be visiting the areas discussed here and on Thursday. The tour is sponsored by the Municipal Arts Society, and they still have tickets available. Please visit their Website, and we hope you’ll join us.

Brooklyn’s Amazing Automobile Industry, part 1

(Postcard of Grant Square area, 1905)