This 200-year-old house on Cranberry Street bears witness to the continuous evolution of Brooklyn

It’s 1822 in the village of Brooklyn, a recently carved out enclave on the high bluffs overlooking the East River in the Kings County town also known as Brooklyn. Roughly 5,000 souls reside in this village, living and working amid a tidy network of streets mostly named for earlier landowners and new developers (like Jacob and John Middagh Hicks) and connected to Manhattan since 1814 by steam-powered ferries. One of the residents, a cooper named John Rogers, decided to construct a new building at the corner of Cranberry and Hicks Streets. Coopers were skilled craftsmen who built barrels and casks out of wood. What became 59 Hicks Street was completed that year. It was likely was occupied by a ground-floor workspace and shop, with domestic quarters upstairs and in the half-floor attic space. The building probably wasn’t considered remarkable; 59 Hicks was a simple wood-frame structure with a peaked roof, similar to other buildings in the neighborhood of riggers, shoemakers, cabinet…

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