Tracing The Life And Legacy Of An Ironworker Through A Coal Chute Cover In Brooklyn Heights

A fashionable townhouse in 19th century Brooklyn would have had many stylish features—like a tall front stoop, iron railings on the stairs, and a ground-level side door through which servants could come and go unseen.

A townhouse like this would also have a coal hole.

You’ve probably seen these in many older residential areas of New York City. It’s a small, street-level chute where coal deliveries could be made directly into the basement, to be fed into a furnace to keep the home toasty.

These coal chutes had iron covers. And when a cover still extant and in view is embossed with the name of the foundry that produced it, it becomes a porthole into Gotham’s manufacturing past.

The one in the photo at top was spotted in front of a house near Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights.

“Bryan G. Green,” it reads, with an address at 229 Pacific Street not far away in Boerum Hill. Based on Google view, 229 Pacific Street looks like it is attached to the red brick shell of a 19th century building that could have been used for manufacturing. No trace of Bryan Green’s foundry seems to remain.

But clues about this ironworker emerge with a little research. Born in England in 1865, he listed his occupation on an 1890s census form as “brass finisher.” Only until the 1910 census did Green transform into the proprietor of an iron works company.

According to Don Burmeister’s manhole cover website, “Bryan G. Green was a transplanted Englishman who had a thriving Iron Works on the edge of Brooklyn Heights in the first decades of the 20th Century. Just the time to supply the growing need for covers for the ubiquitous coal chutes in the front of many of the new and updated buildings in the thriving new borough.”

“The address on the covers varied over the years, but the building that now stands at 215 Pacific was probably at the core of the foundry,” wrote Burmeister.

A Brooklyn Daily Times article notes that Green had a building constructed for his business, Central Iron Works, on Pacific Street in 1905 at a cost of $8,500. He apparently lived on Pacific Street then with his New York–born wife and three children, and his name pops up in newspaper archives as a member of various organizations, including the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce.

Walter Grutchfield states that Green, who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1880s, ran his foundry from 1901 to 1927.

The latter year is when ads in Brooklyn newspapers began to appear that read “Brian G. Green Son.” In his sixties now, Green apparently had his son, John, join him in the business. Or maybe he handed it down to his son—who kept his father’s name in the ad as a testament to his strong reputation.

Bryan G. Green died in Brooklyn two years later, per a Brooklyn Eagle death notice. At the time, his address was listed as 300 Carroll Street. Green’s funeral service was held at a chapel at 187 South Oxford Street, after which he was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery.

And the foundry? The ads stopped in 1927, and I’ve yet to uncover any trace of what happened to it. The coal chute cover near Pierrepont Street and at other sites across Brooklyn Heights are Bryan G. Green’s legacy.

[Second and third images: The Brooklyn Citizen]