The Wilbur House: End of an Era

It’s the 1870s. After two centuries of intermarriage amongst the Vanderveers, Vanderbilts, Ditmases, Lefferts, Lotts, and Martenses—the old Dutch families of Flatbush—Jennie Vanderveer Martense (the most Jane Austeny figure in Flatbush history?) has gone and married an English New Englander who’d only lived in Flatbush for 10 years, Lionel Wilbur.

After Jennie’s marriage, her grandfather, a judge, built them the ornate shown here (including a lil’ wellhouse). His house was next door, (the first two photos below), and the quarters for their black servants was in the back by the train tracks, which would later be the Q/B subway line. On the site of what’s now Westbury Court, all 3 homes were photographed by Eugene Armbruster in 1922—a year before demolition and already abandoned and overrun.

The Wilbur home, which Gertrude Lefferts Vanderbilt called ““highly ornamental to this section of the village” in her history of Flatbush, was completed in 1878, meaning it was a Victorian-era home two decades before any of the houses we think of as “Victorian Flatbush” were built.

Judge Martense’s mansion replaced an old farmhouse likely built with wood from Flatbush trees. It was “much injured” in the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Brooklyn, as Vanderbilt puts it, “standing as it did upon the very borders of the fight.” She goes on to add that “many bullets were picked up upon the grounds afterward, and were kept as relics.”

You can see from the apartments in the background of some of the pics that the area around the mansions was already starting to be built up. Out of place on Flatbush Avenue, the homes were demolished in 1923. I don’t know what became of the Martenses, and I wonder if their servants were able to get work in the homes of the nouveau riche south of the park (a hist’ry myst’ry for another time). Whatever happened next, these photos make me think a lot about Flatbush Ave’s Victorian era transition.