TALAMAN STREET, NOS. 57-61
MAY 22, 1936. ABBOTT FILE 128

TALAMAN STREET BETWEEN JAY AND BRIDGE STREETS
Fort Greene
MAY 22, 1936. ABBOTT FILE 129

Talman Street, variant image

Nestled under the Brooklyn anchorage of the Manhattan Bridge was "Irishtown," a slum of pre-Civil War houses renting for $15 per month. Lacking cellars, central heat, hot water, toilets, and bathtubs, many of the houses had been declared uninhabitable by the city. Talman Street was the remnant of an old cow path with an ice cream factory at one end and empty lots at the other.

During the depression, "Irishtown" began attracting African-Americans, and although racial tensions erupted elsewhere in Brooklyn, such as in Bedford-Stuyvesant, there was little resistance to people of color here. Abbott File 128 provides anecdotal evidence, showing an African-American man and a white woman standing together in the doorway of no. 57 Talman Street. In Abbott File 129, a woman with two small children is sitting at the curb of an empty lot; that the family is wearing winter coats on a pleasant May day suggests that they are homeless. A variant image with a pushcart vendor passing by includes a third child.

In 1950, the entry ramps of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway cut through the area and further marginalized it. Talman Street is now gone, along with the old houses, replaced by a public housing project, but the ice cream factory building still stands. Many of the neighborhood's industrial buildings are occupied by artists in search of inexpensive studios.

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