Thread by @rcallimachi

1. Have you ever seen this photograph by Berenice Abbott in the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Shot in the 1930s, it captures Brooklyn's unique colonnaded rows — once eight pillared houses, four on the east and four on the west side. nytimes.com/2025/10/31/rea…

2. A few weeks ago, I was contacted by the owner of the last survivor of the colonnaded row on the opposite side — No. 46 Willow Place, smushed between two modernist buildings:

3. Brian Palmer's parents bought the house 56 years ago in 1969. The green paint on the columns was already peeling, and his frugal parents — his mother is a survivor of the Holocaust — did little to the house, turning this home into a kind of time capsule. Check out the stove:

4. The house was built in the 1840s, before the light bulb was invented, before the telephone and before running water. @Compass realtor Paul Murphy showed me the indentation in the backyard that is likely the spot where the former outhouse was located.

@Compass 5. The house appears in numerous histories of Brooklyn and the Palmers grew up in the shadow of those columns, hiding behind the colonnade as tour groups stopped by:

6. It's fun to imagine what life was like for the original occupants. In the 1840s, the first owners read by candlelight, bathed with water from a cistern, communicated by sending telegraphs and took the ferry to Manhattan — decades before the Brooklyn Bridge rose across the river:

@Compass 7. The Palmers listed the house for sale for over $3.4 million earlier this month after it had been in their family for more than half a century. Come join me in the Comments to our New York Times story about the pillared house that outlasted its row: nytimes.com/2025/10/31/rea…