Our Buildings: The Broken Angel House
What makes a neighborhood? People, pets and the stories that make up our days. But we also have our buildings, the places where we work, play, eat, sleep, learn and live. Throughout Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, you will find everything from colonial brownstones to housing projects to luxury apartments: buildings that have been here since the earliest days of this country. Have a building you think we should highlight? Let us know in the comments or email us at TheNabe@TheNabe.me.
The corner of Quincy Street and Downing Street is mostly made up of warehouses, with a couple of houses sprinkled in between the big brick buildings. If you walked down the street now, there’s not much that would jump out at you – except for one door half-hidden underneath scaffolding. It’s big and red, with the words “Broken Angel 4” painted on it in white. If you passed by only a few years ago, you would have seen a ramshackle spire of mirrors and ledges rising above the surroundings.
The Broken Angel House was an ongoing architectural project of Arthur and Cynthia Wood, the building’s former owners. After they bought the former Brooklyn Trolley headquarters in 1979, the Woods built the spires on top of the brick townhouse, becoming a neighborhood landmark. It sported stained glass windows made from broken bottles and rooms that were coated in mirrors. It was famously featured in the 2005 documentary “Dave Chappelle’s Block Party.”
In 2006, the top floors of the building caught fire, leading the Department of Buildings to conduct an investigation into the stability of the odd structure. It was deemed unsafe, and the Woods were ordered to vacate. The couple began a long battle against their eviction, but only a year after the initial inspection Cynthia died due to cancer. After more than six years of fighting, Arthur Wood was forced to vacate the Broken Angel House in March 2013.
These days, Wood lives upstate in Beacon, New York. However, he still hopes that he will be able to reclaim his property one day, according to the New York Daily News. While that seems unlikely, the current owner has said he wants to bring the Broken Angel back to its roots, evoking the history of it’s original design.