Triassic-Jurassic sandstone is a softened rock with a 200 million year old history. As the heavy rains of the then-savannah waned over time, the streams zigzagging across the quarries of the northeastern United States dried, leaving behind rich deposits of mudstone and sand. Emerging from this silt is brownstone. The first New York City brownstone townhouses were constructed in the 1830s, gaining widespread popularity in the mid-19th century that stuck around for the centuries following.
In 1920, Mariam Garaoghalanian bought an Italianate style three-story brownstone for $500. Mariam was the co-signer for the deed to the brownstone, a seamstress, a survivor of the Armenian genocide, and my great-grandmother. She brought her mother to American safety up the sandstone steps. Birthed her son on the hardwood floor. Taught her granddaughter—my mother—the running stitch in the backyard garden. Died in the late afternoon sun cutting through the windowpane. Four generations of my family have, at some point, called those sandstone bricks home.
My great-grandmother’s story—and the history of the family brownstone at large—is a story about lasting and displaced persistence, a story about the stability found burrowed into the hardwood floors, and about the block heel of her work boots poking half-inch holes into the backyard garden. Mariam wore her shoes until her toes eroded the leather of the toebox from the inside out, leaving the sole of the shoe on a slope and her ankles buckling outwards. She was bowlegged and walked with a slightly pronated gait, shuffling her shoes across the different textures she encountered in a day: the wood floor of each room with the same universal scratchy panel (except for a brief stint in the 1970s, where each bedroom was so aptly decked in deep-pile shag carpeting), then the brownstone stairs, then the sepia washed pavement, the wood of the factory floor, the latticed metal of the sewing treadle. She spun it backward and forward, every day, for 35 years.
Familiarity seems to coat every surface of Brooklyn in a thick film. Nearly 300 years prior to my great-grandmother’s arrival in Brooklyn, Dutch settlers named the land “Breukelen,” duplicating the name of a small town in Utrecht. They carried the name with them from Utrecht, bringing familiarity to a land so foreign and unknown. “Breukelen” roughly translates to “broken land” in Dutch. My great-grandmother stepped out of the physicality of one broken land into another that inherited that same rupture, but by name only.
The land underneath the brownstone is not “broken,” per se, but it isa shaken landscape. The “slope” of Park Slope is a 3.20% incline, steeper than most areas in Brooklyn. This slant of the landscape operates as the perfect plane to lean against. The slope hides and protects. On August 17, 1776, an English newspaper described the hills of the Park Slope area as “already by nature very advantageous and defensible” in reference to George Washington’s strategic establishment of a defense lookout there. There is something clinging to those Park Slope hills, a kind of structural safety, that has cradled my family for the last four generations.
Compared to the 3,100 foot elevation of her native village in Armenia, the base of the brownstone sits at a measly 48 feet above sea-level. But Mariam must have found a particular kind of resonance from returning, once again, to a house on an incline. From the 5th century BC to the 20th century AD, Armenian houses were primarily constructed into the sloped ground of the mountain, the only openings of the dwelling: the sloping sandstone chimney and the well-shaped-gap of the front door, where inhabitants descended via ladder or rope. The tradition began with our Indo-European ancestors, who, new to the unforgiving winters of the sharp landscape, buried themselves and their families beneath the snow.
Real estate records indicate that, in 1976, my great-grandparents split the building at its hip and rezoned the one-family home to two, retreating to the first level of the brownstone, which laid half-set into the ground, the kitchen windows rising just above the line of the pavement, so they could watch the loafered men scale the slope of the avenue up to the train station.
An instinctive return.
Throughout the neighborhood, the edges of each individual house touch one another, leaving no margin, no space for windows on the sides of the house. The only windows are on the front and back ends of the house. Thus, the hallways are sheathed in a constant dusk. The darkest part of the house, the hallway that stretches its entire length, is now relatively barren, with the exception of a long and skinny Persian rug lining the floor. My mother watched Fixer Upper on HGTV in 2018 and decided to redesign the space to maximize light and minimize clutter.
But it wasn’t always like that. The hallway used to be a crowded space, furniture and loose items from the connecting rooms spilling into the doorway. After Mariam’s death in 1999, my grandfather Andrew removed a large side table from the hallway, wrapping old t-shirts around and under its legs so as not to scratch the floor.
Underneath the sidetable, the wood floor was a darkened footprint; the late afternoon sun that sent sharp arrows through the front windows bleached the exposed floor, leaving the space covered by the sidetable dark and true. Even still, the uneven color persists, marking the shadow of where the sidetable used to be. What’s more, my grandfather discovered a small spider plant, presumably kicked behind the space between the sideboard and the wall. It had survived for over a year without water since she died.
The stubborn plant held the shape of her care. The memory of Mariam roots itself in every crevice of the house.
Though I did not grow up in the house, I always look at it with a kind of reverence; my great-grandmother is so distinctly present there. I find comfort in the architectural overlap that we share. While our lives are so categorically different, our births offset by nearly a century’s worth of catastrophe, we have both laid in the same garden, walked through the same doorways, climbed the same stoop. We have placed our bodies in the same rooms, and that is the closest thing to her that I can know.
