THE UNION STREET PROJECT: 110 Union Street

This is the twelfth post of "The Union Street Project," in which I unearth the history of every building along the once bustling Brooklyn commercial strips of Union Street between Hicks and Van Brunt, and Columbia Street between Sackett and Carroll.
Today, 110 Union Street stands at the southeast corner of Union and Columbia. Prior to the 1970s, this address did not exist. The building on that corner had an entrance on Columbia, not Union, and was first (in the 1850s) 201 Columbia, then later in the 19th Century 227 Columbia.

As the picture from the 1940s below tells, the corner was the home of Brody's, which looks like it was a lovely little luncheonette and soda fountain. Upstairs was a dentist equipped with a x-ray. The odd rectangular outlines between the second-story windows make me think the building was festooned with advertisements at an earlier time.

I have been told by many that this corner was also the site of a vegetable market for many years, but nobody remembers the name, and I haven't been able to confirm it through any hard evidence. 1898, 227 was the location of the Bolton Drug Co., which had four Brooklyn locations. They heavily advertised a wonder drug called Mi-o-na in 1902.

This building and the one next to it no longer exist because their foundations were destabilized during the great Columbia Street sewer dig that blighted the area in the 1970s. Some people say the City let the construction drag on as a way of undermining the crime culture that then ruled the area. Many old buildings along Columbia either fell down or were ripped down as a result, and the apartment building that houses Union Max was erected in the 1980s. It's bland and dull.

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