January 3, 2009
Built around 1830-35 by Nelly Johnson Hubbard, the Hubbard House is, in part, a rare surviving early nineteenth-century Dutch-American farmhouse in Brooklyn. The older section of the house reflects traditional Dutch design in its incorporation of H-bent construction, which gives the house its characteristic one-and-one-half-story form, in its use of a gabled roof with sloping spring eaves at the front and rear, and in its incorporation of clapboard siding. It exemplifies a three-bay-wide side-hall plan type popular for Dutch houses in southern Brooklyn at the beginning of the nineteenth century and originally included an unusual shed-roofed kitchen wing, a feature associated with the buildings of Gravesend carpenter-builder Lawrence Ryder, to whom this building is tentatively attributed.
A late example of Dutch-American design, it presents an interesting blend of traditional Dutch forms and structure with nineteenth-century construction innovations. In 1904 it was purchased by garment worker Vincenzo Lucchelli and in 1924 the Lucchellis constructed the house’s southern two-story hipped-roofed wing designed by the Brooklyn firm of Salvati & Le Quornik which incorporated a multi-windowed bedroom billed as a “sleeping porch” in response to the tuberculosis that was besetting their family.
*Excerpt from the Landmarks Preservation Commission designation report
