Former Bedford Chevrolet Sales Corp
If you’ve ever found yourself crawling down Brooklyn’s Bedford Avenue, trying to get to the BQE highway, you know the building. It’s the long, grey brick one that looks like it’s been holding its breath for decades. For years, its walls have been a rotating canvas of graffiti, each layer a new, temporary skin. Most people see an eyesore, a relic of a forgotten time. But that building has stories to tell.
It’s hard to imagine now, looking at its sealed-up windows, but this was once a place of gleaming new Chevrolets. Back in 1918, the architect Henry Nurick designed it to be a modern, fireproof automobile showroom. The cost? About $1.2 million in today’s money. For a car dealership.
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| Photo courtesy of the New York City Municipal Archives |
That’s because from the 1910s to the 1950s, this stretch of Bedford Avenue was known as “Automobile Row.” Before the “Big Three” car companies swallowed up the competition, dozens of car brands had showrooms here. It was a bustling corridor of chrome and steel, filled with garages, service stations, and the hum of new engines. This building, with its grand windows, Spanish tiles, and intricate brickwork, was one of its jewels. Upstairs, the John Hancock Life Insurance Company kept offices, a quiet hum of business above the street-level sizzle.
But the story doesn’t even start there.
Before the cars, before the showroom, there was a fire. And before the fire, there was the St. Marks Avenue Hotel.
In the late 1800s, this same patch of land was home to a handsome residential hotel. It was a convenient and fashionable place in a rapidly growing city, offering rooms for a night or leases for a year. It served a rising class of professionals who were flocking to Brooklyn. The hotel stood as a neighborhood landmark until 1916, when a devastating fire burned it to the ground.
Two years later, the car showroom rose from its ashes, a symbol of a new, faster-paced century.
Today, the glamour is long gone. The big showroom windows are bricked over. The fancy tiles and decorative cornices have vanished. All that’s left is the building’s solid, silent frame. It no longer sells cars or rents rooms. It just sits there, a quiet witness to a neighborhood that has changed, and changed again. Next time you drive by, maybe you’ll see it a little differently. Not just as a forgotten wall, but as a history book hiding in plain sight.
And it wasn't the only one. Many of the buildings on Automobile Row were designed to be beautiful. If you walk down the street today, you can still see the most famous survivor: the old Studebaker Building, a landmark now filled with apartments. It’s a ghost of that glamorous past.
Our building’s location was no accident. It sat on a clever triangle of land where Rogers Avenue flows into Bedford, giving it a front-row seat on three different streets. It was like a stage with three sides open to the audience. The architects used this to their advantage, lining the walls with enormous display windows. They gave anyone passing by a perfect view of the shiny new cars inside.
This was marketing you could see and feel. Dealers kept the showrooms lit up late into the evening. The idea was to tempt people heading home from work, or couples strolling by after a show at a local theater. They might see a car glinting under the lights and feel a sudden pull, a desire for something new.
But the golden age of the automobile couldn't last forever. The Roaring Twenties gave way to the Great Depression. By 1930, the glamour had faded. The building found a new, more practical purpose. According to The New York Times, the showroom floor was taken over by the Department of Motor Vehicles.
The building that once sold dreams now handled the paperwork. Instead of admiring new Chevrolets, people came here to get their license plates and register their old ones.
But the DMV didn’t last long, either. Maybe the Great Depression meant fewer people were buying cars, and the office just wasn't busy enough to keep the lights on. The building changed hands again.
By 1944, it was a Banner Dairy Store, one of Brooklyn’s local supermarkets. During World War II, it did more than just sell milk and eggs. It became a collection point for recycled paper and metal, a small neighborhood outpost helping with the war effort.
But the grocery store went the way of the DMV, and by 1969, the building had reinvented itself once more. It became the Bellrose Ballroom, a popular and well-known spot for parties and events.
The Ballroom’s most important guest, however, wasn’t a bride or a birthday boy. It was Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. In the late '60s and early '70s, she used the space for political rallies and press conferences. Imagine that. In this building that once sold cars and groceries, the first Black woman elected to Congress, and later a candidate for President of the United States, stood and made her voice heard.
But like all good parties, this one eventually ended. The Ballroom fell behind on its taxes, and in 1983, the city foreclosed. The doors were sealed shut.
This is where the story gets really interesting. A nearby church, the Washington Temple Church of God in Christ, bought the building for $100,000. It was a strange deal with some very specific strings attached. For at least ten years, the church could only use the property for non-profit community work, like outreach or social services. And if the city ever needed the land back for a public project, the church would have to sell it for just one dollar. The building was meant to serve the people.
Did it ever happen? It’s hard to say. For as long as you can look back on Google Street View images, the building has been walled off, silent since the city first took it over.
The church has owned it outright since 2018, having paid off its mortgage. For years, there has been talk of developing housing on the site. But in a city desperate for places to live, no plans have ever appeared. A look at the roof from above shows damage, but the old brick walls still seem to be holding strong.
As someone who lives in Brooklyn, I drive past this building all the time. I hope the church, or someone, finally puts it to good use. It sits right at the edge of Grant Square, a place that deserves to be a vibrant center for the community again, with restaurants, shops, and life.
This building could be the heart of that comeback. It's been a hotel, a showroom, a DMV, a grocery store, and a ballroom. It has served movie-goers and war heroes, and it gave a stage to a political trailblazer. It’s about time it had a new story to tell.
But that new story might be a short one, and its ending seems to have already been written.
Any dream of a comeback is fading fast. City records tell a grim tale: the roof is partially gone, collapsed, and open to the sky. The second floor has caved in on the first, and the first floor has fallen into the cellar. The building is eating itself from the inside out. The city has issued an official order: Vacate. It’s too dangerous even to step inside.
Because the building was never declared a landmark, there is nothing to protect it. It’s more than likely it will be torn down.
This isn’t just about a crumbling building. It’s about location. Three blocks away, a crucial rezoning and a massive redevelopment along Atlantic Avenue are changing the neighborhood. Suddenly, our forgotten building sits on a piece of very valuable land. Its past doesn't matter as much as its future.
As of 2025, the city assessed the property at just under $250,000. But that number is almost meaningless. The real value is in what could be built here next, and the whispers have already started. Developers are circling, and a bidding war feels inevitable for this prime piece of Bedford Avenue.
Soon, the only things left of the hotel, the showroom, and the ballroom will be the patch of land they once stood on, waiting for a new, and probably much taller, story to begin.
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| The exterior wall facing Rogers Avenue shows faded metal stencils of three doves (pigeons) and a lone cat. |
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| The exterior wall facing Bedford Avenue shows faded metal stencils of three doves (pigeons). |
Source(s):
1. Historic Districts Council. (2024). Bedford Heights: A guide to historic New York City neighborhoods [Guidebook]. https://www.hdc.org
2. Platform formed by state blacks; They'll present it to parley opening. (1972, March 6). The New York Times, p. 30. https://www.nytimes.com/1972/03/06/archives/platform-formed-by-state-blacks-theyll-present-it-to-parley-opening.html
3. Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce Bulletin. (1924). United States: (n.p.). pp.11
4. Brooklyn Register and Buyers' Guide .... (1927). United States: Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce.
5. Brooklyn Eagle Staff. (2025, August 8). Once a ballroom and church hall, long-derelict building awaits interested developer. Brooklyn Eagle. https://brooklyneagle.com/articles/2025/08/08/once-a-ballroom-and-church-hall-long-derelict-building-awaits-interested-developer/
6. 1940s.nyc. (n.d.). 1940s NYC: A time-traveling street view [Interactive map]. https://1940s.nyc/
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