Former NYPD 65th and 73rd Precinct Stationhouse

If you walk down East New York Avenue, it is easy to miss the old police station that once watched over the block. Your eyes go first to the Howard Houses, those tall brick towers that rise on the left like a wall. The former precinct squats beside them, low and dignified, its stone face worn by nearly a century of weather and worry.

By the time I began paying attention to it, the building already had an expiration date. The city had picked it as the site of new affordable housing. The full demolition permit had been issued back in February 2025, and the crews were working their way toward it. On paper, it was a win for a neighborhood that has carried more than its share of struggles. For the building itself, it was a quiet death sentence.

I wanted to see it before it went.

The main trolley line that ran down East New York Avenue was the Bergen-East New York Line, operated by the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation (BMT). It served as a key east-west route in the Brownsville area until many city trolley lines were converted to bus routes starting in the 1940s.

One sharp winter day, I came up with a plan. I had spent hours online, reading what I could about the precinct's history, tracing old photos, trying to match them to the doorway and the stonework that were still there.

This place had once been a nerve center for the New York Police Department. People were brought here in cuffs. Families waited on those steps for news. Officers marched in and out on shifts that blurred into one another. Not all of that history was proud. Some of it was heavy and painful, especially in a neighborhood like this one.

Now, the station house was empty on the inside and full of promises on the outside. City officials talked about hundreds of new apartments for low-income families. Advocates for housing cheered. Some longtime residents shook their heads at the thought of losing one more piece of old Brooklyn, even if it had been a symbol of power and fear.

I was not there to debate policy. I was there to get inside.

What I ran into instead was a wave of bad timing and a knot of nerves in my stomach. Work crews were already moving in and out. The first stage was asbestos abatement. That meant sealed doors, taped-off zones, and workers in suits that looked like something out of a sci-fi movie. Even on weekends, there was activity at the site.

I walked back and forth across the street, trying to look casual, trying to read every opening like it might be a door into another time. The longer I waited, the more I could feel that mix of guilt and excitement that comes with any attempt to slip into a place that is supposed to be closed.

In the end, anxiety won. I told myself it was not safe. I told myself there would be another chance. I circled the block one more time, then gave up and left. For a while, I chased other locations, some in New York State, some out of state, places that seemed easier and less watched.

The precinct stayed in my head. Weeks later, I came back to East New York Avenue and knew right away that the clock was close to running out.

Riseboro Apartment Building to the left rose into the sky most recently a year and a couple of months ago.

The roofline had changed. Workers had begun taking the building apart by hand, starting from the top and working their way down. A heavy backhoe sat in the temporary construction yard, quiet for the moment but clearly waiting for its turn to finish what the crews had started.

This time, I did not pace. I slipped through a gap in the fence, squeezed myself into the construction zone, and hugged the building, listening for voices. The yard was empty. My heart was not.

I made it to the side of the building only to find every ground-floor window still sealed with thick cross-sectioned boards, tight and stubborn. Not even a torso-width crack. I pressed my hands against the wood and felt stupid for thinking it would be easy. I had come all that way to touch plywood.

Angry at myself and at the timing, I backed out the way I came in, brushing dirt from my coat. I told myself, out loud this time, that I would be back again in a week. Either the place would be gone for good, or I would finally find a way in.

I slid through and felt the fence scrape my shoulder. On the other side, a simple construction tool, left behind or forgotten, gave me the extra reach and leverage I needed into an open invitation.

My pulse jumped. My face felt hot despite the cold air. I pushed my bag through the opening, then tried to follow. A rusted window nail grabbed at my coat as I squeezed. There was a sharp ripping sound. A part of my winter coat's shoulder had torn. For a brief second, I was stuck, half inside, half out, like the building itself, suspended between past and future. Then I was in.

The air inside was colder than outside and carried that mix of old chalky dust smell and new damage. Light sliced in through wooden window frames, drawing bright lines on the floor. Somewhere above me, something banged and then settled, sending a soft shiver through the frame of the building.

I stood there, coat ripped, face flushed, breathing hard, and felt a wave of victory that was far larger than the small act that caused it. This place that I had watched from the sidewalk, this brick box that had once been a stage for authority and fear, was now open and quiet, almost shy.

The vaulted ceilings inside the basement, where the jail's cells were located.

Only later, once I had explored the rooms and peered into the basement, did I realize there had been an easier way. Near the front, in a low, hidden part towards the side of the building, a large opening yawned where workers had created a walking path of boards for their scaffolding covering its entry.

While I had crawled my way in like a raccoon, there had been a wide, simple entrance waiting for anyone who took the time to see it beneath the darkness.

C'est la vie.

Color Altered Black & White Tax Photo
Photo courtesy of New York City Finance Department tax photo/1940s.nyc

A Tired Beauty on East New York Avenue

Just a block from the grand sweep of Eastern Parkway, at 1546 East New York Avenue, sat a tired beauty of a building that had seen almost everything Brooklyn can throw at it. Its story, like so many in Brooklyn, is layered with history, drama, and the slow, grinding churn of urban change.

For most people walking by, its imposing structure was built on power and fear. But this was once the 65th Precinct station house, later the 73rd Precinct, and the stories tied to it reach from old black and white TV dramas to one of the most troubling wrongful convictions in New York City history.

The station house went up in the early 1900s as the home of the 65th Precinct. That is the safest thing I can say about its birthday. The date you will find repeated everywhere online is 1909, and every version of it I have chased leads back to a single photo caption from 2012 that cites nothing at all. The city's own tax records, meanwhile, put the year built at 1930, which cannot be right for a building that already reads as Edwardian in the 1940s tax photo. Somewhere in the Municipal Archives there is an answer. I have not found it yet.

The renumbering is just as murky. At some point the house stopped being the 65th and became the 73rd, and the plaque over the door never caught up. Every account I can find says "sometime in the 1910s" and none of them says how they know.

For decades, officers here patrolled Brownsville and the surrounding streets. That continued until 1985, when the department moved into a modern station house a few blocks west along East New York Avenue, at number 1470. The new building hummed with fluorescent light, tall jail walls, and fresh paint. The old one was left behind.

Since then, the original precinct house sat empty, back wall sagging, a roost for the local pigeons, its stone and brick still handsome but clearly worn.

The Number That Confused Everybody

The building's number has been confused over the years. Some sources claim that the classic ABC TV series Naked City (which ran from 1958 to 1963) was set in the 65th Precinct, and people sometimes link that back to this Brownsville station. The show was indeed set in a fictional 65th, but it was a Manhattan house. The exteriors were the 9th Precinct on East 5th Street in the first and fourth seasons and Midtown North on West 54th in the second and third, and by the time the series was even imagined, this building had been known as the 73rd Precinct for decades. The matching number is a coincidence and nothing more.

Worth knowing, too, that there is a real 65th Precinct in Brooklyn right now, and it is not this one and never was. It sits down in Sheepshead Bay, a world away from Brownsville. Google the name and that is where you land.

The Whitmore Case

The 73rd did make it into crime history in a darker way. On August 28, 1963, two young women, Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert, were killed in their Upper East Side apartment. The papers called it the Career Girls Murders and the city did not stop talking about it for months.

Eight months later, on April 24, 1964, a nineteen-year-old Brownsville man named George Whitmore Jr. was picked up over an attempted rape a block from where he lived and brought to this station house. He was not arrested for the Career Girls case. He was not a suspect in it. But over the hours that followed, in these rooms, detectives came away with confessions to that attack, to the murder of a woman named Minnie Edmonds, and to the killings of Wylie and Hoffert. Sixty-one pages of them.

None of it was true. A man named Richard Robles was eventually indicted for the Upper East Side murders after confessing, and the Manhattan charges against Whitmore were thrown out in 1965. The other cases took far longer. He was not cleared of the last of it until April 10, 1973, nine years and three convictions after that April night, having served better than three years for crimes he did not commit. He never received a dime in compensation.

The case did not stay local. The Supreme Court pointed at it in Miranda v. Arizona in 1966 as the conspicuous example of what a coerced confession looks like, and it is widely credited with pushing New York to abolish the death penalty. George Whitmore Jr. died in Wildwood, New Jersey, in October 2012, at sixty-eight.

It also inspired The Marcus-Nelson Murders, the 1973 CBS movie that served as the pilot for Kojak.

In this clip from the crime thriller The Marcus Nelson Murders, we see the former 73rd Precinct, Howard Houses, Burger Flame, Mays Deli, Otiz Funeral Home, Sun Lighting, Liberty Lighting, and, farther in the background, Loew's Pitkin Theatre. The scene was filmed in 1972 on East New York Avenue and Rockaway Avenue. The movie later aired on CBS and served as the pilot for the Kojak series, starring Telly Savalas and Ned Beatty.

Even long after the NYPD left this house, the neighborhood kept appearing on screen. Antoine Fuqua shot parts of Brooklyn's Finest here in the summer of 2008, working in Brownsville and around the Van Dyke Houses, a kind of shadow version of the real history on East New York Avenue.

Deals, Debt and Delay

Once the police moved out, the building entered a long, messy chapter that will be familiar to anyone who follows New York real estate.

The deed tells it plainly. After a public hearing in September 1999, the city put the old station house up for auction with an upset price of $163,000. The winning bid was $200,000, and on October 5, 2000, the City of New York signed the property over to the Chen Family Company of 250 Lafayette Street. Buried in that deed is the clause that decided everything that followed: use of the property was restricted, in perpetuity, to a "Community Facility Use." Not apartments. Not offices for rent. Not a warehouse. Whatever this building became, it had to serve the neighborhood, and that restriction runs with the land forever.

Two years later, in the fall of 2002, the Chens sold it on to the Family Services Network of New York, a Brooklyn nonprofit working with HIV positive youth, people struggling with addiction, and New Yorkers living with mental illness. They took a $450,000 mortgage the same day. By September 2003 they had filed plans with the Buildings Department to convert the former police station into offices, and a permit followed in 2005.

On paper, the plan looked hopeful. In practice, it was expensive. That is a heavy lift for a nonprofit, especially with an aging, complicated structure like a former station house. In December 2004 the group refinanced with a $1,118,000 mortgage from Banco Popular North America, and took on another $240,000 in 2010. Somewhere along the line, the numbers stopped working.

In 2017, the group partnered with a developer, Xenolith Partners, to push forward an affordable housing project. On paper, once again, the timing was right. The need for low-cost housing in Brownsville is huge, and the city has been leaning on public-private partnerships to get those buildings up.

Then came more delays. Demolition applications went in during July 2020 and were never permitted. The project had stalled for financial and COVID-19 reasons. Construction costs kept climbing, funding streams shifted, and the old house kept sinking further into disrepair.

The front lobby door. Former residents and witnesses have alleged that individuals "On Trips", experiencing mental health issues, were at times handcuffed to radiators in the lobby, in full view of people passing on the street, "bug out." Additional accounts claim that those taken directly to the building's basement were subjected to severe physical abuse. Such allegations reflect a broader pattern of policing in the 1960s and 1970s that critics and historians have characterized as aggressive and frequently excessive by today's standards.

Stairs, criminal suspects never wanted to walk down or up inside the stationhouse.

Intricate details of the wrought iron staircase

Lebechi East

To make the project work, the city had to get creative with its land. NYCHA agreed to transfer 38,000 square feet of development rights, along with a slim, 6,200 square foot strip of land at the edge of the Howard Houses campus, to the owners of the old precinct lot next door. On paper, it is Brooklyn Block 3489, Lot 1. In real life, it is the kind of leftover space that only becomes valuable when someone figures out how to use it.

That transfer went to 1546 ENY Owner LLC, the entity that controls the former station house site. The NYCHA board approved it in March 2025 and the deal closed on December 19, 2025. With the extra land and development rights, the partners could tear down the boarded-up building, last used in the mid-1980s, and put up an 11-story apartment house in its place. They are calling it Lebechi East.

In return, the two owners, Xenolith Partners and the nonprofit Family Services Network of New York, agreed to hold at least eight of the planned apartments for residents of the Howard Houses who want to move into the new building. It is a small but notable promise, and it is a first: NYCHA had never before used the federal Transfer of Assistance tool, which lets those households move straight across through Project-Based Section 8. Eleven more apartments go to NYCHA residents citywide through the Housing Connect lottery. People who have lived for years in one public housing complex will get a first shot at brand new units a few steps away.

The project calls for 95 apartments with rents capped for households earning between 30 and 60 percent of area median income. At least 57 apartments, sixty percent of the building, are reserved for people leaving homeless shelters, which means more than half of it is meant as a direct path out of the shelter system.

This is not only a place to sleep. Plans show a community health facility of about five to six thousand square feet on the ground floor and on-site social services staff in the building. Residents will share a fitness room, a community room that opens onto an outdoor terrace, a laundry room, a bike room, and apartments in an all-electric Passive House building designed to keep the utility bills low.

The bill came to roughly $61 million, a figure that has climbed steadily from the $51.5 million first floated back in 2020. The money is a stack: about $23 million in equity from the state's Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program, more from the Supportive Housing Opportunity Program, the Community Investment Fund and a Clean Energy Initiative grant, a city Supportive Housing Loan through HPD, construction and permanent debt from Webster Bank, City Council Reso A funds, and operating money for the services from the state Office of Mental Health.

The old 65th and 73rd Precinct station house has gone from a symbol of law and order, to a backdrop for TV and film, to an empty city building that many people forgot. The wrecking crew finished its work, the governor announced the start of construction in April 2026, and the tower is going up now on the ground where I tore my coat. After years of deals, debt, and delay, it is finally being written into a new story about where and how people in Brownsville live. Hopefully, the next chapter will focus on housing, health, and support instead.

Photo courtesy of Gran Kriegel Associates.

📋 Reader Records

🚒 Did you serve at the 65th or 73rd Precinct?

The building is gone now, so what is left is what people remember. If you worked out of this house before the move to 1470 in 1985, or grew up on these blocks when it was still open, I want to hear it. Two questions in particular have beaten me: nobody can tell me the year this station house was actually built, and nobody can tell me when the 65th became the 73rd. Every date online traces back to one uncited photo caption. If you have a shield, a roll call sheet, a photo of the muster room or the cells, or just a clear memory of which year that plaque stopped matching the number on the cars, that would settle something no archive has.

📩 Share Your Story or drop a comment below — every contributor gets full credit

⬇ Keep Reading

🏙 Brooklyn buildings on borrowed time

Station houses, dairies, power plants and churches — the ones that got saved and the ones that did not.

👮 Former 75th Police Precinct Station House Renovated The East New York station house that got the ending this one didn't. › 🥛 Empire State Dairy: The Decay of a Historic Brooklyn Milk Plant (Photos) A massive abandoned dairy complex a few blocks east, in East New York. › 🦇 Former Gowanus Canal Batcave Renovated A legendary abandoned power station turned graffiti mecca, reborn as an arts center. › ✝️ Inside the Abandoned St. Michael and St. Edward Church in Brooklyn A Fort Greene landmark I got into before it came down in 2023. › 🕊 B'nai Adath Kol Beth Yisrael Shul Demolished A Hebrew Israelite synagogue in Bed-Stuy, photographed and then gone. › 📚 Bethel AME Church: A New Chapter for Colored School No. 2 Another Brooklyn civic building rewritten into housing, with the shell kept. ›

📍 1546 East New York Avenue, Brownsville, Brooklyn (Block 3489, Lot 121). Built in the early 1900s as the 65th Precinct station house and later renumbered the 73rd, it was abandoned when the NYPD moved to 1470 East New York Avenue in 1985. The full demolition permit was issued in February 2025 and the building has since come down; construction of Lebechi East, a 95-unit supportive and affordable housing building, began in April 2026.

Source(s):

1. City of New York. (2000, October 5). Deed, City of New York to Chen Family Company, Block 3489, Lot 121, 1546 East New York Avenue (recorded December 18, 2000). New York City Register, ACRIS.
2. New York City Register. (2002–2010). ACRIS records for Brooklyn Block 3489, Lot 121: deed, Chen Family Co. to Family Services Network of New York, Inc., recorded November 14, 2002; mortgage, $1,118,000, Banco Popular North America, recorded December 30, 2004; mortgage, $240,000, recorded March 3, 2010.
3. New York City Housing Authority. (2025, December 19). NYCHA closes on transfer of development rights for Lebechi East building at 1546 East New York Avenue in Brownsville, and for first time leverages transfer of assistance tool to create housing opportunities for existing NYCHA residents [Press release]. https://www.nyc.gov/site/nycha/about/press/pr-2025/pr-20251219.page
4. New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development. (2025, April 3). Combined notice of finding of no significant impact and intent to request release of funds for 1546 East New York Avenue. https://www.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdf/1546-East-New-York-Ave-NOI-FONSI_English.pdf
5. Gillespie, M. (2025, December 29). NYCHA finalizes development rights transfer for 1546 East New York Avenue in Brownsville, Brooklyn. New York YIMBY. https://newyorkyimby.com/2025/12/nycha-finalizes-development-rights-transfer-for-1546-east-new-york-avenue-in-brownsville-brooklyn.html
6. Office of the Governor of New York. (2026, April 23). Governor Hochul announces start of construction on $61 million affordable and supportive housing development in Brooklyn. https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-start-construction-61-million-affordable-and-supportive-housing
7. New York City Department of Buildings. (2025–2026). DOB NOW approved permits and job filings, Brooklyn Block 3489, Lot 121 (job B01078903, full demolition permit issued February 11, 2025; alteration jobs 984602 and 984603 filed September 2003). NYC Open Data.
8. Brand, D. (2025, March 26). Brooklyn's long-abandoned NYPD stationhouse will become affordable housing. Gothamist.
9. Morris, S. (2020, April 29). Redevelopment revealed for century-old police precinct at 1546 East New York Avenue in Brownsville, Brooklyn. New York YIMBY.
10. Robbins, C. (2012, March 29). Old NYPD Brownsville stationhouse sits rotting; the nonprofit that bought it can't afford to rehab it. New York Daily News.
11. National Registry of Exonerations. (n.d.). George Whitmore Jr. (Case 4648). University of Michigan Law School. https://exonerationregistry.org/cases/4648
12. Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966).
13. New York City Housing Authority. (n.d.). Exhibit A: Howard property profile and existing providers. https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nycha/downloads/pdf/a-howard-profile.pdf
14. New York City Police Department. (n.d.). 73rd Precinct. https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/bureaus/patrol/precincts/73rd-precinct.page
15. Spring 3100. (1963). United States: Police Department, p. 35.