Remembering Broken Angel, the Brooklyn Monument That Was Too Weird to Survive

Photo: Michael Galinsky

'While it still stood, the Broken Angel House was the strangest sight in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. It was a monument to nonsense, an absurd remnant of an era that never existed. It looked like an Industrial Age factory that had been fed LSD for years. The four-story building had the colorful glass panels of a Gothic cathedral, the bizarro, false-mirror architecture of a carnival funhouse, and a sort of cartoonish aura hanging about it. Years after its demise, it's still hard to describe it.

The self-taught artist-architect Arthur Wood and his wife, Cynthia, bought the property on 4 Downing Street in 1979 for $2,100, just one of the many details that makes the story of Broken Angel House seem like a myth. The Woods raised their two children there, while turning their home into an attraction that drew visitors from all over the world to a quiet corner on a side street of Brooklyn.'

Read the full article by John Surico on VICE.