Swastika Floor Tiles Adorn Brooklyn Apartment Complex
A swastika Image by Wikimedia Commons
Tiles with swastikas on them are found throughout a Greenwood Heights apartment complex, Brooklyn Paper reported Thursday.
Other tiles in the Brooklyn Garden Apartments are emblazoned with crowns, crosses and interlocking circles.
The complex was build in 1928, according to city records, and the architect’s name is illegible.
Vance Koehler, a tile historian, told Brooklyn Paper that the building’s tiles come from Mueller Mosaic Company, a former tile manufacturer based in Trenton, NJ. He said at the time the apartment was built, the swastika was nothing more than a common decorative symbol.
“You’re going to find that swastika symbol in many tile manufacturers of the early 20th century,” Koehler said. “The symbol is very old, and until the Nazis came along, it was a positive symbol.”
The building’s landlord, Isaac Kurtz, said he has no plans to get rid of the swastikas.
“It is just an emblem engraved on the floor,” he said.
Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at [email protected], or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
