Dept of Buildings/City Register

Yesterday's trip to the Municipal Building requires a follow-up visit. The Department of Buildings has no folder on 230 Corbin and if they had, it would have been located off-site in a New Jersey storage box which is the case for my family house.

My quest to find the architectural plans was to discover the actual date it was constructed, by which architect, and for whom exactly. Since I did not have the original owner's name I was told to look through these antiquated red Block books. They are filled with hand written entries, similar to the format St. Margaret Mary Church had for its records of the baptisms and deaths of its parishioners in the early 1900s.

The entries are chronological, but that is the only form of organization I could tell in my 5 minutes of research. The first page started with Coleridge St. The other difficulty is that the entries do not always list a house number. For instance, they state "Coleridge Street, 480 x 60, 300 feet from Esplanade. I'm not sure exactly where the distance markers would be taken since the Esplanade is pretty much gone. Google Earth shows that 230 Corbin is roughly between 555 or 590 feet away from the edge.

I skimmed quickly through it and happened upon a 1945 entry where 230 Corbin was transferred to Herman Field from Joseph P. Day. This transfer came after the tax photo was taken. I still want to see if there are any previous owners listed next time and when the house was actually built. But regardless, my findings show that the Fields owned the property for 63 years. I also spotted an entry that showed that the property that Washington Mutual (previously Lincoln Bank) was also owned by Joseph P. Day.