Brooklyn Society for the Relief of Respectable, Aged, Indigent Females.

The Graham Home for Old Ladies was founded in 1851 by lawyer John Bell Graham (d. 1853), under the name of the Brooklyn Society for the Relief of Respectable, Aged, Indigent Females. The Society served as a place of refuge for "elderly women, accustomed through life to comforts and refinement, who in their later years found themselves without relatives or adequate resources" (1). The Society's building, the construction of which was funded by Graham and donations from several Brooklyn churches, opened for service in 1852 at Washington and Dekalb Avenues in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Clinton Hill. All applicants admitted by the Society had to meet specific requirements concerning "the propriety of her conduct and the respectability of her character" (2). The Society's name legally changed to the Graham Home for Old Ladies in 1899. The Graham Home operated in accordance with its original mission for well over a century after its founding, but by the 1980s it had dissolved. Its building was largely left abandoned and dilapidated until 2000, when it was purchased by the BRP Development Corporation, which restored the building and converted it into an upscale condominium complex.