The Mysterious Case of the Missing Gates

A string of gate burglaries has Bed-Stuy brownstone owners on alert.

It appears that a team of thieves has been prowling the neighborhood’s most picturesque blocks on the hunt for Victorian-era cast-iron gates and removing them from their hinges. What they do with them afterwards is still a mystery.

Fourth-generation Bed-Stuy resident Emory Moore, who is a fitness instructor by trade, first heard of the threat from the police, who told his wife about it while she was tending to their garden.

According to police, the thieves have been spraying the hinges of the cast-iron gates with a substance that causes them to corrode quickly, making it easy to pick up the gate and load it into a waiting car or van.

“I guess they prepare them to be stolen,” explained Emory out front of his Jefferson Avenue brownstone on Tuesday. “They come back, lift it off, put it in the van -- and goodbye.”

Emory found that his gate’s hinges had been sprayed with the corrosive material over the weekend, so he removed the gate himself, and brought it into his house.

“We have ours sitting in our foyer until I can find a solution,” he said. “I was gonna put a bicycle lock on it” -- after a brief tour of both Jefferson Avenue and Hancock Street, this appeared to be a popular solution -- “or I was gonna go and get a welder. But of course that’s expensive. It’s summertime, we don’t need that,” he said with a laugh.

Some gates’ hinges are already uncapped, as many Bed-Stuy brownstones are well over 100 years old. In fact, this is exactly why Emory suspects that the gates are being stolen to sell to people who are renovating brownstones.

“I think...there’s a black market for the gates, and somebody’s unscrupulous and they’re buying them from these people and not asking questions or maybe even sending them out to do this,” said Emory. “You won’t find the kind of detail [in newer construction] that you’ll find on these gates...you can’t get those unless you get them from a brownstone."

Alan, who rents a brownstone one block over, on Hancock Street, also had his gate stolen. While he’s not financially liable for the loss, he’s still upset.

“I take pride in where I stay. I come out and sweep. I hose it down,” he said. It will ultimately be up to his landlord whether it ever gets replaced.

The theft took place about three weeks ago. “I was going to walk the dog,” Alan said, “and I walk out the gate and I reach to pull the gate behind me, and there wasn’t a gate. My wife came out and I said, ‘You don’t notice anything different?’ I said, ‘Close the gate for me.’ She went to close it, [and realized] ‘Oh, the gate’s gone.’”

Alan suspects different culprits than Emory.

“They’re taking it for scrap metal.” he said. “It’s crackheads. You take the metal, get like, what, eight dollars for it?”

A recent New York Times article on a similar string of robberies in Fort Greene encountered the same two explanations: A man at a scrap yard told them he would only pay about $12 for an iron gate, while the owners of the buildings will likely part ways with $400 to $600 to get a replacement.

There is more money in selling replacement gates to homeowners who like the original details, and, indeed, more people in that market as these burglaries continue.

Whoever the culprits are, they have neighborhood homeowners upset. Many have locked their gates to their fences, in a redundant measure to prevent themselves from becoming victims. Unfortunately for Bed-Stuy homeowners, the thieves have forced their hand.

Perhaps Emory summed it up best: “It’s grimy and it’s bizarre,” he said on his stoop in front of the gate he has removed from his house... so that someone else doesn’t do it for him.