The 1920s

The 1920s were a low point in The Bramford’s fortunes: after earlier witchcraft scandals and other disturbing incidents, the building was half empty and known as Black Bramford. The decade gives the apartment house’s later respectability a disquieting counterhistory, one that Rosemary Woodhouse encounters in fragments before its concealed spaces make the past feel immediate.

The Bramford’s Reputation in the 1920s

Edward Hutchins places the building’s decline after the events associated with Adrian Marcato, who had practiced witchcraft and claimed in the 1890s to have conjured the living Satan. Marcato displayed hair and claw-parings as evidence; a mob attacked him in The Bramford’s lobby and nearly killed him. Hutchins adds that the Keith Kennedy business began a few years later, and that by the 1920s the house was half empty. The account links the decade to a history of scandal and fear without making every later misfortune part of a single explained cause.

By then, The Bramford was called Black Bramford, and, as Hutchins relates it, sensible people stayed away. Its imposing apartments and Victorian details could later attract tenants, but the name preserves a public memory of danger beneath the building’s architectural prestige.

From Abandonment to Respectability

The Bramford did not remain empty. Hutchins says that World War Two and the housing shortage filled it again; by the time Rosemary Woodhouse and Guy Woodhouse sought an apartment there, the building had acquired a measure of Grand-Old-Apartment-House prestige. Their decision to move in therefore belongs to a later moment, when the 1920s reputation had not prevented the house from being desired again.

That change in status does not erase the earlier record. Hutchins warns that ugly and unsavory events were not confined to the distant past, pointing to a dead infant found wrapped in newspaper in the basement in 1959. The building’s history thus resists a clean division between a dangerous past and a safe present.

The Decade’s Afterlife in the Novel

The 1920s matter less as a directly depicted period than as a remembered layer of The Bramford’s identity. Rosemary’s routine trips to the basement laundry bring Hutchins’s account of the dead infant back to her mind: the caged lights, brick passageways, creaking service elevator, and unseen doors make the historical warning part of an ordinary domestic errand. She avoids researching the case further, preferring partial ignorance to a more vivid knowledge of the place where the baby was found.

Later, when Rosemary discovers a concealed passage between the apartments, the building’s divided layout becomes evidence of hidden traffic: a route that would let people move between homes without the neighbors knowing. The 1920s’ reputation does not itself explain that passage or prove a continuous conspiracy across decades. Instead, it establishes the atmosphere in which the house’s apparent respectability and its concealed history remain in uneasy tension.