THIS OLD HOUSE.(The Talk of the Town)(Schenck house )

In 1676 or so, a Dutch settler named Jan Martense Schenck built a house on the south shore of Long Island, in an area that in those days consisted mainly of sweeping meadows, tidal wetlands, and sand dunes, and which today is part of the Mill Basin neighborhood of Flatlands, in Brooklyn.

Schenck (pronounced "Skenk") left the house to his eldest son, who left it to his eldest son, who left it to his children, who sold it to others, who expanded it, remodelled it, heated it, plumbed it, neglected it, and so forth. In the early nineteen-hundreds, the house was turned over to the Atlantic, Gulf & Pacific Company, as payment for filling in some nearby streams and salt marshes. In 1941, a real-estate developer reproduced the house in a suburban subdivision in Port Washington, at an advertised price of $10,990. In 1952, A.G. & P. gave the house--by then it had an address, 2133 East Sixty-third Street--to the Brooklyn Museum, which hired a contractor to dismantle the structure and remove it from the original site. The pieces were numbered with bright-orange paint and stored, for a decade, under what was then the Interborough Parkway. In 1963 and 1964, the museum reassembled the pieces inside a large gallery on the fourth floor, and the house became a favorite destination of boisterous third graders studying the olden days.

A couple of years ago, the museum--which needed to make room for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art--decided to move the Schenck house to a different location on the same floor. Its conservators called James Boor-stein, whose company, Traditional Line, does complex architectural restorations, and has developed a sideline in assembling, disassembling, and transporting tricky museum exhibits. (The Met, which is renovating its Islamic-art galleries, recently hired Boorstein to survey its Nur al-Din Room in preparation for a planned move.) Moving the Schenck house involved, among many other things, using thin wooden wedges and building jacks to pry apart timbers that were living trees when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. The job took five months.

Boorstein, who is fifty-one years old, has wavy dark-brown hair with only a few small patches of gray in it. He was born in Manhattan and reared on Long Island, and over the years he has acquired a staggering quantity of information about things like seventeenth-century window glass, eighteenth-century ceiling paint, and nineteenth-century mother-of-pearl annunciator ...