A Place for Spirits

During Prohibition, many New Yorkers considered the 18th Amendment to the Constitution more a suggestion than the law of the land. City residents created ingenious places to conceal their liquor, and Eric Schiller was thrilled to discover such a place in the Victorian house he bought last year on Westminster Road in Prospect Park South.

Mr. Schiller, an architect, was inspecting the original oak staircase when he noticed a rectangle outlined on the first-floor landing. The rectangle turned out to be a slab of wood that could be lifted by using a discreetly incised thumbhole. Underneath lay a four-foot-deep space lined with shelves and containing a ladder down which a relatively nimble individual could have made his way to retrieve a well-concealed bottle of port or aged whiskey.

“This was an affluent area during Prohibition,” Mr. Schiller said, “and it was in these spaces that people kept their private stashes of illegal booze.” He likes to picture long-ago owners eluding authorities through the magic of architecture.