the Fiske Brothers. as a two-track surface station on the BRT's Brighton Beach Line. The first station house was a small structure at the northeast corner of Avenue H and the railroad. On June 8, 1905 Thomas Benton Ackerson paid $285,000 to George P. and Elizabeth Fiske for their Flatbush estate with a mansion (since demolished) called Fiske Terrace. Ackerson's T.B. Ackerson Company soon began construction, and named the development Fiske Terrace after the estate. According to a 1907 brochure for the development, the company so swiftly transformed the land "from a wooded hilltop to a high class developed Suburban Home Site" that the project would "go down in history as being the most rapidly developed of its kind on record."In 1906 Ackerson built a real estate office on the southwest corner of East 15th Street and Avenue to sell homes in their development. In a contemporary brochure the building was depicted as having exterior siding and other materials made of wood. The sales office was converted to railroad use and "debuted as a transit station" on August 23, 1907,and was renamed "Avenue H". In this same time frame, the Brighton Beach Line was rebuilt as a four-track railroad and regraded from Church Avenue to Sheepshead Bay. This rebuilding placed the Avenue H station at the transition point between the open cut to the north and the embankment to the south. after which the railway was to pass over the Bay Ridge Branch and the nearby Manhattan Beach Junction station; previously, the line crossed underneath the Bay Ridge Branch. With the station house on the surface, the station remained open during the regrading project. The Brighton Line became part of the Brooklyn–Manhattan Transit Corporation (BMT) in 1923 and then became the property of the City of New York in 1940. 21st century In 2003, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced plans to demolish the station house, citing its wood construction as a fire hazard. The community objected, emphasizing the building's historic importance, architectural significance, connection to the adjacent community and the fact that several other wooden station houses on the subway system were already city landmarks. On June 29, 2004, the exterior of the station house was designated a landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, although this designation did not affect the interior. The contract to "restore the landmark station control house" as well as rehabilitation of the