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Downtown

4

Downtown:

Civic Hub of a Metropolis

Above: Borough Hall (center) flanked by early skyscrapers on Court Street

BOUNDARIES: Johnson St., Flatbush Ave. Extension, State St., Clinton St.

DISTANCE: 2.5 miles

SUBWAY: A or C to Hoyt-Schermerhorn

Well, that only took a hundred years. … Brooklynites had anticipated a boom for Downtown Brooklyn when the then-independent municipality of Brooklyn was consolidated into the City of New York in 1898 as a borough. But instead of New York’s business district spilling across the Brooklyn Bridge as expected, Manhattan expanded northward and Midtown developed as the new commercial center. But now, more than a century later, Downtown Brooklyn is finally getting its boom. Completed and planned construction is adding more than 10,000 apartments and nearly 1.5 million square feet of office space since 2004. Most hotel chains are opening properties in the neighborhood. And Brooklyn’s three tallest buildings are all in Downtown, and all were completed since 2014. The real estate blog Bisnow summed up the goings-on in Downtown Brooklyn: “We’re practically seeing a whole new city being built right before our eyes.” There’s still plenty left from the old city filling out Downtown’s streetscape.

Walk Description

Upon exiting the subway, go to your right on Schermerhorn Street, then left on Hoyt Street. Turn right at State. The State Street Houses comprise 23 residences in Greek Revival and Italianate styles that are recognized by both the city landmarks commission and the National Register of Historic Places. Most of them are on your left, #324–290, but they also include #299–291 on your right. They were not built as a unit but at different times between 1847 and 1874 and have been meticulously preserved—the cast-iron balconies outside #297–293 are original.

Before you turn right on Smith Street, look across to that tall building on the left. The dearth of windows may tip you off: it’s the House of Detention—a jail whose presence has not deterred luxury residences from sprouting up en masse in the vicinity. Detainees are taken across State Street for their day in court, and you can check out the courthouse from different sides as you turn onto Smith and then left on Schermerhorn. Constructed during the Art Deco age but in an older Renaissance Revival style, this is the one elegant building among Downtown Brooklyn’s otherwise plain courthouses. Those eagle-topped shields between the arches feature the seals of Brooklyn (on the left) and New York City (on the right) beneath the cherub faces. Farther down the block on Schermerhorn is the Friends Meeting House, used ever since it was built in 1857 for gatherings of Quakers, the religious society committed to peace and justice.

Make a right on Boerum Place. The building across the street, which has the address 22 Boerum Place on this side but officially is 110 Livingston Street, was designed by Beaux Arts icons McKim, Mead & White in 1926 for the Elks Club—with bowling alley, swimming pool, and guest rooms inside—but from 1939 to 2003 was the headquarters of the New York City Board of Education. The penthouse floors were added when it was converted to million-dollar condos.

Under the building, you find the New York Transit Museum, located inside a deactivated subway station that you enter near the Schermerhorn corner. The museum’s collection includes old buses, turnstiles, subway signage, trolley models, and vintage subway cars that visitors can board. At street level, 22 Boerum is home to ISSUE Project Room, an arts incubator that commissions and presents works in different performance genres.

Proceed north across Livingston Street, then take Red Hook Lane to your right. This alley is all that’s left of a road that once extended to the neighborhood of Red Hook over a mile away—a road predating all development in Brooklyn, as it started as a Native American trail and was a strategic route during the American Revolution.

Turn right when you reach Fulton Street. Go inside #372 and seek out the mahogany bar, embossed walls, brass chandeliers, and cherrywood-framed mirrors. Gage & Tollner restaurant (specialty: clam bellies on toast) was responsible for the sumptuous Gay Nineties ambience—which, despite an interior landmarking, has dissipated as a series of eateries and shops have occupied the space since Gage & Tollner closed in 2004 after 112 years at this location. Continuing along Fulton, after Smith on your right there’s a side entrance to the Brooklyn Tabernacle, whose gospel choir has won a Grammy Award.

This Fulton Mall was a lauded urban-renewal project in the 1970s and ’80s but has been more controversial of late, as the increasingly affluent residents of surrounding neighborhoods complained about the strip’s downscale character (decide for yourself if that’s racially coded). While there are still plenty of street vendors and discount stores, a bunch of retail chains have opened along Fulton recently, and both the roadway and sidewalks have been renovated. Still the third-busiest shopping district in the city (after Manhattan’s Herald Square and Madison Avenue), this section of Fulton Street was once the shopping destination of Brooklyn. Look up at the balconet wrapping around the corner building on your left across Lawrence Street. The entire site once belonged to women’s clothier Oppenheim Collins—those are its initials entwined on the shield at the tippy-top.

On your right past Gallatin Place, Macy’s fills two buildings facing Fulton: one from the 1870s with a cast-iron front and the other an Art Deco classic designed in 1929 by the architects of Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale’s in Manhattan. Prior to 1995, these were A&S, which had anchored Fulton shopping ever since the street developed as a retail hub after the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883. The terra cotta flourishes on the beautiful white building at #420 include a bust that may or may not be Queen Victoria, the British monarch at the time of the building’s construction in 1888. On the other side of Macy’s, note the onion-domed turret and terra cotta urns along the top of the corner building.

Across Hoyt, the bronze work of the window bays and finials is the scene-stealer, and this 1920s building boasts charming iron balconies as well. This structure was the last addition to—and is the sole survivor of—a block of buildings occupied by Namm & Son, a prime competitor of A&S from the late 1800s into the 1950s. Both this building and the Offerman Building opposite it on Fulton have been landmarked. That building now occupied by Old Navy and Nordstrom Rack is still known to old-timers as Martin’s, the department store here from 1922 to 1979. Built in the early 1890s, it is looking quite grand following a recent cleaning. Don’t miss the lions at the corners; the monogram beneath each is HO, for developer Henry Offerman.

Brooklyn’s old postal headquarters, built in the 1880s, with its new federal courthouse, opened in 2006, in the background

On the east side of the Offerman Building, note that Duffield Street is also Abolitionist Place. This conaming resulted from an eminent-domain battle that ensued while this block of Duffield was being transformed over the past decade. The owner of the mid-19th-century house at #227 fought to save her home, as she believed it had been a stop on the Underground Railroad. The city’s research could not conclusively establish that fugitive slaves had been sheltered there, but it conamed the street to commemorate all the antislavery activity that took place in the area. And 227 Duffield remains, surrounded by at least three new hotels. The owner hopes to open an abolition museum and heritage center inside.

Stay on Fulton past Duffield and then Elm Place, then go left onto the plaza, known as Albee Square. The name comes from the vaudeville house built here in the 1920s by impresario Edward Albee. It was eventually converted to the RKO Albee movie palace, and shortly before the cinema was razed in 1977, it screened Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the film based on a play by Albee’s namesake grandson. Now the mall that replaced the Albee theater has been demolished, too, supplanted by the brand-new mixed-use complex City Point, featuring stores, restaurants, the DeKalb Market food hall, and the first New York location of Alamo Drafthouse Cinema—a multiplex with service at your seat from a full menu and bar. It also has a macabre wax-museum-themed bar open to all.

There’s an older structure on the north side of the plaza—the marble temple erected by the Dime Savings Bank in 1908. Its wonderful exterior detail includes carved bronze doors (the Brooklyn Bridge is one of the images) and a sculpture above the entry of two men along with symbols of agriculture and industry. The interior is fabulous, too: a rotunda of red marble columns with gilded capitals, inlaid with giant dimes. Thanks to air rights, this landmark, purchased by a developer in 2015, is slated to be incorporated into a skyscraper that would be Brooklyn’s first over 1,000 feet tall. Facing the old bank, go to the left (on Fleet Street), then make a left on Flatbush Avenue Extension. Turn left on Willoughby Street, continuing around City Point’s residential and office component.

Make a right on Duffield Street. Next to St. Boniface church are four pre-1850 houses that were relocated lest they be obliterated by Downtown’s last megadevelopment, MetroTech, which was created in the 1990s. You’re about to enter this 16-acre corridor encompassing office towers, a college campus, and public parkland.

At Myrtle Avenue, go left into MetroTech, whose office space is dominated by financial-services companies and government agencies. Watch on your left for a Tom Otterness sculpture in front of 2 MetroTech illustrating the local urban legend about alligators in the sewers. Look for more Otterness critters amid the lampposts to your right.

Walk across the Commons, a greensward with trees and seating, and then go to your right. You’ll come to the NYU School of Engineering’s Wunsch Hall, located in an 1846 church that housed Brooklyn’s first black congregation, Bridge Street AWME, which still exists in Bedford-Stuyvesant. It was a station on the Underground Railroad and was visited by Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.

Go to your right facing Wunsch, and take Bridge Street out of MetroTech. The Art Deco building on your left at Willoughby Street was constructed as the Long Island headquarters of New York Telephone and is now a condominium called BellTel Lofts. The building was designed by Ralph Walker, one of the country’s preeminent Art Deco architects—and a favorite of the phone company in particular (he even designed Ma Bell’s pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair).

Make a right on Willoughby, but do look again at the telephone building when you’re across the street to appreciate its numerous setbacks. When you reach Lawrence Street, step back so you can take in the full Beaux Arts splendor of the 1898 structure on your right. But you also want to look at it closer up to see the objects depicted in stone around the door and the initials (TC) carved above—it is, in fact, a predecessor to the telephone company headquarters you just saw at Bridge Street. Next to it on Lawrence stands the 514-foot Brooklyner, which had a 2009–2013 reign as Brooklyn’s tallest building; it’s now No. 5.

Continue on Willoughby to Jay Street and turn right to see another former headquarters—that of the city of Brooklyn’s fire department. You can’t miss this terra cotta–adorned Romanesque Revival composition with two pyramidal roofs, the higher one atop a story fronted by a receding arch. It was built in 1892, when firefighters located fires by sighting them from the tower, then rushed to them via horse-drawn carriage—hence the broad entryway. After only six years, the building was demoted from department headquarters to plain ol’ firehouse when Brooklyn became a borough of New York City.

Return to Willoughby, proceed west one more block to Pearl Street, and turn right. In 1867, Quakers started a school in the basement of their meetinghouse that you saw on Schermerhorn. In 1973 they moved into Brooklyn Law School’s former building on your right. Doorway reliefs depict milestones in world legal history, including the Code of Hammurabi, Ten Commandments, Magna Carta, and United States Constitution. The building across the street has some impressive ornamentation of its own at the door and windows, populated with (mostly) mythological beings.

Turn left at the end of Pearl onto the pedestrian plaza. When you reach Adams Street, you’re across from the State Supreme Court—a dowdy edifice that, surprisingly, was designed by the same firm that created the Empire State Building.

Make a left on Adams. In front of the Shake Shack at Fulton Street, cross Adams, putting you on Joralemon Street. Pause to look ahead to Court Street at the old skyline of Brooklyn: four buildings in a row that were successively the borough’s tallest upon their completion between 1901 and 1927. Then make a right onto the path next to Borough Hall. Go all the way to the fountain, then turn around for your nice view of this exquisite Greek Revival structure, opened in 1849 as Brooklyn’s City Hall.

Continue into the plaza, variously called Columbus Park or the Civic Center. To your right are two Kennedy memorials: a bust of Robert F. Kennedy, who represented New York State in the United States Senate, and a tree planted in memory of President John F. Kennedy. Next you greet Christopher Columbus. This famous sailor has moorings around the base of his pedestal.

As you continue to head north through the park, you can see the Manhattan Bridge off in the distance. The statue at this end is of Henry Ward Beecher, abolitionist pastor of nearby Plymouth Church (who usually wore a cape as shown). Beecher’s advocacy for children and African Americans is represented in the figures at the base. The Romanesque fortress beyond Beecher is yet another headquarters demoted to branch when Brooklyn lost its city status; this one belonged to the Postal Service. The section facing Johnson Street—an extravaganza of dormers and turrets, with a potbellied arcade atop the tower—is the original structure, constructed from 1885 to 1891.

With the old post office to your right, walk on Johnson Street. Cross Cadman Plaza West and go left.

Make a right on Montague Street, stopping to read the plaque on the corner bank building. On the opposite corner with Court stands the tallest of the old skyscrapers you glimpsed from Adams Street. Completed in 1927, it was Brooklyn’s first building with more than 30 stories.

Morning and evening are symbolized by male figures at two different ages in the pediment of the former Dime bank on Albee Square

This block of Montague has remained “Bank Row,” as it was a century ago, though the banks have new names. On your right, Citibank occupies a 1903 beaut designed by the same team as the Dime you saw near Fulton Street; the Art Deco skyscraper to its right (#185) was designed by architects who would next work on Rockefeller Center. At the corner of Clinton Street, Chase’s 1915 building, modeled on a palace in Verona, Italy, features extraordinary ornamentation on its wrought-iron gates, entryway, and lampposts, as well as a gilded ceiling inside. Catercorner from Chase, the 1891 headquarters of the Franklin Trust Company has been converted to luxury apartments.

Turn left on Clinton Street, then left on Remsen Street. Past the church-turned-apartments on your right, St. Francis College took over a building erected in 1914 as headquarters of the gas company—thus the torches and gas lamps in the bronze ornamentation. The brownstone-and-brick #186 was created in the 1880s by the Parfitt Brothers, in-demand Brooklyn architects of the Victorian age. Next to it stands Brooklyn’s tallest building from 1918 to 1926, when it was surpassed by the building on the opposite corner of Remsen and Court (which held the title only a year).

Turn right on Court Street. The Temple Bar Building at #44 was Brooklyn’s tallest when opened in 1901—the oldest of these early skyscrapers. It’s still a favorite of many, especially because of its cupolas. Stand right outside the door, facing the building, and look up for an interesting view.

At Joralemon, cross Court to your left to go to the subway—but wait, there’s one last old skyscraper to see. Turning back toward Court, look to your left at the neo-Gothic “wedding cake” at the next corner (Livingston Street). Limestone and terra cotta take you from one setback to the next, with it all peaking in a cupola-crowned pyramidal roof.

Enter the subway on Joralemon in front of Borough Hall.

Points of Interest

State Street Houses 290–324 and 291–299 State St.

New York Transit Museum Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street; 718-694-1600, nytransitmuseum.org

Macy’s 422 Fulton St.; 718-875-7200, l.macys.com/brooklyn-downtown-in-brooklyn-ny

Alamo Drafthouse Cinema and House of Wax City Point, 445 Albee Square W.; 718-513-2547, drafthouse.com/nyc and 929-382-5403, thehouseofwax.com

MetroTech Myrtle Avenue and Bridge Street

Borough Hall 209 Joralemon St.; 718-802-3700, brooklyn-usa.org