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Barclays Center, BAM, and Boerum Hill

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Barclays Center, BAM, and Boerum Hill:

Game On

Above: Detail on the Ashland Place side of One Hanson Place

BOUNDARIES: Lafayette Ave., Flatbush Ave., Wyckoff St., Boerum Pl.

DISTANCE: 2.3 miles

SUBWAY: B/D/N/Q/R/2/3/4/5 to Atlantic Ave./Barclays Center (Flatbush Ave./Atlantic Ave. exit)

Nothing will ever heal the wound of losing the Dodgers, but Brooklyn got back in the big leagues in 2012 when the Barclays Center opened and became the new home of the Nets, the NBA team previously based in New Jersey. The arena hosted the MTV Video Music Awards during its first year and is now a stop on many a pop star’s world tour. It happens to be located just a couple of blocks from Brooklyn’s other premier performance venue, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, known to all as BAM (pronounced as one syllable). Established in 1859 in Brooklyn Heights, BAM is the oldest performing arts institution in the country, yet it continues to expand and has spawned a cultural district around it. The arts presence—and high-rise construction—does not cease once you cross Flatbush Avenue into Boerum Hill. But the genteel residential streets of its historic district will take you back to another time, as they’re full of classic mid-19th-century styles, with many homes predating the Civil War.

Walk Description

Come up the stairs from the subway and the Barclays Center is right in front of you. It resembles a spaceship, although those brown metal panels of the facade are meant to resemble Brooklyn’s iconic brownstones. Walk straight ahead into the covered entry area that has a video-screen-ringed opening in the roof. Turn and walk through the plaza with planters and benches. Notice that both the arena’s roof and the canopy of the subway station are covered with sedum plants—just one of the “green” components of this LEED-certified property. The first two performers to give concerts here, in the fall of 2012, were Brooklyn-born and -raised Jay-Z and Barbra Streisand. As of 2015, it’s also home ice for the NHL’s New York Islanders, who used to play in suburban Nassau County. Head to the flagpole at the Flatbush and Atlantic intersection; it has an important local pedigree, too, as you can learn from its plaque.

Cross Atlantic Avenue and walk on Flatbush Avenue beside the Atlantic Terminal mall. The subway station house on the island to your left dates to 1908, the year the subway first came to Brooklyn. Only three original control houses, as these structures are officially called, remain in the city, and this is the only one in Brooklyn.

At the corner of Hanson Place, stand before the Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower, aka One Hanson Place, and gaze up. For 80 years from the day it opened in 1929, this 512-foot domed clocktower stood as Brooklyn’s only skyscraper—and then it was joined by a building only 2 feet taller (the Brooklyner on Lawrence Street). Today, alas, it ranks sixth, and at least four additional taller buildings have been proposed.

Cross Hanson Place and examine the detail on this magnificent building. Look for the lions guarding a lockbox, industrious folks depicted in the grille, griffins holding flagpoles. The former bank lobby, featuring marble floors and a zodiac-themed mosaic ceiling among other lavish trappings, has received its own interior landmark designation and has been the winter locale for the Brooklyn Flea and Smorgasburg markets.

Go to the building’s Ashland Place side; at the base of the window columns, you find owls and pelicans alternating with human faces, while who knows what those creatures are peering between the paired arches. Many of the things sculpted on the exterior—beehives, squirrels with acorns—are symbols of thrift, ironic given what people are paying to live in the apartments inside. The building was converted to residential around 2007; in its commercial heyday, it had the nickname Tower of Pain because a lot of dentists had offices here.

Walk on Ashland Place. BAM is opening a venue inside the new 300 Ashland apartment building to your left. On your right is BAM Fisher, a 2012 addition containing a 250-seat theater, rehearsal space, and a rooftop terrace. Then you reach BAM’s main building, and could anything be more welcoming than the musician cherubs around the doorways?

Go right on Lafayette Avenue to take in BAM in all its glory. This building, its home since 1908, boasts a 2,000-seat opera house whose ceiling is gilded like a Fabergé egg; a ballroom with 24-foot-high windows, now used as a cafe; and a multiscreen cinema. Tantamount to the physical splendor is BAM’s artistic legacy—from one of Enrico Caruso’s final performances to the annual Next Wave Festival.

With BAM on your left, walk west on Lafayette Avenue and you see BAM’s cultural neighbors. First, at the corner of Ashland Place, look to your right at the dark gray building with a multistory windowed front: Theatre for a New Audience, a classical company that bounced around various locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn for 34 years before opening this building in 2013. Cross Ashland, passing the Mark Morris Dance Center, home of Morris’s world-renowned company, but also a place for people of all ages and abilities to take dance and fitness classes.

Cross Flatbush Avenue and head toward the school and church buildings across the street from each other. But of course you can’t miss the residential tower just beyond the church to your right: Hub, which topped out at 610 feet to become Brooklyn’s tallest building in 2016.

Walk on 3rd Avenue between the school and church—or rather temple, constructed for Brooklyn’s oldest Baptist congregation in 1893. Its interior was rebuilt after it was gutted by a fire in 1917, a disaster that occurred again in 2010. The school, meanwhile, was expanded multiple times from the 1890s and 1920s, but its oldest section dates to 1840, when it was built for a boys’ boarding school. It was used as an infirmary during the Civil War. Across State Street, in the YMCA on your right, the 1920s Memorial Hall theater is the current home of arts organization Roulette, which was founded in downtown Manhattan in the ’70s as an incubator of avant-garde musical composers and now presents music, dance, and multimedia performances.

Continue on 3rd to Pacific Street, where you can reminisce about the days when people not only read newspapers, but when a newspaper would invest in a building like the green-roofed one on your left, with long windows that allowed passersby to watch the printing, collating, and folding of papers. The New York Times built this printing plant (now a school) in the late 1920s, its marbleized exterior adorned with heads of royalty both human and leonine. Across the street stands Bethlehem Lutheran Church, whose name was preceded by “Swedish Evangelical” when this building was erected in 1894—during an era when Atlantic Avenue was known as Swedish Broadway.

Walk on Pacific past the church and then past playgrounds on both sides of the street.

Turn right at Nevins Street, then left on Atlantic Avenue, which slices east–west across the entire borough. The building on the right with arched windows, along with the building adjoining it to the left, was an Anheuser-Busch beer-bottling plant from the 1880s to 1903 and later became part of a factory complex that included the newer, taller building next to them. What else was manufactured there? It still says above the door on that taller building. Given the indelicate nature of the product, you may wonder why they didn’t pry off the Ex-Lax name when the building went co-op. Well, at least they removed the words “The Ideal Laxative”!

Next you pass the House of the Lord, a Pentecostal church whose building was constructed for a Swedish church in the 1890s. On both sides of the avenue, Victorian storefronts and cast-iron street lamps preserve an old-fashioned ambience even as fashionable new retailers hang out their shingles. The corner on your right has been a church site since the 1850s—since 1957 for St. Cyril’s of Turau, a Belarussian Orthodox church.

Cross Bond Street and you’re in the midst of Antiques Row, or what’s left of it. Atlantic Avenue had more than 30 antiques shops in the 1970s and ’80s. Now it’s down to a handful, mostly confined to the north (right) side of this block.

Turn left on Hoyt Street and peek into Hoyt Street Garden on the right. This oasis was created in 1975, when the area—like much of the then financially strapped city—was in shabby condition. The Presbyterian church next door owns the land but has given community volunteers complete control over the space. On your left, Mile End puts a Montreal-inspired spin on one of NYC’s oldest cuisines, Jewish deli food—you can get your smoked brisket on top of poutine. The menu offers a “nibble” of the smoked meat in case you’re not hungry enough for a sandwich or platter.

Turn left at Pacific Street. Past the nursing home on your right, the yellow-brick Cuyler Church, built in the 1890s, is now residential. In the 1930s and ’40s its congregation included many Mohawk Indians, who had moved from Canada to New York City to work in skyscraper construction. The remainder of the block on that side consists of a variety of houses from either the early 1850s or early 1870s.

Turn right at Bond Street.

Make a right on Dean Street. The earliest homes here are the brownstone row about a third of the way down the block on the left side and the six brick rowhouses after it, all built between 1850 and 1852. On your right, the three houses closest to the nursing home also date to about 1850.

At Hoyt, the corner house across on your right was purchased by actors Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams in 2005; Ledger moved out shortly before his untimely death in January 2008. Turn left on Hoyt. The Brooklyn Inn, on your right at Bergen Street, may or may not be Brooklyn’s oldest bar, but it’s been open since 1885, which is when the fantastic exterior detail was added to this 1850 building. It was a brewery-owned saloon prior to 1919, a speakeasy during Prohibition, and had a restaurant on site briefly in the 1980s, but it’s changed little inside—and the woodwork and stained glass are worth seeing.

Dating to 1850, the Brooklyn Inn’s building (right) on Hoyt Street was given a Queen Anne exterior in the 1880s

Go left (east) on Bergen Street. The entire left side past the corner store–apartment building was built by one developer from 1869 to 1873. By that time, houses were being constructed in larger groups versus singly or just a couple at a time, as you’ve seen on other blocks.

Turn right on Bond and right again on Wyckoff Street. The first two houses after the community garden were erected in 1854 and set a no-stoop standard that was copied as more homes were built alongside them. Continue across Wyckoff to #108, whose facade, stoop, pavement, and even window bars are covered with a mosaic of tiles, beads, mirrors, and shells. And to think, it once probably looked just like its sedate next-door neighbor.

Turn right on Smith Street.

Make a left at Bergen Street. Drop in at The Invisible Dog, partway down on your right. This multidisciplinary arts center opened in 2009 in an ex-factory where the “invisible dog leash” novelty used to be manufactured. Encouraging collaboration and experimentation, the center contains artist studios, exhibition and performance space, and a pop-up store.

Turn right on Boerum Place, opposite a colorful row of Bergen Street clapboard houses, appearing impeccably maintained yet somewhat misplaced on this primarily commercial and brickfront block.

Go right on Dean Street. A couple of orphaned wood frame houses from the 1850s still stand toward the end of the block.

Turn right on Smith Street. Bar Tabac, at the right corner, was an early factor in Smith Street’s reputation as a “restaurant row,” and the French bistro has remained while many other restaurants on the street have come and gone.

The F/G subway station is at Bergen Street.

Points of Interest

Barclays Center 620 Atlantic Ave.; 917-618-6100, barclayscenter.com

Williamsburgh Savings Bank clocktower 1 Hanson Place

Brooklyn Academy of Music 30 Lafayette Ave.; 718-636-4100, bam.org

Roulette 38 3rd Ave.; 917-267-0363, roulette.org

Brooklyn Inn 148 Hoyt St.; 718-522-2525

The Invisible Dog 51 Bergen St., 347-560-3641, theinvisibledog.org