Walking Brooklyn. Adrienne Onofri
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
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
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.
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
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