Walking Brooklyn. Adrienne Onofri
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,
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
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
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