Kent Avenue, west side, between Myrtle and Park Avenues, showing Public School No. 157, 1929. Constructed in 1906, P.S. 157 is elaborate Gothic Revival-style building designed by C.B. J. Snyder. The school suffered neglect, water damage, and misguided alterations throughout the 20th century. The original structure included an ornate parapet with 40 terra cotta “learned” owls attached. In the early 21st century, an architectural firm undertook an extensive renovation that recreated more than 5,000 units of terra cotta, including the parapet and owls.

NYPD 88th Precinct ca. 1929 ARCHITECT: George Ingram DATE: 1889-90 STYLE: Romanesque Revival The former 4th (now 88th) Police Precinct Station House is an impressive example of Romanesque Revival style architecture. It replaced an earlier station house at Myrtle and Vanderbilt Avenues. Completed in November 1890, the 4th Police Precinct Station House was designed by George Ingram, a civil engineer who was associated with the Brooklyn Department of City Works in the 1880s. Faced with red pressed brick and sandstone, the fortress-like exterior is well-preserved, including a picturesque turret that rises asymmetrically above the entrance porch. The 4th Police Precinct originally had a separate patrol-stable-and-cells building which was demolished in the mid-1920s. This structure was replaced by a three-story brick extension that was designed by architect Thomas E. O’Brien, a lieutenant in the police force, to create the impression it was constructed at the same time as the earlier building

Crossing guard outside Ack’s Bar and Luncheonette at the corner of Classon and DeKalb Avenues, October 25, 1957.

St. Mary’s Episcopal Church ARCHITECT: Richard T. Auchmuty DATE: 1858-59 STYLE: Gothic Revival St. Mary’s Church is a beautiful Gothic Revival structure reminiscent of an English rural parish church. Built in 1858, it was designed by a relatively unknown architect, Richard T. Auchmuty, in accordance with the religious philosophy of ecclesiology. This movement laid out a strict set of rules for the design of Episcopal churches, which required the honest use of the best materials, the orientation of the church on an east-west axis, and the exterior design to reflect the plan and construction of the interior. In addition to its handsome form, St. Mary’s has beautiful ornamentation and attractive pointed-arched and rose windows.

Some might say that the name, The Graham Home for Old Ladies, is an improvement on its predecessor, the Brooklyn Society for the Relief of Respectable Aged Indigent Females. It’s certainly more to the point. When the building at 320 Washington opened in 1851, it housed 90 women from Brooklyn who were over 60 and could “bring satisfactory testimonials of the propriety of her conduct and the respectability of her character.” Eventually, the home ran out of money and sat vacant until it was turned into the Bull Shippers Plaza Motor Inn, an establishment where conduct and respectability, not to mention AARP membership, were no longer a prerequisite. The Inn operated as a brothel by "ladies by the hour who brought only scanty-panty testimonials of propriety.”\* In 2001, the building was bought and turned into condos. The scanty panty line comes courtesy of the now defunct Fort Greene Newsletter.

“Clinton Avenue, Brooklyn’s Show Street,” from a Brooklyn Eagle postcard series 1905-07. From right to left are: no. 245, the George Dupont Pratt mansion, now Burns hall of St. Joseph’s College; no. 241, the Charles Millard Pratt house, now the residence of the Roman Catholic Bishop of Brooklyn; and no. 229, the Frederic B. Pratt House. The latter, today known as the Catherine Ladd Pratt House, is a gray brick Georgian/Renaissance Revival mansion designed by Babb, Cook & Willard. Built in 1895, the house is notable for its inventive solution to the adjacent rowhouses at the property’s northern edge: a two-story portico entranceway with a second-level colonnade with pillars carved to look like female figures.

Emmanuel Baptist Church ARCHITECT: Francis H. Kimball DATE: 1887 STYLE: French Gothic With its square twin towers and triple entrance porch, Emmanuel Baptist Church is reminiscent of a small French Gothic cathedral. The somber and solid character of this late nineteenth Century stone edifice is relieved by a varied and fanciful use of carved ornament and structural forms, creating an outstanding example of ecclesiastical architecture

P.S. 157, The Benjamin Franklin 850 Kent Avenue, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn 1909 Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, architect C.B.J. Snyder’s goal was to build a world-class public school system for New York City. Constructed in 1909, P.S. 157, an “H” design pioneered by Snyder, is a fine example of the Colligate Gothic style of architecture reminiscent of the classical architecture of Oxford, Bryn Mawr, and Princeton. The building’s parapets are accentuated with 40 terracotta owls, representing “wisdom.”

Pratt Institute, general view, ca. 1917

315 Washington Street, 1957. In the years after the Civil War, the streets of Clinton Hill, particularly Washington Avenue and Clinton Street, saw a construction boom of new, lovely, and large brick and brownstone mansions. This brick home at 315 Washington Avenue was likely completed in the late 1860s. In the 1890s, well-known Brooklyn architects Parfitt Brothers designed an additional story and classic French style mansard roof. At some point in the early 20th century the building's use changed from private residence to a clubhouse (it was the Rankin Post No. 10 of the Grand Army of the Republic) before switching back. Today the home is a multi-unit residence.

George Dupont Pratt House, ca. 1905. The Georgian Revival mansion was designed by the firm Babb, Cook & Willard and completed in 1901. In 1918, the Sisters of St. Joseph bought the building, and today it is Burns Hall of St. Joseph’s College.

Maybe the nicest of the Pratt family houses, this Romanesque Revival home at 241 Clinton was built for Pratt’s oldest son, Charles Millard Pratt, who became President of the Pratt Institute when his father died in 1891. Today, it is the residence of the Catholic Bishop of Brooklyn.

Walt Whitman circa 1890. Whitman lived at 99 Ryerson Street in 1855, the year he published Leaves of Grass. It was here that he received a letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson, calling Leaves of Grass the “most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.” “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” he wrote. Whitman lived in several buildings in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill for over 28 years, but this is the only home of his still standing. He longed for a more permanent home: “My good daddy used to say: ‘Oh! what a comfort it is to lie down on your own floor, a floor laid with your own hands, in a house which represents your own handiwork—cellar and walls and roof!’”

Edward T. Bedford Mansion, ca. 1905. Bedford was a board member of Standard Oil and a colleague of Charles Pratt, whose family had several mansions on the next block south. Bedford’s stately Renaissance Revival home was designed by Montrose Morris and built around 1900. A 1902 New York Times report of a fire at Bedford’s home begins: “There was much excitement yesterday afternoon in the aristocratic neighborhood of Clinton and Willoughby Avenues, Brooklyn." Like many in the surrounding area, Bedford’s mansion was torn down during World War II, making room for the construction of housing for Navy personnel and families at the Clinton Hill Apartments (built 1941-1943, today the Clinton Hill Co-Ops).

In 1890, the Pratt Institute opened one of the country's first library schools, with the Pratt Free Library as its laboratory. The Daily Eagle reported on January 20, 1895: "Pratt Institute's new library building is gradually nearing completion. When ready for occupancy it will be one of the most imposing structures in this big city." The Pratt library had been earlier located in the main building and opened to the public in 1888 as the first free public library in Brooklyn- not limited to Pratt Students. Excessive demand for it services- it was, said the Daily Eagle in 1895, "thronged with students, literary workers, and bibliomaniacs every afternoon"- lead to the construction of a separate library building, dedicated on May 26, 1896. At the dedication, Pratt President Frederic Bayley Pratt presided; the Reverend John Humpstone, pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church, said a prayer; and the famous Dannreuther Quarter performed Mendelssohn's overtire to Athalie, Anton Rubinstein's Music of the Spheres, and "Walther's Prize Song" From Wagner's Die Meistersinger. And then New York State Librarian Melvil Dewey (of decimal system fame) addressed the assembly, followed by a prayer from the Reverend Samuel McConnel, pastor of the Church of the Holy Trinity on Montague Street. It was a grand event. Architect William B. Tubby's Romanesque Revival building housed reference and circulating collections, including a children's collection, as well as an exhibition room, and classrooms for the library school. (In 1982 architect Giorgio Cavaglieri added the south terrace with views down onto new stacks. After 1940, with the opening of the new central library at Grand Army Plaza, Pratt's library was no longer the much-needed municipal resource it had been for 52 years and was restricted to institute students.

Pratt Institute Library ARCHITECT: William B. Tubby DATE: 1896 STYLE: Renaissance Revival The Pratt Institute Library was the first free public library in the City of Brooklyn. Pratt’s belief in self-help led him to an interest in the public library movement. The free-standing Renaissance Revival structure has slightly projecting end pavilions and a two-story stacks wing at the western end.

Engine #209 Taaffe Place, 1957. The Brooklyn Fire Department Engine 9 was organized in 1869 at 159 Taaffe Place (formerly Graham Street) in a building that had formerly housed the volunteer Engine 12. In 1892, Engine 9 was called to a massive fire at a series of buildings on Nostrand Avenue, and its firefighters performed a number of daring rescues. The engine company moved into a different building in 1966, and was eventually disbanded in 2003. The building at 159 Taaffe Place still stands and has a faded sign "American Refractories" above the large rolling metal gate. The top floor looks to be a residence.

Orthodox Friends Meeting House, 1927. The Rundbogenstil Romanesque Revival Meeting House was completed in 1868, following a design credited to architect Stephen Carpenter Earle (himself a Quaker). (The architectural style is sometimes credited as Lombardian Romanesque, proving that architectural styles are a slippery slope that not even architectural historians can always agree on.) The Brooklyn Daily Eagle called the building “new, neat and tasteful.” The red brick church remained a Quaker Meeting House until the 1950s and was sold to the Apostolic Faith Mission in 1965, who painted it white.

Emmanuel Baptist Church Inspired by French Gothic prototypes, this large church, with its twin towers, resembles a small cathedral. Yet the interior is novel in the arrangement, with a semicircular seating arrangement focused on the large baptismal font.

Former Graham Home for Old Ladies. Established in 1851. This brownstone had two lives before it was turned into a condo. It began as the "Brooklyn Society for the Relief of Respectable Aged Indigent Females," for "gentlewomen...unfitted to accept willingly the public asylum provided by the state" by John B. Graham. Supposedly, admissions were overseen by women representing twenty six Brooklyn churches across many denominations. Women had to be at least 60 years old to take residence, and brought their own furniture. The home was funded by individual donors. The old ladies home was shuttered sometime in the 70's, and was turned over to the Bull Shippers Motor Inn. A Fort Greene Newsletter characterized the new dormers as "ladies by the hour who brought only scanty-panty testimonials of propriety." The brothel was closed, and the building became a cheapo single-room occupancy hotel, a "magnet for crime" in the changing Clinton Hill area. The building was gutted and cleaned up in 2000, when BRP Development Corporation purchased the brownstone. The sign, which reads "The Graham Home for Old Ladies" was added during the renovation to hark back to its less rowdy days.