At the turn of the 20th century, Downtown Brooklyn had a theater district to rival Manhattan’s. In the space of a few blocks near the Flatbush Avenue Extension, a collection of grand multi-use ballrooms and smaller vaudeville stages proliferated. Just a few decades later, most had fallen into disuse and disrepair, but in many cases, the buildings themselves survive. Here’s a look at a thriving entertainment district of days gone by — and the contemporary adaptive reuse projects reinvigorating its legacy.

“Fulton Street, east from and across Flatbush Avenue Extension, underneath the B. M. T. elevated. The four-story building (center) is the Witteman Building and is on the east side of Flatbush Avenue Extension. April 27, 1940.” Service on the Fulton Street El was discontinued on June 1, 1940, just weeks after this photograph was taken . At street level is an East New York-bound Fulton Street Line streetcar. Today, the B25 bus replaces the Fulton streetcar line.

Today, Fulton Mall is a bustling shopping district in Downtown Brooklyn. During the late-Victorian / early-Edwardian eras (think 1880-1910), it was the preeminent thoroughfare for fashionable shopping in Brooklyn. With monumental department stores like Abraham & Straus and impeccable restaurants like Gage & Tollner, shoppers and window shoppers alike teamed Fulton Street to see everything from the latest wedding trousseau to mourning veils, and penny candy to soft clam bellies in Duxbury stew. While most of these businesses no longer exist, many of their architectural remains can be found behind and above their modern facades.

Brooklyn, like any bustling urban center, is (and has always been) home to a diverse variety of venues constructed and operated with the express purpose of entertainment: from theatres to pools to baseball fields. In the late 19th and early 20th century, vaudeville theatres were constructed in the most populous areas of Brooklyn, bringing popular entertainment to the working-class masses. In the early decades of the 20th century, the changes in technology altered the way Brooklynites were entertained. Vaudeville waned in popularity as moving pictures were introduced. Some of the early theatres evolved with the times, adding a movie screen and changing their operations, others closed and were razed in the boom of the building that overtook the borough in the first half of the 20th century. This massive development growth meant the former sleepy rural areas of south Brooklyn were becoming vibrant communities. New movie theatres, often designed by well-known architects, popped up everywhere, offering cheap entertainment (and snacks!) to generations of first dates and family outings. As technology once again evolved in the second half of the 20th century and television allowed for similar entertainment within one's home, theatres suffered. In the financially depressed years of the 1970s, many movie theatres closed or transitioned to more "adult" entertainment. Very few of Brooklyn's early 20th century venues remain operating movie theatres today. Those structures—not an inconsiderable number, particularly in South Brooklyn—that survive have largely been re-purposed as music venues, big-box retailers, churches, and is a popular conversion for these large spaces, as fitness centers and chain pharmacies. If you keep your eyes open, the architectural features of the old Brooklyn theatres occasionally pop out from the streetscapes, hiding behind Rite Aids and Walgreens.

In the opening decades of the 20th Century, the proliferation of new subway lines in Brooklyn changed the shape of Brooklyn's busiest intersections; new routes were excavated and transit hubs born, replacing the streetcars and elevated railways of years past. This collection includes a selection of photographs documenting subway construction in and around Times Plaza, Flatbush Avenue, and Ashland Place.

View west on Fulton Street, beneath the Fulton Street El, during construction of the IRT Eastern Parkway Line (2/3), April 30, 1908.

Subway construction beneath elevated trains on Fulton Street (left) and Flatbush Avenue (right), September 10, 1907. This photo captures the past and present of Brooklyn public transit: the Fulton and Fifth Avenue elevated trains (the latter over Flatbush Avenue); streetcars running on both streets; and reinforcements in place to brace the elevated trestles for excavation associated with the IRT Eastern Parkway line, beneath Flatbush.

The Crescent Theatre (formerly Montauk Theatre), pictured one year after its re-opening on Flatbush Avenue Extension, December 21, 1909. The theater would go on to operate under several names before its demolition in 1940.

On January 11th, 1940, Workers went to work demolishing Werba's Theatre. Under the names of Montauk, The Crescent and Schubert-Crescent, it was once the proud citadel of Brooklyn's Social and Political Elite.

The world's busiest harbor was left at a standstill when 3,500 tug boat workers launched a strike on the docks of New York City. The halt of sea bound coal and oil left New York without fuel for over two weeks, forcing subways to be left unheated and the closure of schools, stores, and restaurants.

Fulton Street, looking east across Flatbush Avenue Extension. June 21, 1941. One year after service was discontinued, the Fulton Street El is being dismantled.

The Montauk Theatre, a 1,750-capacity venue built in 1895, sat in the way of the Flatbush Avenue Extension, a 1907 project to widen and extend Flatbush Avenue to carry traffic to and from the Manhattan Bridge, then under construction. Rather than raze the structure, the city bought the building and its site for $230,000, then sold it for just $11,500 to a company who undertook to move the theater to a site on the new Flatbush Extension. (The terms of the deal rose eyebrows at the time, as the company who re-purchased the building shared an executive with its original owners.) An August 1907 report in Harper’s Weekly described the move: “The remarkable engineering feat of moving the Montauk Theater in Brooklyn forty-five feet backwards from its foundations, turn it half around, and then slide it at a right angle, sixty-five feet more to front on another street has not only aroused the interests of engineers and architects, but vividly recalled the strange circumstances which prefaced the feat.” The relocated building reopened in 1908 as the Crescent Theatre.