Former Bridge Street African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church, 1959. The Bridge Street African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church is the oldest African American congregation in the Brooklyn and Long Island area. Its origins date to 1766 and the open air Brooklyn sermons of Methodist convert Thomas Webb. The congregation became the Sands Street Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church and later the First Methodist Episcopal Church of Brooklyn, both mixed race communities. In 1817 the African American members withdrew from the community and went about establishing their own congregation called the African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church (AWME), which first built a church near High and Jay Streets. In 1854 the growing AWME Church purchased a building previously occupied by the First Congregational Church at 309 Bridge Street. The church building they moved into was Greek Revival structure constructed between 1844 and 1847. The red brick church has wooden columns and entablature (the top decorative feature of a column). The Bridge Street church moved in 1938 to 277 Stuyvesant Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, into the former home of the Grace Presbyterian Church, where it remains today. The red brick church on Bridge Street (now no. 311) is today the Wunsch Building of NYU’s Polytechnic Institute. The more than 150-year-old church is the admissions office and hosts social, cultural, and academic events.

The MetroTech Center is a large business and industrial hub in Downtown Brooklyn. Construction began in 1992, leading to the demolition of more than 100 houses and 50 businesses. Here, you can see what the streets looked like before MetroTech.

We stand alongside the Black community and all those speaking against systemic racism and violence with justice, hope, and truth. The fight for justice is one that we all need to play a role in, whatever form that might be. In our sphere of work, this means doing our part to help make archives more inclusive and equitable to communities that have historically been left out. As a start, this story is dedicated to honoring Black life and legacy in New York. Read on for stories of triumph in injustice.

First Free Congregational Church ARCHITECT: Unknown DATE: 1846-47 STYLE: Greek Revival The former First Free Congregational Church, with its simple, rectangular shape and temple front, is one of the few remaining examples of the vernacular Greek Revival building popular in the mid-nineteenth-century. The “Free” in the name refers to the policy of not charging a rental fee for its pews. The building has changed hands many times, and by 1854 it housed the oldest African American congregation in Brooklyn, which used the basement to hide escaping slaves. It is now the student center for the Polytechnic Institute of New York Universit