Brooklyn Training School for Teachers, ca. 1930.

Rendered in a Collegiate Renaissance Revival style, the Brooklyn Training School for Teachers was both a training school for aspiring teachers and the school in which their training was put into practice. This progressive model offered free education with theoretical and real classroom experience to a generation of adults, the children of immigrants, looking to make their way in the city. The building was completed between 1902 and 1907 as the population of New York, and as such, the number of students in its public schools, was booming. The training school model was discontinued in the early 1930s as the success of the program and the Depression resulted in an excess of qualified but out-of-work teachers. The building became a regular public grammar school called P.S. 138.