A look at Brooklyn, then and now.
There are dozens of postcards from the late 19th and early 20th centuries that depict Brooklyn’s majestic City Hall and the plaza that surrounded it, but I hadn’t seen this one before. Many of the other cards have Borough Hall masked by the el train tracks that ran alongside it, or try to cram every building in the area into one shot, resulting in an urban mess that shows exactly why city fathers were happy to create Cadman Plaza fifty years later. I like this shot, because it shows clearly which buildings and features are no longer there, and would be unimaginable to us today.
Where to begin? Let’s start with Borough Hall, once Brooklyn’s City Hall. The postcard’s stamp was cancelled in 1910, but this photo is much earlier. In 1895, the wooden cupola atop City Hall burned down. It wasn’t rebuilt until 1898, the same year Brooklyn ceased to be a city, and became a borough. There is no cupola in this photo, so it dates sometime in the three years between 1895 and 1898.
We get a glimpse of lost Brooklyn here, as all of the municipal buildings in this photograph, with the exception of Borough Hall, are now gone. Ranged along Fulton Street in front of Borough Hall from left to right were the Hall of Records, the domed courthouse, and the mansard roofline of the old Municipal Building. Today, two buildings stand in their place: the Brooklyn Law School and the new Municipal Building, the one built in 1927.
Snaking around the side of Borough Hall are the elevated tracks of the Fulton Street line, which crossed the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan at Park Place and travelled down Fulton Street through the heart of the shopping district before continuing on through to Flatbush Avenue and into Brooklyn. The photo, taken from somewhere high up, doesn’t give proper scale to the height of the el, which would have been very intrusive to those on the street.
And finally, none of the buildings on the left side of the el survived. They included office buildings, theaters, large department stores and assorted places of business — even the headquarters of the Brooklyn Eagle, although that building is not in this picture. They were all razed for Cadman Plaza in the early 1950s. GMAP