There’s just something about a mid-1970s class picture—the kids are so adorably goofy in those wide collars and bright colors, you can’t not look.
Before it began billing itself as “The Greenwich Village School,” it was plain-old P.S. 41 on West 11th Street and Sixth Avenue. And in the cash-strapped 1970s, a kindergarten class with 32 kids and one teacher was perfectly acceptable.
This early-1900s photograph of the Brooklyn Museum—known as the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences when construction began in 1895—shows a neo-Classic beauty of a building, looking majestic on a young Eastern Parkway (those little trees!)
And that grand staircase sure was something, rising 28 feet from street level. It was part of the original McKim, Mead & White design; the famed architectural firm also designed part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The staircase didn’t last long. In the mid-1930s, Brooklyn Museum officials decided to make the building more “democratic” by removing it. Visitors now entered the building through ground floor doors.
In 2000, museum honchos wanted a grand entrance again, something that would recall the original McKim, Mead & White staircase.
This is the result, completed in 2004. People seem to either love it or hate it; there’s no in between.
Architectural monstrosity or “Brooklyn’s new front stoop,” as the museum’s director was quoted in a 2000 New York Times article? You decide.
I don’t know when this terra cotta street sign—with its banners, leaves, even a face—was made a permanent part of this old brick building. But viewing it transports you back to what was then called the Lower West Side, to the days when the neighborhood was mostly a warehouse district.
More street addresses carved into old buildings can be found here.
