Brooklyn Borough Hall in June of 2023. Photo by Susan De Vries
From modest beginnings, the building we know today as Brooklyn Borough Hall is the result of years of struggle — and narrowly avoiding demolition as the world around it changed.
Most municipalities have one building that is the headquarters for that municipality’s government. Whether you have a mayor or town supervisor or some other official in charge, well, that’s where they hang their hat. Some cities and towns have impressive 18th and 19th century city halls designed by important local architects, while others have more modest and utilitarian buildings or spaces.
Most city halls were multi-functional, part of the reason why some are so large, even in small or medium-sized towns and cities. In addition to administrative offices, they often contained courtrooms, assembly halls, post offices, police stations, and jails. The administrative offices were not just for the mayor and staff, but also for important departments such as Buildings, Public Utilities and Works, Parks and Recreation, tax collection, and City Records.
When Brooklyn was incorporated as a city in 1834, building a new city hall was high on the list of priorities. The first Brooklyn City Hall was a modest three-story Federal-style building on the corner of Henry and Cranberry streets. It had the distinction of having its cornerstone laid in 1825 by the Marquis de Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution. The building was built for the Apprentices’ Library Association, organized in 1824 as the first free library in Brooklyn. The organization would one day grow to become the Brooklyn Museum.
The Pierrepont family donated a triangle of land for the new building. Hezekiah Pierrepont saw himself as a urban visionary and was in the process of building nearby Brooklyn Heights blocks as the new suburb called Brooklyn Heights. It took city fathers another year to organize a contest and choose a winning architect to design the building. In 1835 Manhattan architect Calvin Pollard won the contest, with Brooklyn’s Gamaliel King coming in second.
Pollard designed an impressively huge Greek Revival style temple that caught city official’s attention. Multi-columned Greek Revival buildings clad in marble or limestone were very popular at this time, especially for large civic buildings. The style was thought to be an expression of America’s independence and was inspired by the philosophies of the ancient Greeks, especially in regard to democracy. The upper crust of American society during this period was well versed in ancient Greek and Roman literature and history, so an adaptation of a Greek temple was thought to be appropriate and impressive.
Pollard’s building and its grounds took up the entire plot, which measured 269 feet on Fulton Street, 250 feet on Court Street, and 222 feet on Joralemon. Located at 209 Joralemon Street, the new building would be the city’s seat of government, with all the young city of Brooklyn’s governmental divisions in one building. It was estimated to cost anywhere from $750,000 to $1 million. That would be around $35 million in today’s money. Ground was broken in 1836; the foundation was dug and a cornerstone was put in place. Walls for the first story went up. Then everything came to a screeching halt.
The U.S. went into one of its many recessions — this one the Panic of 1837. The city had no money to continue. Stuck with an unfinished project, the contractor who supplied the marble sued the city. When money was flowing again, the city intended to resume construction, but the break gave those in charge time to rethink the design and expenses. Pollard was out and Gamaliel King was brought in to design a smaller, less ornate, and cheaper product.
King, as it happens, was a trustee of the Apprentices’ Library Association. He was also one of Brooklyn’s most prominent early architects. He began his practice in the 1820s. He and his partner, John Kellum, were pioneers in cast iron-fronted commercial buildings and designed one of the first in Manhattan. For his city hall design he was told the building had to fit into the footprint and foundation of Pollard’s building but with less, not more. With that in mind, he took Pollard’s basic ideas and shrunk and simplified them.
Seven years later, in 1845, construction began again. But before builders could erect the new building they had to tear down the first-floor walls already completed. The marble-clad brick walls had not been covered or protected, had been exposed to years of weather, were damaged beyond repair, and had to be demolished and removed. Then they started over. King incorporated the marble that had already been cut and delivered, plus material recycled from the demo. The city ended up paying for it when it settled the contractor’s suit.
The new build was not without problems. In the dead of night in April 1847 someone partially severed eight of the guy ropes which held up the derricks used to raise the marble cladding to the upper floors on the outside walls. Some of the stones weighed over five tons. Had the derrick failed, one of the pilasters would have fallen inside the building, taking the iron beams and brick arches holding up the second floor with it. Anyone who happened to be working inside at the time would be crushed, not to mention the cost of repairing the damage and replacing the materials and time lost. Fortunately, the sabotage was discovered, the ropes replaced, and construction went on as scheduled. The police were investigating and hoped to find the perpetrators.
The result was the beautiful Tuckahoe marble-clad temple-fronted building we know today, which looks out over what is now the plaza that is part of Columbus Park. The design’s most memorable feature is the expansive staircase leading up to the triangular portico entrance supported by six stately fluted columns. Originally, a wooden cupola that housed a large alarm bell and lookout used to signal fires and other emergencies crowned the top of the three-story-and-a-basement structure. There was also a clock. The final cost for building City Hall, including the demolition of the ground floor walls and starting over was $750,000.
City Hall’s Glory Days
Brooklyn’s new City Hall opened its doors in the spring of 1849, although the building really wasn’t completed until the end of the 1860s. The various agencies that needed to set up their offices started to move in as soon as they could. The grand court room and Common Council (as the Brooklyn City Council was called in those days) spaces followed. In August of 1849, with most of the work completed, a Brooklyn Eagle reporter was given a grand tour. He described the rooms and architectural and functional details of the building. There were 14 offices on the first floor, including the offices of the mayor, city judge, health officer, street commissioner, comptroller, county clerk, city clerk, city attorney, and commissioner of the Board of Education.
Continuing up the stairs, one entered the large and impressive rooms for the Brooklyn Common Council and the Brooklyn Supreme Court. The rest of the floor was taken up by judge’s chambers, jury rooms, the district attorney’s office, and offices for the various clerks and functionaries. The floor above housed more offices and an apartment for the building’s keeper and his family. Next came the alarm bell at the bottom of the tower. Two flights of stairs above the bell was a glassed-in observation room with seating “for the ladies who dare mount so high” and a spyglass, or small telescope, for taking in the magnificent views all around. Crowning the top of the building was a statue personifying Justice.
Some finishing touches like landscaping and fencing were still in motion as the various offices got back to business. This and the entire project gave local critics the opportunity to complain about a whole host of issues. They flooded the letters to the editor pages of the local papers for the next year. The building cost too much. Surely there were payoffs and graft throughout! Too much was spent on this, not enough on that. Someone complained about the paint job on the wooden cupola, but was later relieved to find out the color was a primer, not the final white.
Another person complained that the trees that were being planted around the building were too small and were planted too late. “We should like to see large trees set out and not the little twiglings which are usually procured,” the critic wrote. “There would be no difficulty in setting out half-grown forest tress, and the advantage would more than compensate for the additional expense.”
The Brooklyn Evening Star visited the courtroom and the Common Council chamber. They admired the former, calling it “magnificent,” but took issue with the mayor’s seat in the council room. “The eye is struck, and the pocket pained, by considerable tawdryism about the mayor’s seat. Some more chaste and simple style of taste would have been preferable,” according to the paper.
One writer wanted to make sure that the new Common Council chamber had adequate ventilation. He noted that the old chambers did not, and neither did the Fulton Ferry, for that matter. “Every room in our new City Hall must have a contrivance for furnishing a supply of air that is air and letting out that which is not better than poison.” Another thought that the area around City Hall, which included a small park, should have a name, like London’s Westminster. “The name should be for the entire triangle. It should be appropriate, original, distinguishing, simple and yet classical, not pompous, not too common.”
As the agencies and workers of the new city hall settled in, Brooklyn continued to grow around them. In 1868 Gamaliel King was back, this time designing the new Kings County Courthouse directly across the street. Before the end of the 19th century, they would be joined by the first Municipal Building and a new Hall of Records, making this part of Downtown Brooklyn a government center. Below them, heading east towards Flatbush Avenue, a huge mercantile district was also thriving. The elevated railroad ran from the Brooklyn Bridge and skirted City Hall before covering Fulton Street.
On February 26, 1895, Brooklyn almost lost its City Hall. A lighted gas jet in a third floor closet filled with waste paper caused the fire that destroyed that floor and the wooden cupola above. The bell that was supposed to announce an emergency and the clock and statue of Justice crashed through the roof. By the time the fire was put out, water had also ruined the walls and ceiling of the Common Council chamber below.
Three years later, a new cast-iron cupola was designed by Vincent C. Griffith of the firm Stoughton & Stoughton. It was hoisted to the roof and anchored firmly. A flag replaced the statue of Lady Justice. By this time, Brooklyn had been joined to Manhattan and the other boroughs as part of greater New York City. Brooklyn’s City Hall became Brooklyn Borough Hall. Things were going to be different from now on.
In 1902, funds were allocated to renovate the Common Council chamber, as there was no longer a Common Council. They needed a new courtroom instead and hired prolific Brooklyn architect Axel Hedman to design the new chamber. The old chamber was demolished and Hedman oversaw the construction of a new Beaux-Arts-style room. Over the years, other features had to be replaced or changed. Some, like replacing the interior stairways, were large projects.
Great Changes in the 20th Century
But the problem with the building was the lack of space. There were too many courts, judges, and staff vying for room in the building. The Kings County Courthouse across the street had been converted into the Appellate Court, so its use for other courts was limited. The Appellate wanted to leave the Kings County Courthouse and was petitioning for a new court building just for the Appellate Court, with room for the eight justices, their clerks, a law library and all the various space-claiming functions of the court. They got their wish in 1937, when a new Appellate Court building broke ground on Monroe Street in the middle of Brooklyn Heights. The building opened in 1938.
Meanwhile, over on Henry Street, the original building housing the Apprentices Library and City Hall had been replaced by a five-story loft building at some point after both moved out. The replacement building was slated to be torn down in the spring of 1930 and would be replaced by an apartment building. Today, that building is the Deco building at 80 Cranberry Street.
Some were also looking to do the same to Borough Hall. During the Great Depression, the knives came out against Borough Hall. The complaints came in that since Brooklyn was no longer a city, it didn’t need Borough Hall and the building had no real government function. Others claimed that the building was not really all that notable and the design nothing special, so it was expendable. Others said it was a marble monument to a brief era in Brooklyn’s history, considering it was only a city hall for 43 years, and therefore not worth keeping if something better came along.
It turns out that removing Borough Hall from the streetscape wasn’t going to be that easy. The deeds and old records were dusted off, and it was revealed that Hezekiah Pierrepont was a crafty planner. The deed to the triangular property, which included both the building and the small park in front of it, had conditions attached to the gifted land. Pierrepont stipulated that no matter what the city wanted to do, no building other than a city hall could be erected on the site. If they violated that, the land could revert to the Pierrepont estate. Borough Hall was there to stay.
As the centenary anniversary of the building approached in 1938, some renovations were needed. The original one-over-one windows were deteriorating beyond repair. It was decided that they would all be replaced with nine-over-nine or six-over-six sash windows. The idea came from Manhattan’s City Hall, and it was thought that the style was closer to the original and looked nice. (Technically, they were wrong, since Manhattan’s City Hall was built in 1812, 30 years before Brooklyn City Hall, and the architectural styles and details had changed.) But the new windows were welcome, as the deteriorating ones let in drafts.
A new copper roof on the cupola replaced the old materials, and other sprucing up was completed in time for the centenary. The newspapers printed a number of articles about Borough Hall, some with old-timers telling stories about the history of the building and interviews with those who worked on the construction. The building that many no longer loved celebrated its first 100 years.
Borough Hall’s neat triangle plot with garden was soon going to change beyond belief. First, the much hated noisy and dirty elevated train was now obsolete, as downtown Brooklyn was well served by subways, and the new Fulton Street subway, which followed the path of the El, was being replaced by the Fulton Street A line. The elevated tracks started coming down in 1941, exposing many of the surrounding Fulton Street buildings to fresh air and views they had never seen from the ground. Borough Hall greatly benefited from the expanded view.
Robert Moses, with the approval of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, planned a grand civic plaza for this part of Brooklyn, joining City Hall’s park to a much larger one that would lead to the Brooklyn Bridge. Between 1936 and 1960 the cityscape near Borough Hall changed radically. The surrounding area was a maze of short blocks filled with crowded buildings, large and small, some of which, like the Brooklyn Eagle Building, were significant.
Blocks and blocks of houses, tenements, theaters, and commercial buildings were torn down. WPA money paid for much of the earliest work and included demapping some streets and creating Cadman Plaza North, East, and West, which eliminated the stretch of Fulton Street and Washington Street surrounding Borough Hall. The site was named after Reverend Samuel Parks Cadman, who died in 1938. He was one of the most respected church leaders of his day, known around the world for his brilliant oratory and leadership.
Having cleared the field, as it were, Moses envisioned creating a grand civic plaza that would “be as much the pride of Brooklyn as the Piazza San Marco is to Venice.” Further development around Borough Hall eventually led to the new (and much unloved) Kings County Supreme Court building in 1958. It was designed by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, the architects of the Empire State building. The old Kings County Courthouse, which can be seen in almost any period photo of Brooklyn City Hall or Borough Hall was now obsolete and was torn down in the 1950s along with the Hall of Records next door.
The Brooklyn Law School, which at that time was located on nearby Pearl Street, built a new school on the site, which opened in 1968. In 1994, their second building, designed by Robert M. Stern & Associates, was sandwiched between the school and the Municipal Building. The grand 19th century classical marble-clad civic square was gone, leaving only Borough Hall.
In 1966, the newly created Landmarks Preservation Commission designated Borough Hall as one of the first of their individual landmarks, thus assuring there would be no more talk of demolition. In 1980, Borough Hall was added to the National Register of Historic Places. That same year, Borough President Howard Golden formed a commission to raise money for the restoration of Borough Hall. The funds raised from the public and private sector allowed him to authorize the firm of Conklin and Rossant to begin a long overdue renovation of the entire building. Nine years later they were finished.
The copper-clad shingling of the cupola was revived by the same French firm that restored the Statue of Liberty. The marble was repaired and cleaned and other exterior repairs made. A new statue of Lady Justice once again looked over her city. Inside, Axel Hedman’s courtroom was grandly restored, highlighting its beautiful woodwork and decorative plaster, topped by its coffered gilded dome. Other original details were restored, changed back to what Gamaliel King designed, but better. Borough Hall is once again something to be proud of.
Back in 1934, before any of the massive changes to the plaza and Borough Hall were made, the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper had a long running series called “Brooklyn Memories.” Readers old enough to have lived through the 19th century sent in first-person stories from all over Brooklyn. One very elderly woman had been a child living in Bedford when the cornerstone was laid in 1836. She wrote that her neighbors walked to the cornerstone ceremony. When they returned, the grandmother in the family said, “We wondered at the stupidity of the authorities in placing the City Hall so far out of town; for we decided that never would the city grow up that far.” Was she ever wrong!
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