Walking Brooklyn. Adrienne Onofri

      Well, that only took a hundred years. … Brooklynites had anticipated a boom for Downtown Brooklyn when the then-independent municipality of Brooklyn was consolidated into the City of New York in 1898 as a borough. But instead of New York’s business district spilling across the Brooklyn Bridge as expected, Manhattan expanded northward and Midtown developed as the new commercial center. But now, more than a century later, Downtown Brooklyn is finally getting its boom. Completed and planned construction is adding more than 10,000 apartments and nearly 1.5 million square feet of office space since 2004. Most hotel chains are opening properties in the neighborhood. And Brooklyn’s three tallest buildings are all in Downtown, and all were completed since 2014. The real estate blog Bisnow summed up the goings-on in Downtown Brooklyn: “We’re practically seeing a whole new city being built right before our eyes.” There’s still plenty left from the old city filling out Downtown’s streetscape.

      Walk Description

Upon exiting the subway, go to your right on Schermerhorn Street, then left on Hoyt Street. Turn right at State. The State Street Houses comprise 23 residences in Greek Revival and Italianate styles that are recognized by both the city landmarks commission and the National Register of Historic Places. Most of them are on your left, #324–290, but they also include #299–291 on your right. They were not built as a unit but at different times between 1847 and 1874 and have been meticulously preserved—the cast-iron balconies outside #297–293 are original.

      Before you turn right on Smith Street, look across to that tall building on the left. The dearth of windows may tip you off: it’s the House of Detention—a jail whose presence has not deterred luxury residences from sprouting up en masse in the vicinity. Detainees are taken across State Street for their day in court, and you can check out the courthouse from different sides as you turn onto Smith and then left on Schermerhorn. Constructed during the Art Deco age but in an older Renaissance Revival style, this is the one elegant building among Downtown Brooklyn’s otherwise plain courthouses. Those eagle-topped shields between the arches feature the seals of Brooklyn (on the left) and New York City (on the right) beneath the cherub faces. Farther down the block on Schermerhorn is the Friends Meeting House, used ever since it was built in 1857 for gatherings of Quakers, the religious society committed to peace and justice.

      Make a right on Boerum Place. The building across the street, which has the address 22 Boerum Place on this side but officially is 110 Livingston Street, was designed by Beaux Arts icons McKim, Mead & White in 1926 for the Elks Club—with bowling alley, swimming pool, and guest rooms inside—but from 1939 to 2003 was the headquarters of the New York City Board of Education. The penthouse floors were added when it was converted to million-dollar condos.

Under the building, you find the New York Transit Museum, located inside a deactivated subway station that you enter near the Schermerhorn corner. The museum’s collection includes old buses, turnstiles, subway signage, trolley models, and vintage subway cars that visitors can board. At street level, 22 Boerum is home to ISSUE Project Room, an arts incubator that commissions and presents works in different performance genres.

      Proceed north across Livingston Street, then take Red Hook Lane to your right. This alley is all that’s left of a road that once extended to the neighborhood of Red Hook over a mile away—a road predating all development in Brooklyn, as it started as a Native American trail and was a strategic route during the American Revolution.

      Turn right when you reach Fulton Street. Go inside #372 and seek out the mahogany bar, embossed walls, brass chandeliers, and cherrywood-framed mirrors. Gage & Tollner restaurant (specialty: clam bellies on toast) was responsible for the sumptuous Gay Nineties ambience—which, despite an interior landmarking, has dissipated as a series of eateries and shops have occupied the space since Gage & Tollner closed in 2004 after 112 years at this location. Continuing along Fulton, after Smith on your right there’s a side entrance to the Brooklyn Tabernacle, whose gospel choir has won a Grammy Award.

      This Fulton Mall was a lauded urban-renewal project in the 1970s and ’80s but has been more controversial of late, as the increasingly affluent residents of surrounding neighborhoods complained about the strip’s downscale character (decide for yourself if that’s racially coded). While there are still plenty of street vendors and discount stores, a bunch of retail chains have opened along Fulton recently, and both the roadway and sidewalks have been renovated. Still the third-busiest shopping district in the city (after Manhattan’s Herald Square and Madison Avenue), this section of Fulton Street was once the shopping destination of Brooklyn. Look up at the balconet wrapping around the corner building on your left across Lawrence Street. The entire site once belonged to women’s clothier Oppenheim Collins—those are its initials entwined on the shield at the tippy-top.

On your right past Gallatin Place, Macy’s fills two buildings facing Fulton: one from the 1870s with a cast-iron front and the other an Art Deco classic designed in 1929 by the architects of Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale’s in Manhattan. Prior to 1995, these were A&S, which had anchored Fulton shopping ever since the street developed as a retail hub after the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883. The terra cotta flourishes on the beautiful white building at #420 include a bust that may or may not be Queen Victoria, the British monarch at the time of the building’s construction in 1888. On the other side of Macy’s, note the onion-domed turret and terra cotta urns along the top of the corner building.

      Across Hoyt, the bronze work of the window bays and finials is the scene-stealer, and this 1920s building boasts charming iron balconies as well. This structure was the last addition to—and is the sole survivor of—a block of buildings occupied by Namm & Son, a prime competitor of A&S from the late 1800s into the 1950s. Both this building and the Offerman Building opposite it on Fulton have been landmarked. That building now occupied by Old Navy and Nordstrom Rack is still known to old-timers as Martin’s, the department store here from 1922 to 1979. Built in the early 1890s, it is looking quite grand following a recent cleaning. Don’t miss the lions at the corners; the monogram beneath each is HO, for developer Henry Offerman.