The subject is Real Estate in the New York Times, and the treatment of it in this article is architecture. This short filmette from the article is well done, but (more below)
that was my high school, the largest in the country. The NYT misses the more important backstory.
Winners of the most Westinghouse and National Merit Scholarships were from Erasmus Hall High School. (My favorite alumnus was Moe Howard.) With changing demographics and theories of education, the city has shut it down as unmanageable. The building on the corner was a Yeshiva in my time. The grade school (P.S.6 for public school #6, in NYC parlance) sits on what was a parking lot in my time, for people who flocked to the then excellent shopping, now mostly gone and replaced with Carribbean shops, and three palace like movie theaters on Flatbush Avenue, now shuttered. What's now called the Flatbush Town Hall, built in 1875, was a police station, and we knew all the beat cops who looked out for us. Down the block on Church Avenue was Holy Cross, church and school, now closed. If you look in the upper right corner of the shot above you'll see the steeple of the Dutch Reform Church, built in 1654.
In my time, one out of every seven families in the US traced its family to Brooklyn, a major settling spot from the 1600s to 1900s for immigrants who went on to build America. The bones that made Flatbush, at the heart of Brooklyn, famous are still there. The spirit and lifeblood isn't.
