Building a large civic building is a prize for any architect, be that back in the early 20th century, or now. The chance to put your stamp on a city, to build something both useful and necessary and quite public is a great coup and a huge ego boost. By those criteria and more, architect Rudolf Daus was a very successful man. Part One of this story tells about his rise to the top of Brooklyn’s architectural world. By 1900, he had a number of very public buildings to his credit; the Lincoln Club, the St. John’s Orphanage for Boys, and most recently, the impressive NY and NJ Telephone Building, downtown on Willoughby Street. He had designed several of the new Brooklyn Carnegie Libraries, and perhaps the biggest and most noticeable building of all – the massive 13th Regiment Armory in Bedford that took up almost an entire city block. Now he was looking for another hotly contested prize; the expansion of Brooklyn’s Hall of Records, which stood on the corner of Boerum Place and Fulton Street.

The commission would be decided by a mayoral committee that looked at submissions by several interested architects or firms. They submitted drawings, floor plans, scale models and budgets. Budget was everything in a civil project, and the winner of the contest would be expected to deliver on time and on budget. As one of three fine architects vying for the job, Daus had one disadvantage: all of his other projects, most especially the recent armory, were way over budget. Daus did not like limits, not on his work, or on the money it would take to make it work. But he had connections, he was the consummate insider, and this time, his Brooklyn connection was Hugh McLaughlin, the powerful boss of the Democratic machine in Brooklyn, which was itself a subsidiary of Manhattan’s Tammany Hall. When Daus beat two other architects out for this Hall of Records job, some cried “Foul!” Daus really didn’t care. (more…)