Past and Present: The Children’s Court/ 102 Court Street

A Look at Brooklyn, then and now.

After many delays, including the Panic of 1837, Brooklyn’s majestic City Hall was finally finished in 1848. It set the stage for the development in the area. By the 1850s and 60s, commercial buildings were going up all over the neighborhood, especially on Court Street, Remsen, Joralemon and Montague Streets. The Berean Buildings opened in 1867, located on the northwest corner of Court and State Streets, right where Barnes & Noble and the Regal Theater are today. They were three adjoining buildings, a large, handsome three story brownstone building with a pitched pediment roofline in the middle, flanked by unadorned three story brownstones, all in the Italianate style. All of the buildings had storefronts on the street level, and the center building had a two story hall auditorium space above the stores. The other two buildings had two floors each of rooms. The buildings took up most of Court Street, between State and Schermerhorn, and wrapped around State Street.

Soon after opening, the Berean Building became home to the Brooklyn branch of the New York Conservatory of Music. They remained here, advertising music lessons of all kinds, until at least 1887, when the school became August Arnold’s Music Conservatory. There were still more ads in the Brooklyn Eagle for piano, voice and other music lessons. The hall itself was rented out to political meetings and other events, as evidenced in the newspaper. By the 1890’s the address was home to the People’s Party and the Woman’s Progressive Union, which advocated for greater women’s rights and “a higher spiritual and scientific truth for women.” The Kings Country Prohibition Party also had meetings here, an organization that the Brooklyn Eagle referred to as the “County Committee of the Cold Water Men.”

By 1894, the Berean Buildings were renamed Apollo Hall, and its tenants were several acting schools, dancing schools, and political and social clubs, while the hall continued to be rented for all kinds of organizational functions. In 1899, the Medical Society of the County of Kings moved their entire library, as well as their meetings here, while their new building across from the Bedford Armory at Atlantic Avenue was being finished. An advertisement in the Eagle called Apollo Hall, “a hall for concerts, lectures, social entertainments; also lodge rooms.”

However, things were to radically change in 1903. Apollo Hall became a courthouse, the Municipal Court, First Division: Children’s Court. The building appears as such on a 1904 map of Brooklyn. The New York Times had an announcement on September 9, 1903. Judge E. Wilkin would be presiding over the court. The photograph on the left was taken in 1921, when the court had been here for eighteen years. It would stay another three years, abandoning this space in 1924.

So why let a good theater space go to waste? Between 1924 and 1949, 102 Court Street went back to its roots, and was called the Borough (or Boro) Hall Theater. It was small, and only held 598 people. The theater had a Kimball organ installed, and opened with a special children’s performance, in January of 1924,. This theater had live performances, and was a movie house as well, and lasted until 1949, when it became the Teatro Amor. The new owner renovated the old theater, inside and out, and established “the borough’s most intimate showcase for Latin-American products”, showing Spanish language movies. That same Brooklyn Eagle article also said that the theater had been a Latin American vaudeville house off and on for the last twenty years.

The end of a Latin-American venue in the late 1960’s came with the sharp decline in the fortunes of Brooklyn and New York City in general. Downtown Brooklyn became, well…seedy. Court Street was garbage strewn, practically abandoned at night, and not too attractive during the day. It was a perfect time and place for the theater to become a porn playhouse called the Cene-Art or Cinart Theater. In 1969, “I am Curious Yellow” played here, and by the late 70s, early 80s, they were running nothing but XXX movies and having live strip shows. By the mid to late 1980s, when I came to Brooklyn, the theater was boarded up, and the stores on the ground floor were in the process of moving or closing up for good. Homeless men huddled and slept in the theater doorway, and panhandled on the corner.

In 1989, the property was purchased by a development company, which sat on it until 1995, when Forest City Ratner acquired the property and planned a large entertainment complex with a twelve-plex movie theater and a Barnes & Noble. The Berean Building/Apollo Theater/Children’s Court/Borough Theater/Teatro Amor/Cinart Theater, one of Court Street’s oldest buildings, would be rubble in 1999. The multiplex and store opened in 2000, and has been operating for twelve years. GMAP