Past and Present: The Brooklyn Art Association

A look at Brooklyn, then and now.

In 1857, a group of Brooklyn artists who had previously been organized as the Sketch Club formed the Brooklyn Art Association. The group not only included artists, but their patrons and general lovers of art. The group grew in size and by the late 1860s had enough members and followers of means to have a grand building erected in heart of Brooklyn’s civic and business district on Montague and Court Streets.

At that time, Court Street was becoming the financial hub of Brooklyn. Banks, trusts and insurance companies were leaving the Fulton Ferry and slowly moving up the hill to the City Hall area. Montague Street was becoming a cultural destination. The leaders of the city, including Abiel A. Low, Henry Ward Beecher and Richard Storrs, wanted Brooklyn to have the same cultural venues that other important cities had. They and others spearheaded the building of the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Montague Street, between Court and Clinton. It opened in January of 1861.

The Academy was a beautiful building designed by Leopold Eidlitz, one of that era’s best, in a High Victorian Gothic design with “Moorish” ornamentation and details. The building had excellent acoustics, and was a beautiful building, inside and out. It also had the flexibility to be used for other events besides concerts. During the Civil War, the grand hall was used for several “Sanitary Fairs;” grand bazaars where money was raised for bandages and medical supplies for the war effort.

Soon after the Academy was completed, plans were made for a new Mercantile Library, which would be built across the street from the music hall. The Mercantile Library Association of the City of Brooklyn was founded in 1857, and it had run their own library on the second floor of the Brooklyn Athenaeum on Atlantic Avenue. That organization had been founded to provide a place of rest, relaxation and education to Brooklyn’s young men engaged in a “mercantile life.”

As the library grew, its collection became more business oriented, as well as providing tomes on philosophy and poetry. The Athenaeum and the Mercantile Libraries combined their collections and began thinking of a larger home. Their new building on Montague Street was designed in a similar High Victorian Gothic style by an architect named Peter B. Wight, and was finished just before the Art Association building was built. His building was a striped polyphonic combination of three colors of stone, with Gothic ornamentation, a hallmark of the High Victorian Gothic style.

The Art Association sponsored a competition to choose an architect for their building, which would rise next door to the Academy of Music. The winner of the contest was a young architect named Josiah Cleaveland Cady. His design incorporated the High Victorian Gothic styles of the Academy of Music and the Mercantile Library, tied them both together, added a bit more Moorish spice, and created a gem of a building that complemented them both.

The combination of important cultural buildings on the street was purposefully reminiscent of the great boulevards of Europe, most especially Munich’s Ludwigstrasse. The similarity wasn’t lost on A.A. Low, a well-traveled man, who compared the growing cultural significance of Montague Street to the Ludwigstrasse as early as 1869, when Cady’s design was chosen, but before the Art Association had even been built.

J.C. Cady’s building was just beautiful. Design-wise, he was inspired by the work of William Burges in London. Burge’s 1866 entry for a competition to design the Royal Courts of London looks very similar to the Art Association, especially in the design of the windows. The Association building, although much smaller than the neighboring Brooklyn Academy of Music, practically is the one you notice, which suited the Association’s goals and purpose very well.

The Art Association opened in 1872. For years afterward, they were THE place for gallery exhibitions in Brooklyn. Artists from all over the world showed their works there, some making their New York debuts there. It became as much of a grand and important venue as showing in the galleries of Manhattan, Paris or London. Brooklyn had arrived.

Many of the members of the Art Association were not artists, but art lovers and collectors. A group consisting of only artists, called the Brooklyn Art Club, also met here. In addition to gallery space, the building also had painting and sculpture studios on the upper floors. They also sponsored free art classes. A third group, the Rembrandt Club, which consisted of serious collectors, also met here.

J.C. Cady’s work on the Art Association was a huge jump start to his career. He partnered with two friends, Louis DeCoppet Berg and Milton See, for much of his career. Berg had connections and the engineering skills, See took care of the business, and Cady was the principle designer, although Berg was also quite skilled. A.A. Low liked the building so much, he hired Cady to design a large, important office building on the corner of Court and Remsen called the Garfield Building.

Cady would go on to a great career, designing buildings for Yale University, the original Metropolitan Opera building, the great southern wing of the Museum of Natural History, and more. In Brooklyn, his impressive buildings for the New York Methodist Episcopal Church, on New York Avenue and Dean Street in Crown Heights, and the St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Williamsburg, are among Brooklyn’s finest houses of worship.

The Brooklyn Art Association eventually was done in by its own success. By the end of the 19th century, the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Science, with the enthusiastic support of the members of the Art Association, were building a grand and enormous new institution on Eastern Parkway. When that opened, all the attention went over there.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music burned down in a spectacular fire in 1903. The new venue would open far away on Lafayette Avenue several years later. Montague Street was no longer a cultural hub. The business corridor had run around the corner past the Association’s building, and new banks and office buildings were going up, replacing all of the cultural institutions. The Art Association was torn down like the remains of the Academy of Music and the Mercantile Library. Today, a couple of taxpayer buildings stand where Cady’s beautiful building once welcomed art connoisseurs from all over the world. Those buildings won’t be there much longer either, and will be replaced by apartment towers.

GMAP