The late nineteenth century was a period of substantial growth for the Shriners in Brooklyn. In 1888, the Kismet Temple was chartered as the 37th Shriners temple. By 1910, the temple had more than 2,000 members. The site was purchased in 1909 and construction of the temple began later that year.The building was designed by architect Richard Thomas Short, a Brooklynite and a Kismet Noble. It was built in the Moorish Revival style, which was common among Shriners temples at the time. The Shriners envisioned the temple as a venue for public events as well as their own gatherings and it was built with an auditorium that could seat 2,326 people. At the time, it was a state-of-the-art facility, with border lights, footlights, and switchboards, as well as fireproofing and ventilation. In keeping with its Moorish theme, the temple features minarets, intricate tile work, and arches.In the early twentieth century, the temple hosted numerous public events, including a speaking engagement by Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt's son, Theodore, Jr., was a member of the Kismet Shriners. The temple continued to be used by the Shriners for a number of years, although it was listed as a movie theater in 1932.By the 1960s, the demographics of Brooklyn were changing. African Americans and immigrants began moving into the borough and many of the white residents opted to leave. Many of Brooklyn's white residents moved, and by the 1970s, Brooklyn was home to the largest African American community in the city. With white flight in full swing, the Shriners decided to sell the temple. In 1966, the building was sold to the Friendship Baptist Church, which still occupies the building today. The Kismet Temple is also still active, with headquarters in Hicksville, New York.The Kismet Temple is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Detail of the building's Moorish elements

Construction of this Freemason Shrine began in 1909 under a fraternal organization known as the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. It is believed to be the oldest Shriners' mosque still in existence and was the first of its kind in New York. The building was designed in a Moorish Revival style with murals and architectural details mirroring that style throughout the interior. The Friendship Baptist Church has owned the building since 1966. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2013.

Kismet Temple (Kismet Mosque) Friendship Baptist Church

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Take a stroll through the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood to some of its most historical buildings. The walking tour includes what may be the oldest Shriners' mosque still standing in the U.S., the birthplace of the teddy bear, an apartment building that looks like a French chateau, and two of the oldest high school buildings in Brooklyn.

The late nineteenth century was a period of substantial growth for the Shriners in Brooklyn. In 1888, the Kismet Temple was chartered as the 37th Shriners temple. By 1910, the temple had more than 2,000 members. The site was purchased in 1909 and construction of the temple began later that year. The building was designed by architect Richard Thomas Short, a Brooklynite and a Kismet Noble. It was built in the Moorish Revival style, which was common among Shriners temples at the time. The Shriners envisioned the temple as a venue for public events as well as their own gatherings and it was built with an auditorium that could seat 2,326 people. At the time, it was a state-of-the-art facility, with border lights, footlights, and switchboards, as well as fireproofing and ventilation. In keeping with its Moorish theme, the temple features minarets, intricate tile work, and arches. In the early twentieth century, the temple hosted numerous public events, including a speaking engagement by Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt's son, Theodore, Jr., was a member of the Kismet Shriners. The temple continued to be used by the Shriners for a number of years, although it was listed as a movie theater in 1932. By the 1960s, the demographics of Brooklyn were changing. African Americans and immigrants began moving into the borough and many of the white residents opted to leave. Many of Brooklyn's white residents moved, and by the 1970s, Brooklyn was home to the largest African American community in the city. With white flight in full swing, the Shriners decided to sell the temple. In 1966, the building was sold to the Friendship Baptist Church, which still occupies the building today. The Kismet Temple is also still active, with headquarters in Hicksville, New York. The Kismet Temple is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

While the City of Brooklyn offered public elementary schools for many decades, public high schools were mentioned by the Board of Education as early as 1849 but weren't introduced until the 1880s. The system began in the late 1870s as part of a "central grammar school" where basic courses were taught more thoroughly; this was first housed at Court and Livingston Streets until the high school could be built. The Girls' High School was designed by Irish-born James W. Naughton (1840-1898), a trained architect and the Brooklyn Schools' Superintendent of Buildings. The institution was meant to be co-educational when it was designed, but the rapidly growing Brooklyn population would have filled the school beyond capacity. Plans were made to build another building as the boys' high school and keep the Nostrand Ave. building for girls only. The Girls' High School opened in 1886 with its original name as the Girls' Department of the Central Grammar School. The Boys' High School, four blocks away on Marcy Ave. north of Putnam Ave. (also a Clio entry and Naughton design), didn't open until 1892. The schools' names were changed in 1891 to Girls' High School and Boys' High School. Both schools served as prototypes for high schools built later in Manhattan.The original part of the Girls' High school features a central towered entrance pavilion with a Corinthian portico and a balustrade balcony for the windows above; decorative tile plaques on the portico display the date. There are two projecting side pavilions topped with hipped, slate roofs with dormer windows. The three-and-a-half story building is faced in red brick with contrasting stone trim and a stone basement. A rear addition opened in 1891, nearly doubling the size of the school, containing 28 classrooms, a library, a lecture room, and an auditorium. This addition has since been demolished. An addition on the south side of the Girls' High School, built in 1912, is Collegiate Gothic style; it was designed by C.B.J. Snyder and executed in red brick with stone trim and tripartite pointed-arched windows on the first floor. The roof and dormer windows of the addition are similar to those of the original building; the addition contains two floors of classrooms below a gymnasium, which is below a running track.In September 1895, the Brooklyn Board of Education discussed a resolution that those girls who were unable to gain admission to the Girls' High School could attend the Manual Training High School temporarily if they wanted to. Some board members were against the resolution, citing concerns for girls' safety in a building with so many boys and filled with machinery. The Girls' High School seating capacity was 2,038 while 2,225 pupils had applied. Instead, a resolution was passed that a committee be formed to report to the board on the overcrowding issue.Girls' High School was even more severely overcrowded by the late 1930s with an enrollment of over 4,000. To accommodate, art and typing rooms were converted to regular classrooms, the school day was split into two sessions, and some classes met in an annex in Public School 75 on Evergreen St. The gymnasium was too small to fit class demand and some calisthenics classes were held in school hallways. Dr. Rowena Keith Keyes was the school's principal. The city acquired land on Bedford Avenue near Brooklyn College to build another high school.After building renovations in the 1970s after the high school moved elsewhere, the vacant building soon became a Center for Adult Education, which continues to this day. Classes are offered in general education and English as a Second Language.

The red brick building at 475 Nostrand Avenue is the oldest surviving structure in New York City that was built as a high school. The Girls' High School was constructed from 1885 to 1886 and was designed by James W. Naughton in a mixture of Victorian Gothic and French Second Empire styles. A large addition to the rear of the building dated to 1891 but has been demolished; another to the south was added in 1912. The building has become an adult education center. The Girls' High School building is considered eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places and became a New York City Landmark in 1983. The building is part of Bedford Historic District, a National Park Service-certified local historic district.

Girls' High School

The Renaissance Apartments building was fancier than the typical multi-family tenement-style dwelling of its era and aimed to attract middle-class residents who favored rowhouses. The building has been compared to a French chateau from the Loire Valley with its slate mansard roof, terra cotta decorations, and three round corner towers with conical roofs and finials. Above the Nostrand Avenue entrance, the second through fourth floors are vertically joined in a triumphal arch. Pairs of two-story columns with Corinthian capitals decorate the bays flanking the arch. The facade has a striped effect with continuous bands of terra cotta alternated with courses of buff brick. Use of lighter-colored brick and more refined details as seen in the Renaissance Apartments became fashionable in the 1890s.The Brooklyn architect, Montrose Morris (1861-1916), was born in Hempstead, New York but soon moved to Brooklyn. He designed his own residence in Bedford-Stuyvesant on Hancock St. and allowed the public to tour the home to promote his business. An investor named Louis Seitz hired Morris to design the Renaissance Apartments after he was pleased with the nearby Alhambra Apartments (500-518 Nostrand Avenue) that Morris designed for him. Morris also designed the Imperial (on Bedford Avenue at Grant Square), a grander version of the Renaissance Apartments. The Renaissance Apartments building (sometimes listed as 140-144 Hancock St.) was sold in December 1899 by David A. Barnes to an unnamed investor for $110,000. It was last sold in 2020 for nearly $1.5 million.The ground floor held space that was advertised for rent as doctor's or dentist's offices in 1925; the building superintendent was Mr. Sealey. There was only one vacant apartment in the building in March 1926; the "light and airy" apartment was offered for a "reasonable" rent. The apartment building's owner served as its management; the apartments were updated by the early 1930s and typically offered six to seven rooms, a bath and shower, an Electrolux refrigerator, wood parquet flooring, and "every modern improvement." A seven-room apartment rented for $65 in 1931. By the mid-1980s, the building was vacant and partially sealed until it underwent renovations. In recent years, rent ranged from about $1,500 to $2,500 for the studio to three-bedroom, one-bath units.

The buff Roman brick building with circular corner towers on the southwest corner of Nostrand Avenue and Hancock Street has been standing since 1892. The Renaissance Apartments building was one of several in Brooklyn designed by a local architect, Montrose W. Morris, for real estate investor Louis F. Seitz. The building was listed in the New York and National Registers of Historic Places in 1995 and became a New York City Landmark in 1986. The five-story building holds 25 rental apartments.

Renaissance Apartments

A political cartoon in 1902 started it all. President Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt, an avid hunter, was on a hunting trip in Mississippi with reporters in 1902 when he failed to kill any prey. When a young bear was captured and brought to the hunting camp, Roosevelt refused to kill the cub. Clifford K. Berryman captured the scene in cartoons published in the Washington Post newspaper. Morris Mitchtom saw the political cartoons and Rose created a stuffed toy bear in velvet with button eyes; he displayed it in the window of his Tompkins St. candy and toy shop with a sign reading "Teddy's bear" and they sold as fast as Rose could sew them. Michtom sent one of the bears to President Roosevelt and asked permission to call them teddy bears. The President wrote back and said fine, but he doubted his name would be worth much in the toy bear business. Roosevelt met cartoonist Berryman in 1903 at a reception and introduced him to Mrs. Roosevelt as "the bear man." The President reportedly confessed that he felt pity after getting a laugh out of the cartoons and doubted that he could find it in his heart ever to kill another bear. Roosevelt used the Michtom's bear as a symbol in his 1904 election campaign. A few years later, Roosevelt told Berryman that that little bear of his had put the doll industry out of business. The toy bear proved to be so popular that Mitchtom opened a second facility in Brooklyn to create the teddies.In 1907, the Michtoms created the Ideal Novelty &amp; Toy Company with the Butler Brothers as the wholesale distributors of the bears created from the Michtoms' patterns. This was the first teddy bear manufacturer in the U.S.; stuffed plush bears also were created independently and sold by the Stieff company in Germany, who began producing them around the same time as the Michtoms. The early Ideal teddy bears tended to have ears far apart, a triangular face with a wide forehead, and plush mohair coats. Some thought that the teddy bear craze was just a fad that would disappear when Roosevelt's time in office ended, but this proved untrue. A rival stuffed toy, the "Billy Possum," was introduced in 1909 but failed to catch on.Morris Mitchtom died in 1938, fifteen years after his son, Benjamin joined the family business. Benjamin changed the company name to Ideal Toy Company. The 50th anniversary of the teddy bear was marked in 1952 by the creation of a special edition teddy bear with a plastic face. The Ideal Toy Corporation joined the New York Stock exchange in 1968 as one of the top three toy companies in the U.S. In 1982, Morris's grandson, mark, sold the company; it later became part of Mattel but stopped making teddy bears around 1982.J.C. Burne was the architect of the building at 404 Tompkins Avenue, built in 1887. The ground floor storefront was modernized years ago. Rental apartments are still on the upper floors of the building, with a thrift store in the former Michtom's store space.

The red bricks at 404 Tompkins Avenue once served as the facade of a ground-floor commercial space operated by Morris and Rose Mitchom, Russian-Jewish immigrants who designed a stuffed toy bear in 1902 after President Theodore Roosevelt spared the life of a bear cub while hunting. The couple got permission from Roosevelt to call their toy a "teddy bear" and founded the Ideal Novelty and Toy Company in 1907. The couple lived in one of the apartments above the store. One of their early teddy bears is on display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The commercial space now contains Byas &amp; Leon, a vintage and consignment shop, and the upper floors are still apartments.

Birthplace of the Teddy Bear

The Superintendent of Buildings for the City of Brooklyn Schools, James W. Naughton, designed the Boys' High Schoo, which was finished in 1891. Along with the Girls' High School several blocks away (475 Nostrand Ave., also a Naughton design and a Clio entry), the Boys' High School was the first public secondary school in New York City. Even before the Girls' High School opened, the building was too small to hold both boys and girls as planned as Brooklyn's population exploded, so it was decided to split the sexes and build another building for the boys. The Boys' High school opened in September 1892 and was filled to capacity right from the start.The main facade of the original part of the school spans all of Marcy Ave. from Putnam to Madison Avenues. Earmarks of the Richardsonian Romanesque style are multiple arched openings, a picturesque silhouette, and strong, powerful massing. The left end on Marcy Ave. has a round tower with a conical roof and is decorated with carved portraits of students' faces. There's a taller, square tower on the right corner with a pyramidal roof. A rear addition was built in 1911 in an earlier Romanesque style which included an auditorium and a basement boiler room. The building was expanded to the rear again in 1955 with a new cafeteria in a simple, one-story box-like design in orange brick that ignores the style of the rest of the building. The school building has been featured on postcards.The City of Brooklyn became a New York City borough in 1898 and the schools became New York City public schools. The city decided to combine the Girls' and Boys' High Schools into a co-educational school and built a new high school building on Fulton Street at Utica Avenue. The Boys' and Girls' High School buildings closed in 1975. The Girls' High School building soon became a center for adult education, but the Boys' High School was vacant for a while before it was turned into a school for difficult students and remedial classes.The deteriorating former Boys' High School was rehabilitated on the inside and outside in the 1990s. Since the renovations, the building has housed several public-school programs. One is Brooklyn Academy High School which teaches about 140 students aged 16 to 21 who have dropped out of high school or have fallen behind on credits needed to graduate. The fourth floor contains Uncommon Collegiate Charter High School, a continuation of the Uncommon elementary and middle schools, featuring longer school days and longer school years.

The building at 832 Marcy Avenue between Putnam and Madison Avenues has been called one of the finest Romanesque Revival buildings in New York City. The Boys' High School was constructed in 1891 and opened in 1892. The school building is listed in the National Register of Historic Places for its architectural significance. Famous alumni include composer Aaron Copeland, sportscaster Howard Cosell, and author Isaac Asimov. The exterior appeared in the television show The Knick as a Victorian hospital. The auditorium, built in 1911, appears near the end of the Spike Lee film Crooklyn as a concert hall. The building still houses public schools, the Brooklyn Academy High School and the Uncommon Collegiate Charter High School. The school building is part of a National Park Service-certified local historic district, Bedford Historic District.

From Shriners to Teddy Bears, Bedford-Stuyvesant Historical Walking Tour, Brooklyn

Kismet Temple (Kismet Mosque) Friendship Baptist Church

Introduction

Images

Backstory and Context

Sources