The New Yorker:

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October 4, 2024

Two hundred years ago, Brooklyn’s population was somewhere around ten thousand, double what it had been a generation earlier but still not enough to sell out a show at Barclays Center. The Brooklyn Bridge didn’t exist. Nor did bam, Prospect Park, Grand Army Plaza, or the Coney Island Cyclone. In a winter landscape painted by Francis Guy around this time, the territory has more in common with a medieval village than with the place it’s about to become.

The Brooklyn Museum, where that art work and around a hundred and forty thousand others now reside, is one of the few institutions to have survived Brooklyn’s journey from village to metropolis. Today, it is a lovely Frankenstein’s monster of different eras and aesthetics, but in 1824 it was a newly incorporated public library, the first free, circulating one that the borough ever had. Its earliest art exhibitions date back to the eighteen-forties, though the west wing, designed by McKim, Mead & White, wasn’t finished until 1897, less than a year before the formation of the modern City of New York. In 2004, the main entrance was replaced with a shiny glass-and-metal lobby that, today, gushes out from the Beaux-Arts slab above it like cream cheese from a bagel.

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