The Brooklyn Institute's Museum Opens Its Doors

On October 2, 1897, the Brooklyn Institute's new museum building on Eastern Parkway formally opened to the public, just months before Brooklyn gave up being its own city and joined the five boroughs of Greater New York. The architects, McKim, Mead and White, had designed the building in the neoclassical style as part of a plan so grand it would have made it the largest museum building in the world. Only a portion of that plan was ever built, an L-shaped wing covering roughly 4.5 acres, while the rest stayed on paper as Brooklyn's civic ambitions cooled after consolidation. What opened that day became the seed of today's Brooklyn Museum, one of the city's biggest art collections housed in a building that still reads as unfinished by design.