Girls' High School
475 Nostrand Avenue | also 457 Nostrand Avenue | Bedford-Stuyvesant | built 1886
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The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1886
Girls' High School opens as the girls' department of the Central Grammar School
The Central Grammar School, which gave the city its first publicly funded secondary education, began at Court and Livingston Streets after a compromise in 1878. Before the new Nostrand Avenue building opened, officials saw it would be too small for all students, so only the girls moved. They started classes here in September 1886, while the boys stayed downtown.
- 1886
James Naughton designs a red brick school with a towered, mansard-roofed center pavilion
James W. Naughton, the Board of Education's Superintendent of Buildings, designed the school in a blend of Victorian Gothic and French Second Empire styles. Three pavilions of red brick with stone trim are joined by recessed sections, and the center entrance pavilion rises to a mansard roof, a square belfry and a slate spire. Naughton designed all of Brooklyn's schools of the period.
“Girls' High School is a symmetrically massed structure consisting of three pavilions ... faced with red brick with contrasting stone trim…”
- 1891
Girls' and Boys' High Schools get separate names, and a rear extension nearly doubles the building
In 1891 the two departments of the Central Grammar School were given separate administrations and the names Girls' High School and Boys' High School. That year Naughton also added a rear extension that nearly doubled the Nostrand Avenue building, with an 1,800-seat auditorium, a library, a lecture room and 28 classrooms. The extension has since been demolished.
“A substantial rear extension, also by Naughton, was added in 1891 nearly doubling the size ... 28 classrooms, a library, a lecture room, and an auditorium…”
- 1912
C.B.J. Snyder adds a Collegiate Gothic wing with a gym and a running track
A new wing opened in 1912 along the Macon Street side. C.B.J. Snyder, who was then head of school building for the city's Board of Education, designed it in the Collegiate Gothic manner, in red brick with stone trim. Classrooms filled its first two floors, with a gymnasium on the third and a running track on the fourth. The report credits Snyder with bringing Collegiate Gothic to New York's public school architecture.
“The first two floors of this addition contain classrooms while the third floor is a gymnasium and the fourth contains a running track.”
- 1968
Girls High closes after teaching Betty Smith, Shirley Chisholm and Lena Horne
Brownstoner lists Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Shirley Chisholm and Lena Horne among the school's graduates. Girls High officially closed in 1968, merging with Boys High in a new building on Fulton Street and Stuyvesant Avenue. The Nostrand Avenue building then sat empty for several years before reopening as the Brooklyn Adult Training Center, offering GED, computer and job-skills classes.
Source: brownstoner.com
- 1983
The Landmarks Preservation Commission designates Girls' High School a city landmark
The commission designated the school an individual landmark on June 28, 1983, after a public hearing in 1981. It called the building the oldest public high school structure in New York built for that purpose, and said the school's curriculum became the model for high schools later built in Manhattan and across the city.
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