Boys' High School

832 Marcy Avenue | also 260 Madison Street | Bedford-Stuyvesant | built 1892

Open on the map6 entries

The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

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.

  1. 1891

    James W. Naughton builds Boys' High in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, with two contrasting towers

    Naughton, Superintendent of Buildings for the Brooklyn Board of Education, designed what was then Brooklyn's most important public academic institution. A round tower with a conical roof marks the Putnam corner, while a four-sided tower with a pyramidal roof rises at Madison Street, cut at its base by the deeply recessed main entrance arch. The landmark report compares that tower to Richardson's courthouse and jail in Pittsburgh.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  2. 1892

    September

    Boys' High School is completed in September 1892, seven years after Girls' High opened nearby

    Brooklyn's Girls High School opened on Nostrand Avenue in 1885 as the first high school in New York City. It had been planned for both sexes but was too small for both, so the boys waited until this school was completed in September 1892. The student body was already full before the doors opened, which led to immediate plans for expansion.

    Source: brownstoner.com

  3. 1905

    The first addition by Snyder expands Boys' High and adds an auditorium

    By 1905 the school received its first expansion by C.B.J. Snyder, who took over school building after Naughton's death in 1898. The addition houses an auditorium that has changed little over the years; in Spike Lee's film Crooklyn it is the concert hall seen near the finale.

    Source: brownstoner.com

  4. 1975

    Boys' High, which merges into Boys and Girls High in 1975, counts Mailer, Asimov, Copland and Max Roach among its alumni

    Graduates include Norman Mailer, Isaac Asimov, Aaron Copland, Man Ray, Norman Lloyd, William Levitt, the architect Morris Lapidus and the jazz great Max Roach. Professional athletes who attended include Lenny Wilkens, Tommy Davis, Connie Hawkins and Si Green. In the mid-twentieth century the school drew the sons of Jewish immigrants, and a teaching job there was an NYC teacher's dream.

    Source: brownstoner.com

  5. 1975

    Boys' High merges with Girls' High and moves out; the empty landmark later hosts remedial classes

    In 1975 the Board of Education merged Boys and Girls High Schools into a coed school in a new building at Fulton Street and Utica Avenue. The old Boys' High building sat empty, though it was designated an individual landmark that year. For another 15 years it housed incorrigible students and remedial classes, until community activists and educators found money to rehabilitate it.

    Source: brownstoner.com

  6. 2014

    The Cinemax series The Knick, airing 2014 to 2015, turns the school into Knickerbocker Hospital

    The school's exterior served as the Knickerbocker Hospital in The Knick, a Cinemax period medical drama that ran from 2014 to 2015. Brownstoner reports that the back of the school and the surrounding block were the set, and the hospital signage was removed afterward. The school itself had left the building in 1975, when it merged with Girls' High School.

    “The building was the exterior filming location for the Knickerbocker Hospital in the Cinemax period medical drama television series The Knick (2014–2015).”

    Source: Wikipedia

Further reading

Nearby

All 23 buildings with stories in Bedford-Stuyvesant