NOT too many of Kings County’s or any other boroughs’ town halls remain. The history of Kings County’s towns is complicated… but the $2 history is: The county’s original towns were Brooklyn (today’s downtown and stretching east and south as far as Bedford-Stuyvesant and Sunset Park), Bushwick, Flatbush, Flatlands, Gravesend and New Utrecht (New Lots was carved out of the eastern end of the town of Flatbush in 1852), and after a series of secessions and reorganizations, Brooklyn, by then a city, managed to annex all other towns and cities in Kings County in 1896 — only to consolidate with Greater NYC in 1898. Thus, Brooklyn became synonymous with Kings County.
Probably the largest of Kings County’s town halls still standing is the Flatbush Town Hall on Snyder Avenue, but the much smaller New Lots town hall can be found at #109-111 Bradford Street between Fulton Street and Atlantic Avenue in East New York. When opened in December 1873, the building included office space, rooms for public assembly and a fire department, and a police headquarters and jail cells were later added.
Its tenure as a town hall was short-lived as the city of Brooklyn annexed New Lots in 1886. It served as a police precinct for a decade and then became the Bradford Hospital, serving in that capacity until 1934. After that it was divided into residences. Other than the addition of a front wall and fence and a white paint job, it doesn’t look much different than it did in 1940 and I’m glad this relic of Brooklyn’s towns has been retained. Unfortunately the Landmarks Preservation Commission has not designated it.
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10/21/24