One of my favorite fun facts about this area of Brooklyn, is that there was an elevated train perpendicular to the one described here, that today would cut stra

One of my favorite fun facts about this area of Brooklyn, is that there was an elevated train perpendicular to the one described here, that today would cut straight through Pratt’s campus, from north to south, and is the reason why there’s such a wide space between the boiler building and the engineering building. It connected the G line to EL. It was also surrounded by tenements, which were eminent domain’d (along with the elevated train line), so that Pratt could get a campus. That’s why Pratt’s campus is still a public park. It’s interesting because it’s a perfect counterpoint to what the city planners of the era wanted to do with Washington Square Park (replace an existing green space with a mass transit hub). Here, they did the inverse.