Brooklyn Museum
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Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet (52,000 m2), the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 500,000 objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, Flatbush, and Park Slope neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the museum's Beaux-Arts building was designed by McKim, Mead & White.

The Brooklyn Museum was founded in 1823 as the Brooklyn Apprentices' Library and merged with the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in 1843. The museum was conceived as an institution focused on a broad public. The Brooklyn Museum's current building dates to 1897 and has been expanded several times since then. The museum initially struggled to maintain its building and collection, but it was revitalized in the late 20th century following major renovations.

Significant areas of the collection include antiquities, specifically their collection of Egyptian antiquities spanning over 3,000 years. European, African, Oceanic, and Japanese art make for notable antiquities collections as well. American art is heavily represented, starting at the Colonial period. Artists represented in the collection include Mark Rothko, Edward Hopper, Norman Rockwell, Judy Chicago, Winslow Homer, Edgar Degas, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Max Weber.

The Brooklyn Museum's origins date to August 1823, when Brooklyn citizens, including Augustus Graham, founded the Brooklyn Apprentices' Library in Brooklyn Heights. The library was formally incorporated November 24, 1824, and the cornerstone of the library's first building was laid in 1825 on Henry and Cranberry Street. The Library moved into the Brooklyn Lyceum building on Washington Street in 1841. The two institutions merged into the Brooklyn Institute in 1843; the institute offered exhibitions of painting and sculpture and lectures on diverse subjects. The Washington Street building was destroyed in a fire in 1891.

In February 1889, several prominent Brooklyn citizens announced that they would begin fundraising for a new museum for the Brooklyn Institute. The museum's proponents quickly identified a site just east of Prospect Park, on the south side of Eastern Parkway. The next year, under director Franklin Hooper, Institute leaders reorganized as the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences and began planning the Brooklyn Museum. Brooklyn officials hosted an architectural design competition for the building, eventually awarding the contract to McKim, Mead & White. The competition was characterized in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle as "one of the most important in the history of architecture", as the museum was to contain numerous divisions. The museum remained a subdivision of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, along with the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and the Brooklyn Children's Museum, until these organizations all became independent in the 1970s.

Brooklyn mayor Charles A. Schieren agreed in January 1895 to issue $300,000 per year in bonds for the Brooklyn Institute museum's construction. Initially, only a single wing and pavilion on the western portion of the museum's site, measuring 210 by 50 feet (64 by 15 m) across, was to be built. Engineers began surveying the site that May and found that the bedrock under the site was several hundred feet deep, making it impossible to build the foundations on solid rock. Nonetheless, the engineers had determined that the gravel fill under the site was strong enough to support a building. Construction on the Brooklyn Museum of Arts and Sciences' west wing officially began on September 14, 1895. A groundbreaking ceremony for the museum was hosted on December 14 of the same year. Two of the museum's three stories had been completed by April 1896.

The Brooklyn Institute museum's building was completed in March 1897 after a sidewalk was built between the museum's entrance and Eastern Parkway. The museum's first exhibit was a collection of almost 600 paintings, which had opened to the public on June 1, 1897, several months before the formal opening of the museum. The Brooklyn Institute's museum formally opened on October 2, 1897, and was one of the last major structures built in the city of Brooklyn before the formation of the City of Greater New York in 1898.

The Brooklyn Institute approved the construction of the central entrance pavilion in May 1899, and Hooper requested $600,000 for this addition the next month. The four-story structure was to measure 140 by 122 feet (43 by 37 m). The central pavilion was to include a 1,250-seat lecture hall in the basement (actually at ground level), as well as a hall of sculpture on the first floor, which would serve as the museum's main lobby. The second story was to contain natural-history exhibits, while the third story was to include paintings. The New York State Legislature needed to authorize $300,000 in bonds for the pavilion, but they had not done so by the end of 1899. Work on the central wing started in June 1900. The museum's central section was nearly completed by January 1903, but work proceeded slowly due to labor disputes.

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