The View from Here: the Brooklyn Quaker Meeting House
Thursday, April 26th, 2007This is the first in an occasional series of posts on buildings and features visible from 110 Livingston. If you have a suggestion for a feature, let us know.
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At the corner of Schermerhorn and Boerum Place sits a modest yet oddly imposing brick structure. If you thought this building looked old, well, it was built four years before Lincoln was president, in 1857–so it’s probably the only pre-war building along Boerum Place (pre-Civil War, that is). For the last 150 years it has housed various incarnations of the Brooklyn Monthly Meeting of the Society of Friends (i.e., the Quakers), who have outlasted quite a bit of change in the surrounding neighborhood.
The meeting house is the place for the society’s gatherings, and also houses a Sunday school for kids aged 4-12. The society also founded the Brooklyn Friends School, housed at 375 Pearl St., in 1867.
The Architectural Guidebook to Brooklyn describes the building as having “that beguiling simplicity expressive of the still, small inner voice that we know from the Quaker tradition.” We would second that peaceful thought.