Why Brooklyn Academy of Music matters.
Brooklyn Academy of Music is a pioneering performing-arts institution where Fort Greene's cultural concentration meets international theater, dance, music and film across a campus shaped by more than 160 years of artistic ambition.
Set along Lafayette Avenue near Ashland Place and just steps from Fort Greene Park, the institution occupies several buildings threaded through the historic streets at the edge of Downtown Brooklyn. The Peter Jay Sharp Building presents its principal Beaux Arts face through light brick, polychrome terra cotta and an expansive entrance composition created by theater architects Herts & Tallant. Inside, a 5,000-square-foot grand foyer distributes audiences toward the Howard Gilman Opera House and adjoining rooms, preserving the building's original conception as a multipurpose cultural center. BAM Strong and BAM Fisher extend the campus into contrasting architectural settings, placing performance spaces inside a recovered early twentieth-century theater and a purpose-built contemporary arts building. The result is an unusually layered performing-arts campus whose historic auditorium, adapted theater and newer production spaces place successive generations of Brooklyn cultural architecture within a few surrounding blocks.
What defines Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Brooklyn Academy of Music is best known for developing from a nineteenth-century Brooklyn cultural institution into an internationally significant center for experimental and contemporary performance. The Brooklyn Philharmonic Society proposed a borough cultural center in 1858, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music was incorporated the following year for the advancement of music, literature and the arts. Leopold Eidlitz designed its first home on Montague Street, which opened in 1861 with a 2,200-seat theater and subsequently hosted Edwin Booth, anti-slavery gatherings, Mark Twain and the Brooklyn and Long Island Sanitary Fair supporting sick and wounded Union soldiers. Fire destroyed that building on November 30, 1903, prompting Brooklyn civic leaders to raise funds for a replacement near Fort Greene. The cornerstone of the Lafayette Avenue building was laid in 1906, and the new Academy culminated its 1908 opening celebrations with Geraldine Farrar and Enrico Caruso in the Metropolitan Opera's production of Gounod's Faust. The Metropolitan Opera continued Brooklyn seasons there through 1921, when Caruso suffered a throat hemorrhage during L'Elisir d'Amore in what became his final public performance. The institution subsequently hosted major figures spanning Arturo Toscanini, Isadora Duncan, Anna Pavlova, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Paul Robeson and Rudolf Nureyev, whose 1962 appearance marked his American debut. Postwar audience decline left BAM struggling financially and renting rooms for language classes, martial arts instruction and school use before a new leadership era altered its artistic direction.
Harvey Lichtenstein's appointment as executive director in 1967 began a separate institutional chapter centered on contemporary performance and international artistic exchange. Seth Faison helped restructure BAM during this period, and the Academy separated from the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in 1969, receiving $318,000, about one quarter of the parent institution's endowment. Lichtenstein remained at BAM for 32 years, developing a program that brought experimental theater, dance and music into sustained contact with Brooklyn audiences. Chuck Davis created DanceAfrica at BAM in 1977 after his company represented the United States at FESTAC '77 in Lagos; the annual Memorial Day program grew into BAM's longest-running program and the largest American celebration devoted to African and African-American dance, music and culture. The Next Wave series began in 1981 and developed into the Next Wave Festival in 1983, creating a durable platform for interdisciplinary artists and productions that resisted conventional divisions between theater, dance, music and visual practice. Peter Brook, Pina Bausch, Robert Wilson, Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson became closely associated with this period of BAM's artistic development. Lichtenstein retired in 1999, when the Majestic Theater was renamed the Harvey Theater in his honor, and Joseph V. Melillo became executive producer alongside president Karen Brooks Hopkins. More recent expansion has carried BAM into film, archives and education, including the 2025 opening of BAM KBH with public archive space connecting audiences to more than 160 years of institutional history.
How Brooklyn Academy of Music fits.
Brooklyn Academy of Music works as the anchor for a Fort Greene outing connecting Brooklyn's movie-palace era, community arts infrastructure and a purpose-built home for classical drama.
Begin at Brooklyn Paramount, commissioned by Paramount Studios in 1927 from Chicago theater architects Rapp & Rapp and opened on November 24, 1928 as a lavish movie palace constructed for synchronized sound. Dorothy Arzner's Manhattan Cocktail premiered on opening night, and Duke Ellington brought his orchestra there in 1931 as the theater developed into an important Brooklyn stage for big band jazz. R&B, soul and rock 'n' roll followed, with 1950s revues placing Black musicians before desegregated teenage audiences. The theater closed in 1962 and spent decades serving Long Island University as an athletic facility before restoration returned it to concert use in 2024. Continue to BRIC House, occupying the former Strand Theater at 647 Fulton Street, where an arts organization founded in the late 1970s gradually joined visual art with community television and performance. Brooklyn Community Access Television began cablecasting in 1990, and BRIC later commissioned Leeser Architects to convert the former theater into a multidisciplinary cultural center. The design received a New York City Design Commission Award for Excellence in Design in 2010, and the completed complex incorporated exhibition areas, artist workspaces, media production facilities and a flexible ballroom with a sprung dance floor. Conclude at Polonsky Shakespeare Center, the first permanent home of Theatre for a New Audience, founded by Jeffrey Horowitz in 1979. Hugh Hardy and H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture designed the 27,500-square-foot building, which opened in 2013 after more than three decades in which the company worked. Its 299-seat Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage draws from the Elizabethan courtyard model and supports end-stage, thrust, flat-floor and arena arrangements; rubber isolation bearings beneath a concrete slab protect performances from nearby transit vibration. Julie Taymor inaugurated the center with A Midsummer Night's Dream, joined by composer Elliot Goldenthal, scenic designer Es Devlin, costume designer Constance Hoffman and lighting designer Donald Holder. The progression moves from Rapp & Rapp's grand movie palace through BRIC's conversion of another former theater into an arts-and-media center and culminates in Hardy's flexible home for classical drama, tracing nearly a century of performance architecture around BAM.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Enjoy editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
Foresyte may earn a commission when you book.
