The Brooklyn Academy of Music, wrote Walt Whitman, is “so beautiful outside and in, and on a scale commensurate with similar buildings, even in some of the largest and most polished capitals of Europe.”

Whitman said this, not about the BAM we know today, but about its predecessor, which opened in 1861 on Montague Street between Court and Clinton streets. That BAM burned down in 1903. By then, Brooklyn had ceased being an independent city. But Brooklynites’ sense of themselves as more cultured than Manhattanites didn’t die so easily. In an almost Pyrrhic assertion of civic pride, a new, more lavish BAM rose in Fort Greene. The new BAM opened November 14, 1908, with a Metropolitan Opera production of Charles Gounod’s “Faust” starring Enrico Caruso and Geraldine Farrar. (“Faust” has long been a staple of the New York opera repertory. It also opened the old Met, in 1883, and Christine Nilsson appears in it, at the Academy of Music on 14th Street, at the beginning of Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence.”)

Whitman died in 1892. He never saw the new BAM. Another great Brooklyn poet, however, once practically lived at the new BAM. Marianne Moore lived in Fort Greene for 36 years. In the 1930s, she attended concerts and lectures at BAM on an almost daily basis. She attended a reading there by William Butler Yeats. She herself gave a reading there. In 1965, an elderly woman fearing for her safety in an increasingly dangerous neighborhood, she moved to Greenwich Village.

Two years after her move, a down-atheels BAM, the world-class venue that had fallen victim to Brooklyn’s declining fortunes in the era of the “urban crisis,” hired an ambitious Brooklynite, Harvey Lichtenstein, as its director. Moore’s move from Brooklyn made the front page of the New York Times. It stood for all that had gone wrong with Brooklyn. What Lichtenstein would make of BAM came to stand for all that was going right for Brooklyn. He made BAM the world headquarters of what we might call the established avant-garde. It’s the showcase — the Carnegie Hall, if you will — of many of today’s most important composers and choreographers, including Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Mark Morris, Twyla Tharp, and Pina Bausch. It’s also home to the BAM Rose Cinemas, the city’s most delightful place to see serious films.

BAM was designed by New York’s greatest theater architects, Henry Herts and Hugh Tallant, whose other credits include the New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street and the Lyceum Theatre on 45th Street. These Beaux-Arts-trained architects created a sumptuous jeweled box. The recently restored exterior terra-cotta work, and the interior plasterwork, are as fine as anything in the city. To attend a performance or to see a film at BAM, even to eat a burger at the BAM café is an exalting experience. The magnificent lobby, the sybaritic Howard Gilman Opera House, and the spaces expertly transformed into screening rooms have no peer in New York.

Marianne Moore famously called Prospect Park’s extravagantly gnarled Camperdown elm the “crowning curio” of Brooklyn. BAM is no curio. But it crowns its borough like nothing else.

fmorrone@nysun.com