When the Fort Greene poet Marianne Moore used to do research for her poems and essays at the Pratt Institute Free Library in the 1930s, Pratt was a good deal less campus-like than it is today. The visitor to Pratt today can’t help but notice how the buildings line up so rectilinearly along north-south pathways; these pathways were through streets until they were demapped in the 1960s.

Charles Pratt, a partner in Standard Oil Trust, founded his eponymous institute in 1887 as a Brooklyn counterpart to Manhattan’s Cooper Union. Both schools sought to train a wide variety of students (male and female, black and white, young and old) in the applied arts. In time both schools became nationally and even internationally renowned schools of art, architecture, and design.

In 1890, Pratt opened one of the country’s first library schools, and its laboratory was the Free Library. It was called “Free” because it was the first Brooklyn library open to the public (more precisely, to any Brooklynite 14 or older) free of charge. Not until the Grand Army Plaza library was built in 1941 did the Pratt library become for

Pratt students only.

The library building dates from 1896 and was designed by William Tubby, a prolific Brooklyn architect who inherited the practice of Ebenezer Roberts, the first architect of whom Pratt was a patron. Tubby’s Rundbogenstil design was clearly inspired by Manhattan’s Astor Library (now the Public Theatre). In 1936, John Mead Howells added a north porch, and a 1982 renovation under Giorgio Cavaglieri modernized the facilities and created the south terrace from which one can look down onto the stacks below.

There are several interesting buildings on the Pratt campus, but you may want to focus on the core group of three, just across Ryerson Walk from the east side of the library. You will see what’s called the Main Building flanked on its north by Memorial Hall and on its south by South Hall.

The Main Building rose between 1885 and 1887. The architects were 1180 2174 1292 2185Lamb & Rich, who at the same time were designing the Astral Apartments, the model tenements Charles Pratt built in Greenpoint for workers at his Bushwick Inlet refinery. The Main Building (to which Tubby added a stubby porch in 1894), looks like a Romanesque warehouse in TriBeCa; In fact, Pratt wanted a building that could readily be converted to a factory, should his school fail.

Memorial Hall of 1926-27, by John Mead Howells, is also Romanesque, but of the type that makes the building look not at all like a warehouse but like one of its decade’s grand synagogues. South Hall, by Tubby from 1889-91 also resembles a TriBeCa warehouse; indeed, it is strikingly similar to Babb & Cook’s lovely warehouse at 173 Duane Street.

Be sure also to look at the Machine Shop Building, behind the Main Building and South Hall. A museum of industrial archaeology, its three 1900 steam engines still provide some of the power for the campus.

These buildings work wonderfully together to create a sharp internal focus for a school that in its unassuming way has proven itself one of our most important New York institutions.

fmorrone@nysun.com