Much attention has lately focused on the neighborhood of Atlantic Avenue east of Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. Developer Bruce Ratner has proposed a vast complex to rise on the “Atlantic Yards” of the Long Island Railroad. Amid the loud controversy, I know people who have gone to view this site with their own eyes. When they ask me what they should look for, I advise that they take a moment to cross to the other side of Flatbush to see two forlorn gems of Brooklyn architecture.

At Flatbush, Fourth, and Atlantic Avenues stands a site familiar to motorists on those infernally clotted streets. This is the abandoned “control house,” as such structures were once called, of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company’s Atlantic Avenue station, part of the IRT’s first line in Brooklyn. The IRT established Brooklyn’s first subway service in 1908, the date of this structure, designed by architects Heins & La Farge.

The lovely little building actually has great strength, as it architecturally negotiates a pivotal intersection once known as Times Plaza (named after the once nearby Brooklyn Daily Times). The control house recently has been spruced up following years of neglect, in which it was swallowed in hideous 1960s-style “supergraphic” signage meant to lend an air of contemporaneity to a borough notably resistant to such incursions.

Behind the control house, along Third Avenue between Dean and Pacific Streets, stands a building unknown even to many architecture buffs, though one of America’s most famous architects designed it. This printing plant belonged not to the Brooklyn but to the New York Times, at least when it rose in 1929. It soon passed to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Today it’s part of a public high school.

We associate Albert Kahn with Detroit, where he designed automobile plants that cast a spell on the Modernist architects of 1920s Europe. Of mid-20th-century American architects, only Frank Lloyd Wright enjoyed greater international prestige. Kahn’s name became synonymous with the big, bold industrial plants he designed for Ford and General Motors, so much so that in the 1930s, the architect contracted with Joseph Stalin to build more than 500 factories in the Soviet Union. Kahn designed all manner of buildings, often for automotive clients; the range of his work – from GM’s downtown Detroit headquarters to Edsel Ford’s Grosse Pointe Shores mansion – shows that Kahn was more than just a proto-modernist.

In the 1920s he worked for the New York Times. He enlarged the Times’s West 43rd Street headquarters, though there his individual touch is inevident. The Brooklyn plant, however, amply evinces the Kahn touch. The unusual limestone, the street side windows that once afforded views down onto the whirring presses and folding machines, and the fine terracotta ornamentation combine for a building of great character.

In this jumbly part of Brooklyn, these and other gems await the appropriate infilling that will pull them together in urban coherence.