Brooklyn Technical High School - Building and Facilities

Building and Facilities

The school, built on its present site from 1930-33 at a cost of $6 million, is 12 stories high, and covers over half a city block. Brooklyn Technical High School is directly across the street from Fort Greene Park. Facilities at BTHS include:

• Gymnasia on the first and eighth floors, with a mezzanine running track above the larger first floor gym and a weight room on the third floor boys locker room. The eighth floor gym had a bowling alley lane and an adjacent wire-mesh enclosed rooftop sometimes used for handball and for tennis practice.
• 25-yard swimming pool
• Wood, machine, sheet metal and other specialized shops. A program involves a shop where an actual house is built and framed by students. Most have been converted into normal classrooms or computer labs, except for a few robotics shop.
• Foundry on the seventh floor, with a floor of molding sand used for creating sand casting molds and equipped with furnaces, kilns, ovens and ancillary equipment for metal smelting. Students made wooden patterns in pattern making which were used to make sand molds which were cast in the foundry and machined to specification in the machine shops. It was closed during the 1990s. The foundry complemented a mandatory course titled "Industrial Processes" which emphasized metallurgy and "how industry functions".
• Materials testing lab, used during the basic materials science (Strength of Materials) class. Included industrial capacity Universal Testing Machine and brinell hardness tester and polishing and microscopic examination rooms. During the 1960s, students attended "inspection training shop" and were taught to use X-ray analysis to detect metal fatigue failures, use of vernier measuring instruments, micrometers, and go-no-go gauges.
• Aeronautical lab, featuring a large wind tunnel, During the 1960s, a T-6 Texan U.S. Air Force surplus aircraft in the building was used for student aeronautical mechanic instruction.

• Radio studio and 18,000 watt transmitter licensed by the Federal Communications Commission as WNYE (FM). The studio has not been used since the 1980s.
• 3,100-seat auditorium — Second-largest in New York City next to Radio City Music Hall, with two balconies
• Recital hall
• Drafting, both pencil and ink technical drawing and freehand drawing rooms
• Library with fireplaces
• Football field on Fulton and Clermont Streets. The Football Field, named in honor of Brooklyn Tech Alumnus Charles Wang, was opened in 2001, with the home opener played October 6, 2001, against DeWitt Clinton High School.
• Access to Fort Greene Park for outdoor track, tennis, etc.
• Mock courtroom for use by the Law & Society major and the Mock Trial Team.

• A 456-foot (139 m)-tall rooftop broadcasting antenna, when added to the height of the building itself (145 ft), makes Brooklyn Tech the borough's tallest structure, at 597 feet (182 m) high. It is 82 feet (25 m) taller than Brooklyn's tallest building, the 515-foot (157 m) Brooklyner.

• In 1934, the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), which later became the Works Projects Administration (WPA), commissioned artist Maxwell B. Starr to paint a mural in the foyer depicting the evolution of man and science throughout history.

• Brooklyn Tech's founder and first principal, Dr. Albert L. Colston, had an apartment built for himself in the tower of the building, and was the only person to live at Brooklyn Tech.