322 3rd Avenue
1902

This massive eight-story Romanesque Revival style building served as the powerhouse for the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Corporation, or BRT. The BRT owned every steam railroad, elevated line and streetcar in Brooklyn at the turn of the 20th century, and this enormous building burned coal to generate electricity for all of the trains. Coal was fed from the canal bank via a coal elevator to a cement tunnel connecting the coal pit and the larger boiler building. The currently vacant building, the only remnant of what originally was an extensive complex, is under threat by neglect and abandonment.