The Brooklyn Masonic Temple

317 Clermont Avenue, at Lafayette. A neo-classical hall built for thirty-five Masonic lodges, which spent part of the 2000s as one of Brooklyn's better-sounding music rooms.

The temple was designed by the architectural firm of Lord & Hewlett and completed in 1906, with construction finishing in 1909. It was built to house thirty-five local lodges and affiliated groups, and it was modelled on King Solomon's Temple — a reference that matters to Freemasonry because of the biblical account of its construction by master stonemasons.

The terra cotta is the point

Most people walk past this building and register 'big old classical thing'. Look up. The upper storeys are clad in polychrome glazed terra-cotta — green, yellow, blue, sienna and cream worked into the ornament. It is one of the earliest and best polychrome terra-cotta buildings in New York City, and on a clear afternoon the colour is genuinely startling against the brick around it.

The bottom twenty feet or so are something else entirely: plain marble, with none of the ornamentation above it. The effect is a building that saves everything for the eye-line you have to lift your head to find.

It sits inside the Fort Greene Historic District, on the corner of Clermont and Lafayette.

Inside

There are two large gathering spaces. The lower auditorium holds around 280 and is the one usually let out for banquets. The upper hall holds about 700 — that is the room that made the building interesting to concert promoters, because a 700-capacity hall with a high ceiling and hard surfaces is a rare thing in Brooklyn.

The interior keeps its original hand-operated elevator and a good deal of its original decoration.

As a music venue

Through the late 2000s and into the 2010s the upper hall was booked regularly for shows, and it developed a reputation among people who record live audio — the room had a big, live, slightly unruly sound that suited loud guitar bands and did no favours at all to anything subtle. Bills there were promoted under several banners over the years rather than by the building itself.

Now

The building continues as the headquarters of the organisation's Grand Council and as a rental hall for community functions and events. It is not a venue with a standing calendar, so there is no schedule to check here — bookings are one-off, and announcements come from whoever is promoting the individual event.

If you want to see the exterior, the corner of Lafayette and Clermont is a two-minute walk from the C train at Lafayette Avenue.