School portraits / The old foundry, seen in 2021; student voices in 2026
Brooklyn Tech Keeps Its Spare Chairs in an Old Foundry
On the seventh and eighth floors of Brooklyn Technical High School is a two-story metal-casting room, with a hundred-foot skylight and a furnace. It is used for storage.
In December 2021 a student reporter for The Survey, Brooklyn Technical High School's paper, described Room 7N4. It spans the north side of the seventh and eighth floors. It was once the school's biggest classroom: the foundry, where students packed molding sand around wooden patterns and poured molten metal into the shapes. Students had not used it in over thirty years.
It has a hundred-foot skylight and ten enormous arched windows, three stories high, overlooking Fort Greene Park. It has brick floors, a furnace and an oversized exhaust hood. And it is full of furniture: piles of classroom chairs, cafeteria tables, computer carts, custodial equipment and cardboard boxes, all sitting in the sun.
Most schools keep spare chairs in a closet. This one keeps them in a cathedral.
The principal, Mr. Newman, told the paper that when the sun comes through the windows at certain times of day, it has what he called the "Grand Central Station effect."
The room went quiet as the school changed. Brooklyn Tech opened in 1922 to train Brooklyn boys for technical work. By the time of its 85th anniversary gala, in 2008, the principal wrote that foundry and industrial processes had given way to newer subjects like digital electronics and computer-integrated manufacturing.
Not everyone has made peace with it. In 2026 the paper interviewed a 1974 graduate who remembered the satisfaction of watching a woodworking project take shape, and who still wished there were a woodshop elective.
In 2021 there was a plan for the foundry: a media center, library and student space. It was unfunded. A student had a simpler proposal. Clear out the furniture first, and improve it gradually.
That is the teenage approach to every renovation, and it is not wrong. Step one: remove the chairs. Step two: sit on the floor in the sunlight. Step three: see.
We have a room like this. It is the garage. It once held two cars. It now holds the old crib, three bikes, a box labeled "eldest - 2nd grade," a broken lamp I am going to fix, and the minivan, which is parked outside. Last weekend the middle one proposed clearing the garage and turning it into a band studio. My wife asked where everything would go. He pointed to the attic.
The attic, I'm told, also has excellent light.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- The Survey: Closed for Decades: Inside Brooklyn Tech’s Massive 7th-Floor Foundry, and a Plan to Repurpose It surveybths.com
- The Survey: The History of Tech’s Curriculum and How It Has Been Shaped by Time surveybths.com
- Brooklyn Technical High School: 85th Anniversary Gala journal, October 22, 2008, principal’s message bths.edu