Erasmus Hall High School

Erasmus Hall High School

Erasmus Hall Campus High School was a four-year public high school in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, United States operated by the New York City Department of Education. Owing to poor academic scores, the city closed the school and created four separate schools on the same campus.

Erasmus Hall High School, originally called Erasmus Hall Academy, a private institution of higher learning founded in 1786 by Dutch settlers in Vlacke bos ("flat woodland"), Anglicized to Flatbush, was the first secondary school chartered by the New York State Regents. The clapboard-sided, Federal style building, constructed in 1787 on land donated by the Flatbush Dutch Reformed Church still located at 890 Flatbush Avenue (designated a New York City Landmark in 1966), continued in use and was donated to the public school system in 1896.

Around the start of the 20th century, Brooklyn experienced a rapidly growing population, and the original small school was enlarged with the addition of several wings and the purchase of several nearby buildings. In 1904, the Board of Education began a new building campaign to meet the needs of the burgeoning student population. The Superintendent of School Buildings and Architect, Charles B.J. Snyder, designed a series of buildings to be constructed as needed, around an open quadrangle, while continuing to use the old building in the center of the courtyard.

Erasmus Hall was named for the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus (a Dutch Renaissance humanist and Catholic Christian theologian). Called "the greatest Latinist since Cicero," Erasmus translated the Christian New Testament from Greek, and brought the "New Learning to England at the time of Henry VIII".

A statue of Erasmus (cast from the 1622 original in Rotterdam by Hendrick de Keiser) was donated by an alumnus, Richard Young, and stands in the school’s courtyard. Dedicated in 1931, the base is engraved with the words:

"Desiderius Erasmus, the maintainer and restorer of the sciences and polite literature, the greatest man of his century, the excellent citizen who, through his immortal writings, acquired an everlasting fame."

The original Academy building, which still stands in the courtyard of the current school, served the students of Erasmus Hall in three different centuries. Now a designated New York City Landmark and listed in the National Register of Historic Places, the building is a museum exhibiting the school’s long and colorful history.