These salvaged relics in a Brooklyn subway station are the ghostly remains of old New York buildings

Dating back to 1824 when it was a free library founded specifically for tradesmen, the Brooklyn Museum is a magnificent repository of 140,000 pieces of art spanning ancient Egypt to contemporary America. But beneath the museum at the grimy subway stop that takes you directly in front of the Beaux Arts building (which took 29 years to finally complete in 1926) are intentionally placed relics of another kind. Inside the station is an underground mini-museum of salvaged relics—from corbels to rosettes to human faces with eyes that follow you as you move toward the platform—taken out of the rubble of demolished New York City buildings. These 78 artifacts of terra cotta and stone are mounted on station walls with the care and precision of the mounted paintings inside the Museum’s halls and rooms. What are they doing here, besides giving passengers a reason to hang out and experience art underground? The relics come from the Brooklyn Museum’s longtime collection of ornamental architecture,…