Completed in 1908 in the design of Henry Herts and [obscured], the Brooklyn Academy of Music replaced an 1859 building designed by Leopold Eidlitz that had burned. The current Renaissance Revival building was intended to assert Brooklyn's continuing commitment to a cultural life of its own after the merging in 1898 of the independent City of Brooklyn into Greater New York. [obscured] character of then-independent Brooklyn, third largest city in the nation in 1855.