Brooklyn’s Fulton Street, between Adams Street and Flatbush Avenue, was once one of the busiest retail corridors in America. Once, commercial Fulton Street extended all the way to the river. In the postwar years, after the city had dismantled the Fulton Street elevated railway, the city also dismantled Fulton Street between Borough Hall and the river, creating Cadman Plaza. As the years passed, the truncated street changed. Its characterizing establishments disappeared. The city transformed Fulton Street into a transit mall. Lately, developer Bruce Ratner, first with MetroTech Center, then with Atlantic Terminal, has redeveloped much of downtown Brooklyn, without touching the Fulton spine itself. Fulton Street’s transformation is inevitable. How it is transformed should concern us all.

Meanwhile, Fulton hums with commerce, and harbors, often behind signage and storefront “modernizations,” several buildings of distinction. Let me draw your attention to a couple that I particularly like.

At the northeast corner of Fulton and Lawrence Streets stands an elegant, four-story store, designed by Buchman & Fox and built in 1916. This housed the once-famous firm of Oppenheim & Collins, which dealt in women’s clothing. The company left Brooklyn in 1957. A glance at the building, above its “modernized” ground floor, shows that Brooklyn’s downtown offered a mix of high-end retailers, like Oppenheim & Collins, together with gigantic, full-service department stores (like Abraham & Straus, across the street in the complex of buildings that now houses Macy’s) and stores like Woolworth’s. The Oppenheim & Collins building is the sort of refined, airy classical building in which the late 1910s and early 1920s abounded. The building glides gracefully round its corner, the turning negotiated by the lovely balustrade beneath the top floor, as well as by the stately march of vertically accentuated window bays at the second and third floors. Look at the top of the parapet at the corner for the initials O and C. For some years, the building housed the discount store Korvette’s. Now a retail hodge-podge operates at street level.

We find an even lovelier corner turning at the southeast corner of Fulton and Hoyt, a block away. This gorgeous building, built in 1924-25, housed Namm’s, a fine department store remembered by old Brooklynites. The architects, Robert Kohn and Charles Butler, were among the designers of Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-El. Kohn excelled in sprinkling bits of Art Nouveau, Vienna Secession, and Art Deco into otherwise traditionally designed buildings, striking that note of modernity-within-tradition that his period produced at its best. Namm’s lasted, like O&C, until 1957.

For old-time Fulton Street, go to the south side between Smith Street and Red Hook Lane. The Italianate house at 372 rose in 1875. In 1892, Charles Gage and Eugene Tollner opened a restaurant there, Gage & Tollner, which, before it closed this year, boasted the richest historic atmosphere of any restaurant in the city. We lost the last of old Fulton’s businesses. But many of the old buildings remain, awaiting the renovations that may make this street again as glorious as it ever was.