The ears of the Renaissance Revival building at 110 Livingston Street might still be burning.

Mayor Bloomberg called the building a “notorious Kremlin”and a “rinkydink candy store.”The current schools chancellor called it the “catacombs,” a former chancellor called it a “puzzle palace,” and a former board member called it “dour and unpleasant.”

Senator Clinton — never one to be left out of a name-calling game — called it broken and unfixable. Robert Wagner said its bureaucrats should be locked out after being evacuated by a forced fire drill, and Mayor Giuliani, who called it a “moribund bureaucracy,” famously wished in 1999 that it would be “blown up.”

But after Mayor Bloomberg wrested control of the city schools and neutered the Board of Education, he sold the 335,000-square-foot former headquarters of the now-defunct board to Brooklyn mega-developer David Walentas and Two Trees Management for $45 million.

To commemorate the albatross’s sale, the mayor slapped a red SOLD sign on the building in a ceremony consecrating so much in New York’s history — the end of an era in Gotham’s storied educational bureaucracy, a political victory for Mr. Bloomberg, who has pegged his legacy on his ability to reform the schools, and another gentrified building in an outer borough’s renaissance.

“This will add one more star to Brooklyn’s glittering constellation,” Mr. Bloomberg said in 2003.

Two Trees didn’t exactly fulfill Mayor Giuliani’s wish to blow up the Kremlin at 110. But they did the next best thing by gutting and trashing more than six decades of bureaucratica while retaining the façade and restoring the municipal metalwork and gold ceilings.

And several years before they could blow anything up, project architect Tim Macy said, planners had to try to survey and photograph every inch of this seat of bureaucracy that had managed to strong-arm New York City’s educational establishment for more than six decades — while bureaucrats who hadn’t yet moved were still clinging to their posts.

Though Mayor Bloomberg had begun ordering most of 110’s workers to the downtown Manhattan Tweed Courthouse — itself a reformed symbol of another era — some 200 or 300 remained in the notorious Brooklyn building.

Mr. Macy, whose firm Beyer Blinder Belle designed the revamped 110 Livingston, said he could feel the burn of the bureaucrats’ suspicion from the first moments his team entered the building to survey and photograph the labyrinth layout.

“There were some people who didn’t want us there,” Mr. Macy said — a reception the firm, which specializes in preserving historic buildings like the Grand Central Terminal and the immigration museum at Ellis Island, wasn’t exactly accustomed to.

The team needed to make its own renderings of the space because the existing documents maintained by the bureaucracy were so archaic as to be useless. So the architects documented the hundreds of dingy corridors dotted with identically anonymous “rabbit warrens” housing Gotham’s educrats.

“You felt like you were in some film noir from the 1950s,” Mr. Macy said.

One of the scarier moments came the day planners went into the so-called “rubber room” — a notorious holding pen for teachers in disciplinary limbo.These tenured teachers, suspected but not proven guilty of wrongdoing like stealing, beating children, or having sex with students, still collect their salaries but report to the rubber room, instead of a classroom, to play cards, read the newspaper, and count ceiling tiles.

“It’s kind of like detention for teachers,” he said.

Mr. Macy said he was on edge because he’d been warned ahead of his visit that the rubber room denizens might be, well, somewhat testy.

To pre-empt any confrontations, he told the teachers there (many of whom were counting ceiling tiles) when he walked in that he was just there to measure windows.

Now, just steps from one of the historic entrances on Boreum Place where school safety agents used to screen visitors and their possessions with metal detectors and X-ray machines, Mr. Walentas and his son proudly show off posh model apartments with stainless steel kitchen appliances, bamboo floors, chic light fixtures, and washer/dryers where less-thanmotivated school system janitors used to hold fort.

“The maintenance guys hung out here as I recall,” Jed Walentas, David’s son and longtime partner, said Tuesday.

Less than five years after the maintenance guys and some 900 board of ed employees stopped hanging out in 110, 300 apartments ranging from studios to threebedroom condos, will replace hundreds of offices in this former Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks lodge built by McKim, Mead and White in 1925 and occupied by the city in 1939.

In addition, the 12-story building, which features a 225-vehicle garage basement garage, will become four stories taller with a glass-andmetal enclosed addition and rooftop cabanas replacing the original pitch terra cotta roof. Already, the builders demolished a huge wall and bought nearby air rights to give apartments a view of the water.

“The building is really stripped to its shell,” David said as he showed off the notorious firstfloor Great Hall — where the board of education brawled, bickered, and bated one another monthly over education policy — that will become a public theater.

Two Trees will be reviewing bids from local nonprofits; a stage will replace the aging dais there where the now-defunct board once wielded power to set classroom policy, give the city police control of school security — and even once reinstated a local school board member who had been accused of sprinkling pink powder to do voodoo against a nemesis superintendent.

Since Two Trees started showing the apartments earlier this summer, the company has 142 under contract and 18 under reservation — about half the total, the vice president of sales and marketing, Asher Abehsera, said wearing a DUMBO cap.

The building is even attracting several of the very bureaucrats, like former special education official Joan Rosenberg, who once called 110 a home of a very different kind.

Mrs. Rosenberg, who now teaches at New York University, considered buying her old office before settling on an apartment on the 8th floor.

Unlike most of New York’s political elite, the former official has nothing but fond memories of her days in the 1970s and 1980s of 110 Livingston.

Maybe that’s because she met her husband there.