[1] Brooklyn's first public high school, the Central Grammar School (named "Central" rather than "Free" to avoid controversy over providing free "higher education" for poor children), opened September 1878 in a rented building on Court & Livingston Streets.

it opened as Boys High School on November 1, 1892.

In 1975 the two schools were merged once again, and shortly afterwards moved into their present building at Fulton Street and Utica Avenue.

[4] From 1986 until 2004, the school's principal was Frank Mickens, who dealt with the school's many problems during the 1980s, and turned into an excellent college preparatory institution for poor and marginalized young men and women.

Though Mickens methods were attacked on the grounds that he was steering undesirable students to other institutions, his success was hard to question;[5][6] and there had been no objections during the long years in which both Boys' and Girls' had been in decline, largely due to "steering" good students to other places.