Paul C. King named executive director of the Brooklyn Waterfront Research Center

In the summer of 2024, Professor Paul C. King of the Department of Architectural Technology was selected to take over the leadership of the Brooklyn Waterfront Research Center (BWRC) after the retirement of the founding director Richard Hanley of the English Department.

A native of Brooklyn, Paul has a long history connected to the Brooklyn Waterfront, growing up along the shore of Coney Island, still living at the water’s edge in Bay Ridge and working as a historian focused on 19th century suspension bridges and the work of John A. Roebling, engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge.

He ventured beyond the shore when he took an interest in long distance swimming, completing swims from Brighton Beach to Breezy Point, from Staten Island to Bay Ridge under the Verrazano Bridge, twice around Governors Island and from Manhattan to Brooklyn in the shadow of his beloved Brooklyn Bridge. He is a founding member of the Coney Island Brighton Beach Open Water Swimmers and has taken many a new year’s days dip in the ocean with the Polar Bears.

In 2010 and again in 2012, Paul participated with Richard Hanley and others at the college in support of the NEH Grant, Along the Shore: Changing and Preserving the Landmarks of Brooklyn’s Industrial Waterfront, which led to the founding of the BWRC.

In demand for his expertise, Paul helped to develop the Roebling exhibit that can be viewed at the D & H Canal Historical Society in High Falls NY, site of one of Roebling’s suspension aqueducts and he currently serves as a historical consultant to the National Park Service, providing tours of Roebling’s Delaware Aqueduct and training their summer docents each spring. His technical addendum correcting this historic record of its construction is now a part of the Historic American Engineering Record in the national archives. He regularly presents and publishes on the early work of John Roebling.

Professor King is a licensed architect with degrees in Architecture and Landscape Architecture and Urban Design, all from the City College of New York. He is a member of the Brooklyn chapter of the American Institute of

Architects (AIA), the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the Society of American Registered Architects (SARA) and the Society of Industrial Archeology (SIA).