Brooklyn

The Once and Future City

Thomas J. Campanella

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780691194561
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

An unprecedented history of Brooklyn, told through its places, buildings, and the people who made them, from the early seventeenth century to today America's most storied urban underdog, Brooklyn has become an internationally recognized brand in recent decades—celebrated and scorned as one of the hippest destinations in the world. In Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, Thomas J. Campanella unearths long-lost threads of the urban past, telling the rich history of the rise, fall, and reinvention of one of the world's most resurgent cities.Spanning centuries and neighborhoods, Brooklyn-born Campanella recounts the creation of places familiar and long forgotten, both built and never realized, bringing to life the individuals whose dreams, visions, rackets, and schemes forged the city we know today. He takes us through Brooklyn's history as homeland of the Leni Lenape and its transformation by Dutch colonists into a dense slaveholding region. We learn about English émigré Deborah Moody, whose town of Gravesend was the first founded by a woman in America. We see how wanderlusting Yale dropout Frederick Law Olmsted used Prospect Park to anchor an open space system that was to reach back to Manhattan. And we witness Brooklyn's emergence as a playland of racetracks and amusement parks celebrated around the world.Campanella also describes Brooklyn's outsized failures, from Samuel Friede's bid to erect the world's tallest building to the long struggle to make Jamaica Bay the world's largest deepwater seaport, and the star-crossed urban renewal, public housing, and highway projects that battered the borough in the postwar era. Campanella reveals how this immigrant Promised Land drew millions, fell victim to its own social anxieties, and yet proved resilient enough to reawaken as a multicultural powerhouse and global symbol of urban vitality.

CHAPTER 1

THE NATAL SHORE

There is toward the sea a large piece of low flat land . . .

overflowed at every tide.

—JASPER DANCKAERTS AND PETER SLUYTER, 1679

Amidst the leafy quietude of East Thirty-Fifth Street in Marine Park, far from the hipsters or the merchants of twee, there is a spectacle as unique and unlikely as a Hollywood stage set. The Hendrick I. Lott house is one of New York City’s most extraordinary survivors, a virtually unaltered keepsake from Gotham’s distant past that sits among its upstart neighbors like an old cat sleeping in the sun. The house occupies a spacious lot, but it once commanded an empire of earth that swept south and west from Kings Highway to Jamaica Bay. Canted a few degrees off the street grid as if in protest of municipal edict, the Lott house is among the oldest homes in New York and a superlative example of Dutch American vernacular architecture that—unlike most other colonial holdouts in the city—has sat on the same foundation for over two hundred years. Incredibly, the Lott house was occupied by the same family until 1989—the longest tenure of any in New York City history. I remember well its elderly last occupant, Ella Suydam, a librarian at Eramus Hall High School, who would wave to us boys as we gaped, wide-eyed, at the “country house” in the middle of town. Suydam, a neighborhood character who swept her porch in a 1930s fur coat, was—incredibly—the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Johannes Lott, who built the east section of the house in 1719, the year my favorite childhood book was published, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

The long-rural southern hemisphere of Brooklyn was brought into Gotham’s pale in the 1920s, as the city grew south and east in its most exuberant era of expansion. Municipal water and sewer infrastructure had only just been extended to this part of town—service that, combined with a roaring economy and a ten-year tax holiday, stoked an unprecedented frenzy of residential development. Fields first plowed in the seventeenth century now brought forth a last great crop of mock-Tudor homes. This remarkable metamorphosis—from countryside to cityscape almost overnight (subject of chapter 13)—is well documented thanks to a twenty-six-year-old aviation entrepreneur named Sherman Fairchild, whose fledgling Fairchild Aerial Survey Company had photographed every inch of Manhattan in 1922 with a fast new camera of his own design. The images were tiled together to produce a map twenty inches wide and more than eight feet long. The following year, Fairchild was commissioned by city engineer Arthur S. Tuttle to do the same for all of New York. By the summer of 1924 his camera plane had flown nearly three thousand miles back and forth over the city, snapping some twenty-nine hundred images of the five boroughs from an altitude of ten thousand feet. These were assembled into a great mosaic to produce an eight-by-twelve-foot aerial portrait of the Big Apple—the first comprehensive photographic map of any city in the world. It revealed, among other things, the hungry grid of metropolis about to consume the old Lott farm—Brooklyn’s last rural landscape. Fairchild’s camera planes came not a moment too soon; for the very next year—1925—was the last that Johannes Lott’s rustic spread would be tilled. Sherman Fairchild’s photomosaic thus captured in the wink of a mechanical eye a two-hundred-year-old pastoral realm at the very end of its days.¹

The Hendrick I. Lott House, c. 1720. Photograph by Alyssa Loorya, 2017.

Lott was a pioneer, to be sure, but hardly the first European in this vernal corner of the New World. Flatlands had been colonized for close to a century by now, and had been home to Native Americans for untold centuries before that. At the northern boundary of Lott’s land was an old Indian crossroads, the present-day junction of Flatbush Avenue and Kings Highway. Heavily trafficked thoroughfares today, they still roughly follow ancient alignments, which explains why both roads look like random rips in the urban fabric on a map of the city. At the juncture of these trade routes was once the Canarsee Indian settlement of Keskaechqueren or Keskachauge (Keskachoque in “modern Long Island nomenclature”), a principal council site of the tribes of western Long Island and possibly the seat of Penhawitz, a powerful, peaceable sachem and friend of the Dutch. One of several chieftaincies scattered across Long Island at the time of European contact, the Canarsee lived in semipermanent settlements made up of small matrilineal family groups. They drew sustenance from land and water—gathering chestnuts, fishing, hunting, and harvesting shellfish; cultivating maize, beans, pumpkins, and squash. They were part of the Leni Lenape Nation of Algonquian peoples that once occupied much of the northeast coast, and whose place-names—Gowanus, Hackensack, Manhattan, Passaic, Rockaway, Weehawken—are the toponymy of daily life in metropolitan New York.²

Brooklyn’s last rural landscape on the verge of urbanization, 1924. From a citywide photomosaic map produced by the Fairchild Aerial Camera Corporation for city engineer Arthur S. Tuttle. Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library.

Keskachauge was on the edge of a broad expanse known as the “Plains” or the “Great Flats,” which extended north to about where Brooklyn College is today. It was the largest of three such plains in the area that were among the few natural prairies east of the Allegheny Mountains.³ These long-vanished grasslands were surrounded by woods, but treeless except for an occasional ancient oak or pine tree. In places, they were planted to maize by the Canarsee. They were formed in part by the centuries of periodic burning by Native Americans to facilitate travel, clear underbrush for camps and cultivation, kill off ticks and fleas, and increase the forest-edge habitat favored by game animals—turkey, grouse, quail, deer, rabbits.⁴ We recall these miniature prairies today in the name given this part of Long Island by the English—Flatlands. Something of their character may be gleaned from a description by Timothy Dwight of the larger Hempstead Plain, farther east on Long Island (a tiny fragment of which may still be seen between Nassau Coliseum and the Meadowbrook Parkway). Then serving a grueling term as president of Yale College, Dwight took a series of extended autumn journeys through New York and New England in the 1790s, one of which covered the length of Long Island. Dwight found the Hempstead Plain to be “absolutely barren” in some places, but elsewhere covered by “a long, coarse wild grass” or thinly forested with pine or shrubby oaks (“the most shrivelled and puny that I ever met with”). Except for peninsular intrusions of forest into the plain, the terrain was relieved only by occasional clusters of trees such as the Isle of Pines—which “at a distance,” he noted, “resembles not a little a real island.”⁵

Plan of the former township of Flatlands showing the plains or Great Flats, Baes Jurians Hooke, and the “Stroom Kill or Garretsons Creek.” Drawn in 1873 by S. H. Stebbins using early records. Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library.

Keskachauge appears on the earliest surviving map of New Netherland—the remarkable Manatus Map of 1639. The document—produced by either the Dutch cartographer Johannes Vingboons or colonial surveyor Andries Hudde—was found hanging on a wall at the Villa Castello near Florence and later moved to Michelangelo’s Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. The nearly identical “Harrisse Copy”—a detail of which is reproduced here—is held by the Library of Congress.⁶ On the map, Keskachauge is shown just east of “Conyné Eylant,” marked by a longhouse noted as the habitation typical of “de Wilden Keskachaue”—the “savages” of Keskachauge.⁷ We don’t know what this structure looked like, but it was likely similar to an Indian longhouse several miles to the west at Nieuw Utrecht described in a remarkable document discovered in an Amsterdam bookshop in 1864—a travel journal by two visiting missionaries from Friesland, Jasper Danckaerts and Peter Sluyter. While riding along the marshy shore near today’s Fort Hamilton, the pair heard the sound of pounding, and discovered nearby an elderly Indian woman “beating Turkish beans [maize] out of the pods by means of a stick.”

Manatvs gelegen op de Noot Riuier (Manatus Map), 1639. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

We went from thence to her habitation, where we found the whole troop together, consisting of seven or eight families . . . Their house low and long, about sixty feet long and fourteen or fifteen feet wide. The bottom was earth, the sides and roof were made of reed and the bark of chestnut trees; the posts, or columns, were limbs of trees stuck in the ground, and all fastened together.

The roof ridge of the longhouse was left open half a foot the entire length of the structure, allowing smoke to escape from cooking fires below. These were built “in the middle of the floor,” noted the men, “according to the number of families which live in it, so that from one end to the other each of them boils its own pot, and eats when it likes.” The Keskachauge longhouse was probably located at the headwaters of “a certaine Kill or Creeke coming out of the Sea”—a tidal estuary of Jamaica Bay known as Weywitsprittner to the Indians, the Strome Kill to the Dutch, and Gerritsen Creek today.⁸

The Strome Kill is Brooklyn’s natal stream. Once extending as far north as Kings Highway, it was the longest of the many tidal inlets that scored the outwash plain above Jamaica Bay, so cleaving the landscape that the Dutch called it breukelen—“the fractured lands.” As Daniel Denton observed in 1670, such “Christal streams” on Long Island’s south shore not only teemed with fish—“Sheeps-heads, Place, Pearch, Trouts, Eels, Turttles”—but ran “so swift, that they purge themselves of such stinking mud and filth” and were thus unlikely to harbor “fevers and other distempers.”⁹ The cultural history of the Strome Kill may date back some fifteen hundred years, when post–Ice Age sea levels stabilized and the modern coastline of Long Island began to take form. As Frederick Van Wyck speculated in 1924, the tidal estuary “probably contains more undisturbed traces of the Indians than are to be found in any other part of Brooklyn, possibly in any other part of the city of New York.” It was on the western shore of the Strome Kill that a Canarsee Indian village and wampum works known as Shanscomacoke once stood. Evidence of long occupation of this place by Native Americans came to light slowly in the nineteenth century. Farmers found arrowheads on the beach; vast shell banks or “middens” were revealed by tides and erosion. When Avenue U was constructed at the turn of the nineteenth century, human skeletons were unearthed in graves filled with still-sealed oyster shells—meant, perhaps, as sustenance in the afterlife.¹⁰

“Ryder’s Pond and Old Cedar,” 1899. This photograph by Daniel Berry Austin was taken from the west bank of Gerritsen Creek below present-day Whitney Avenue. Daniel Berry Austin photograph collection, Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection.

It was around this time that an amateur archaeologist named Daniel Berry Austin began digging at Gerritsen Creek. Austin was an accomplished photographer with a day job at Standard Oil, but his real passion was the indigenous history of Long Island. Equal parts hoarder and scientist, Austin amassed a breathtaking collection of artifacts over his lifetime. He crammed more than ten thousand items into his modest home on East Fourteenth Street in Midwood, some fifteen hundred of which were from sites in Brooklyn alone. This included several skeletons stored—quite literally—in his closet. One of these probably came from the vicinity of Avenue U and Burnett Street, where Austin discovered a dozen graves each spaced thirty-five feet apart from one another. Sometime later, just to the north, Austin and his two young sons stumbled upon perhaps the most extensive prehistoric site ever unearthed in New York City. They dug up hundreds of arrowheads, stone tools, pottery shards, and animal bones later determined to date mostly from the Late Woodland period—a period that ended a thousand years ago. But Austin excavated carelessly, failing to note relative depth or location of artifacts and thus scrambling forever the archaeological record. Still, if not for him, knowledge of Shanscomacoke might have been lost altogether. For in the 1930s, the entire site north of Avenue U was buried under many feet of sand and soil. What remains of this ancient place today lies beneath the ball fields and turf of Marine Park, especially its western half, south of Fillmore Avenue and Junior High School 278. Austin’s hoard was scattered to the winds after he died. Fortunately, some of it passed to a prominent Long Island naturalist named Roy Latham, who later gifted the artifacts to the tiny Southold Indian Museum. They remain there today, across the road from an astronomical observatory named, oddly enough, for the grandniece of Indian fighter George Armstrong Custer.¹¹

Austin was not the only one bewitched by this spectral corner of the city. So, too, was Frederick Van Wyck, a New Yorker of old Dutch stock whose cousin was the bumbling first mayor of Greater New York, Robert A. Van Wyck (whom we’ll meet in chapter 10). A broker by trade, Van Wyck had the time and money to indulge a lifelong passion for history and the arts. Several of his books were i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Epigraph Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Natal Shore
• 2. Lady Deborah’s City by the Sea
• 3. Death and the Picturesque
• 4. Yankee Ways
• 5. Whip, Spur, and Saddle
• 6. The Isle of Offal and Bones
• 7. A House for the God of Speed
• 8. The Steampunk Orb
• 9. Port of Empire
• 10. The Ministry of Improvement
• 11. Salt Marsh of Sunken Dreams
• 12. Grand Central of the Air
• 13. Paradise on the Outwash Plain
• 14. Field of Schemes
• 15. The Babylonish Brick Kiln
• 16. Colossus of Roads
• 17. Highway of Hope
• 18. Book of Exodus
• Epilogue: Under a Tungsten Sun
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index