Skip to main content

The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn: An American Story: Notes

The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn: An American Story
Notes

  • Show the following:

    Annotations
    Resources

  • Adjust appearance:

    Font
    Font style
    Color Scheme
    Light
    Dark
    Annotation contrast
    Low
    High
    Margins
  • Search within:
    • Notifications
    • Privacy
  • Project HomeThe Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn
  • Projects
  • Learn more about Manifold

Notes

table of contents
  1. List of Illustrations
  2. Acknowledgments
  3. Prologue: America’s Brooklyn
  4. 1. Brooklyn Village
  5. 2. The City of Brooklyn
  6. 3. On the Waterfront
  7. 4. Toward a New Brooklyn
  8. 5. Newcomers
  9. 6. Transformation
  10. 7. Acceptance, Resistance, Flight
  11. Epilogue: Brooklyn’s America
  12. Notes
  13. Index

Notes

Prologue: America’s Brooklyn

1.Nathan S. Jonas, Through the Years: An Autobiography (New York: Business Bourse Publishers, 1940), 3.

2.Lionel R. Lindsay, Gravesend Kid: A Brooklyn Boyhood (Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2004), 62–63.

3.William L. Riordon, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1905; 1963), 41.

4.Riordon, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, 42.

5.Clay Lancaster, Old Brooklyn Heights: New York’s First Suburb (New York: Dover Publications, 1979); Robert Furman, Brooklyn Heights: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of America’s First Suburb (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2015); Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

Chapter 1. Brooklyn Village

1.On the settlement and early trade and development of Breuckelen, see Henry R. Stiles, A History of the City of Brooklyn…, vol. 1 (Albany: J. Munsell, 1869); Stephen M. Ostrander, A History of the City of Brooklyn and Kings County, vol. 1 (Brooklyn: by subscription, 1894). Later works that allude to these aspects of early Brooklyn include Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 35, 36, 46; Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped the World (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 127; Jaap Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 87–88. On the early ferry, see Henry Evelyn Pierrepont, Sketch of the Fulton Ferry and its Associated Ferries (Brooklyn: Eagle Job and Book Printing Department, 1879), 13.

2.Jacobs, Colony of New Netherland, 159.

3.Daniel Denton, A Brief Description of New York, Formerly Called New-Netherlands (London: n.p., 1670), 46.

4.Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 128.

5.On the 1738 census the proportion of slaves in Brooklyn’s population was 22 percent, slightly higher than the proportion in Manhattan.

6.Stiles, History, 3, 598–600; David Ment, The Shaping of a City: A Brief History of Brooklyn (New York: Brooklyn Educational and Cultural Alliance, 1979), 26; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 390; Ralph Foster Weld, Brooklyn Village, 1816–1834 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), 13; Ostrander, History, 2, 24–26.

7.The legal term in New York State for what is elsewhere termed a “township” is “town.” But we will use “township” where it seems to convey our meaning more clearly, especially to readers who do not reside in New York.

8.Weld, Brooklyn Village, 7–8.

9.The classic analysis of this connection between Protestantism (Calvinism in particular) and the pursuit of material wealth is Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in German in 1905 and in an English translation by Talcott Parsons in 1930 (New York: Scribners). Weber has been challenged, modified, and rebutted many times over more than a century, but his fundamental idea remains relevant in many historical settings. Brooklyn, we claim, is one of them.

10.Guide to the Sands family papers, Brooklyn Historical Society. dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/bhs/arc_096.sands/bioghist.html.

11.Stiles, History, 3:381–32; 2:96–97; Ment, Shaping of a City, 26–27.

12.Ment, Shaping of a City, 26–27.

13.Census of the State of New York, 1835…

14.Stiles, History, 2:98.

15.Stiles, History, 1:385; 3:945; James H. Callender, Yesterdays on Brooklyn Heights (New York: Dorland Press, 1927), 53; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 390.

16.Hezekiah Pierrepont spelled his name Pierpont, the Anglicized version of the original Huguenot family name, although, curiously, in his will he instructed his children to revert to the original spelling. Most accounts of his life use Pierrepont, as will we. See Stiles, History, 2:147.

17.Historical sources differ as to whether this business was a brewery or a distillery before Pierrepont purchased it. One, Robert Furman, Brooklyn Heights: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of America’s First Suburb (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2015), 66, argues that it was a distillery before and after the Revolution, and a brewery while the British occupied the area. Pierrepont distilled Anchor gin in this facility.

18.Stiles, History, 2:147–49; Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 30–31.

19.Stiles, History, 2:151; Callender, Yesterdays, 41.

20.A note concerning the word “commuter” seems appropriate here. For some time it has been used to refer to a person who travels daily between suburb and city for work and domestic life. But its original meaning derives from the commutation (substitution, exchange) of a daily fare on a train, ferry, or other form of mass transportation, for a longer-term ticket that is cheaper per individual ride. Hence, it is the fare that is commuted, not the traveler. So, strictly speaking, a person who travels by automobile between work and home is not a commuter, unless he commutes a daily highway or bridge toll for a longer-term charge. And Hezekiah Pierrepont in his rowboat was not one either.

21.The Brooklyn landing of this ferry became the “old landing” in 1795 when a “new landing” was established at the foot of Main Street for a ferry that ran to Catherine Street in New York. Another innovation that deserves mention here was the horse or team boat, introduced around the same time as the steam ferry. It involved the introduction of a treadmill, on which teams of horses walked to turn a vertical shaft attached to a paddle wheel below, usually in the center of a deck connecting two separate hulls. The horse boats were technically successful and offered some competition to the steam ferries for several years. See Stiles, History, 3:38–43.

22.Stiles, History, 2:149; Pierrepont, Sketch of the Fulton Ferry, 27–31.

23.Weld, Brooklyn Village, 16–17.

24.Long-Island Star, March 20, 1816.

25.Star, July 14, 1813.

26.Star, November 15, 1815.

27.Stiles, History, 2:149; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 31.

28.Star, December 25, 1823; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 31–32; Weld, Brooklyn Village, 27.

29.Callender, Yesterdays, 83.

30.Stiles, History, 2:101–4.

31.Star, March 1, 1820. Guy completed two such scenes, which varied mainly in a few of the characters portrayed in the street. Stiles, History, 2:88, 101–4, names this painting Brooklyn Snow Scene.

32.This was the Catherine Street Ferry. It ran for many years but was never as important as the Fulton Street Ferry.

33.Because of damage to the left side of the painting these two houses are no longer visible. The lithograph reproduced here is a better representation of Guy’s original composition than the painting in its current state.

34.Callender, Yesterdays, 68–69.

35.Star, September 5, 1822; September 12, 1822.

36.Star, September 1, 1823.

37.Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 450.

38.Elizabeth Leavitt Howe, My Early and Later Days: Their Story for My Children and Grandchildren (n. p., 1898), 19. Fisher Howe Papers, New-York Historical Society.

39.Howe, My Early and Later Days, 32.

40.Clay Lancaster, Old Brooklyn Heights: New York’s First Suburb… (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1979), 20, 67, 69; Furman, Brooklyn Heights, 22–23.

41.Star, June 28, 1820, June 5, 1823.

42.Star, July 7, 1825.

43.Weld, Brooklyn Village, 200–203; Stiles, History, 3:886–91.

44.Star, July 8, 1824; June 7, 1827.

45.Weld, Brooklyn Village, 32; Stiles, History, 3:896–97.

46.Weld, Brooklyn Village, 62.

47.Weld, Brooklyn Village, 63–66; Stiles, History, 3:652–55; Eugene Armbruster, The Olympian Settlement in Early Brooklyn, New York (New York: n. p., 1929), 7–8; Anon., St. Ann’s Church, (Brooklyn, New York) … (Brooklyn: F. G. Fish, 1845).

48.Weld, Brooklyn Village, 70–71. Being independent of the Episcopal Church, the Methodist organizations of the United States are called churches, not chapels, as they are in England, where they remain within the formal structure of the Church of England. On Judge Garrison’s role in Brooklyn’s Methodist Church, see Stiles, History, 3:700–701.

49.These events are described in a pamphlet, Reverend David B. Cousin and Reverend Valerie E. Cousin, Welcome to Bridge Street, reproduced on the Bridge Street Church’s website, at www.Bridgestreetbrooklyn.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/About-Bridge-Street.pdf. See Stiles, History, 3:702, 707, and Weld, Brooklyn Village, 71, for accounts that make no mention of fees charged to Black members of the Sands Street church.

50.Weld, Brooklyn Village, 60.

51.Stiles, History, 3:636–37.

52.Stiles, History, 3:702, 741–42.

53.Howe, My Early and Later Days, 19–21, 24–32.

54.Weld, Brooklyn Village, 78–79. See also Weld, A Tower on the Heights: The Story of the First Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946).

55.Weld, Brooklyn Village, 79.

56.Star, May 3, 1815; September 27, 1815.

57.Star, April 10, 1816. For a detailed recollection of the founding of this society, see The Brooklyn Eagle, May 15, 1854.

58.Star, July 3, 1816.

59.Weld, Brooklyn Village, 94.

60.Star, April 10, 1823; May 22, 1823; May 29, 1823; March 16, 1826; May 11, 1826.

61.Weld, Brooklyn Village, 111.

62.Weld, Brooklyn Village, 122, 126, 129; Star, July 9, 1829.

63.Weld, Brooklyn Village, 98–99, 194–97, 216, 218–19, 237–40, 252–53.

64.Weld, Brooklyn Village, 263.

65.Star, April 1, 1830.

Chapter 2. The City of Brooklyn

1.Long-Island Star, April 24, 1834. There was also a dinner that evening at Duflon’s Military Garden, with tickets priced at $1.50. The following week’s paper reported a large turnout for the procession and church ceremony but disappointing attendance at the dinner. Star, May 1, 1834.

2.Star, May 1, 1834.

3.Census of the State of New York, 1825 (Albany, 1826).

4.Star, December 8, 1825.

5.Star, December 29, 1830, December 14, 1831, December 21, 1831.

6.Star, January 4, 1832.

7.[Henry Evelyn Pierrepont], Historical Sketch of the Fulton Ferry, and its Associated Ferries (Brooklyn: Eagle Job and Book Printing Department, 1879), 12–15. In New York, as in all the states, the awarding of a city charter does not extinguish the power of the state legislature to regulate the policies of that city, or even to revoke the city’s charter.

8.Henry R. Stiles, A History of the City of Brooklyn … (Brooklyn: n.p., 1870), 3:518.

9.Star, April 3, 1833, April 24, 1833.

10.Star, October 16, 1833.

11.Star, May 8, 1833, October 16, 1833, December 18, 1833, January 2, 1834, January 9, 1834, January 16, 1834, January 23, 1834, April 10, 1834.

12.Star, April 10, 1834.

13.This is mostly correct, and we have used the term “tidal strait” ourselves. The only qualification to be made here is that the Harlem River empties into the East River, mingling with the salt water of the Sound and Bay at Hell’s Gate. But the Harlem River (as a branch of the Hudson River) is itself a brackish tidal estuary, so it offers only a limited volume of fresh water to the East River, and the flow there is, in sum, far more tidal than riverine. It is quite reasonable to describe the East River as an “arm of the sea.”

14.Star, May 14, 1835.

15.Star, May 15, 1845.

16.Star, January 5, 1837.

17.Census of the State of New York, for 1835 (Albany, 1836); Compendium of the Enumeration of the Inhabitants and Statistics of the United States … (Washington, 1841), 18, 22; Census of the State of New York, for 1845 (Albany, 1846).

18.Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 2, 1845.

19.Star, May 26, 1845. In this issue the Star announced the opening of a branch office on Atlantic Street for the accommodation of its South Brooklyn customers. The Atlantic Street terminus of the Brooklyn and Jamaica Rail Road Company (soon merged into the Long Island Railroad) was an important impetus for the opening of the South Ferry. The Long Island Railroad, once built to an eastern terminus at Greenport, Long Island, provided a rail and ferry link between New York and Boston. It would take several years for this link to be superseded by an inland, all-rail system.

20.Joseph Alexiou, Gowanus: Brooklyn’s Curious Canal (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 91–106; Stiles, History, 3:558, 575–80. On the details of James S. T. Stranahan’s New England background, see Eagle, September 3, 1898.

21.Star, September 22, 1842.

22.Clay Lancaster, Old Brooklyn Heights: New York’s First Suburb (New York: Dover Publications, 1979), 68.

23.Mrs. E. R. Steele, “Brooklyn,” The Ladies’ Companion: A Monthly Magazine; Devoted to Literature and the Fine Arts, November 1841, 18.

24.Star, November 14, 1842.

25.Eagle, July 21, 1845.

26.Star, May 10, 1838. Five years later, as the depression began to lift, the Star’s appraisal was much the same: “In the convulsions which have racked our gigantic neighbor, … Brooklyn has been the gainer.” Star, May 13, 1843.

27.One of the latter was John R. Pitkin’s proposal for a large new community to be known as East New York on land he had acquired in the Town of New Lots at the eastern end of Kings County. He publicized his project during the early months of the depression, but it attracted little interest and was not heard from again. Star, August 21, 1837. We will return to Pitkin’s proposal and the later development of East New York in chapter 4.

28.Clay Lancaster, Old Brooklyn Heights, 32–32; Stiles, History, 2:253; Star, August 7, 1837, August 11, 1846; Eagle, August 17, 1849.

29.Census of … New York, for 1835; Census of … New York, for 1845; The Seventh Census of the United States: 1850 … (Washington, 1853).

30.Eagle, November 5, 1849. A similar observation was made as early as 1840 in J. T. Bailey, An Historical Sketch of the City of Brooklyn and the Surrounding Neighborhood, Including the Village of Williamsburgh … (Brooklyn: J. T. Bailey, 1840), 25.

31.Quoted in Star, June 30, 1853.

32.Stiles, History, 2, 300.

33.Population of the United States in 1860 … (Washington, 1864). In 1800 New York City and Philadelphia each had populations of approximately sixty thousand. In 1860 a Brooklyn neighborhood named Williamsburg numbered sixty-five thousand.

34.The parts of Gowanus that lay along the meandering Gowanus Creek, and the marshes and mill ponds that bordered it on the east, remained rural despite Daniel Richards’ efforts during the late 1840s to canalize the creek and provide Brooklyn with the extensive inland commercial waterway that was in fact achieved by others a dozen or so years later. See Alexiou, Gowanus, 108–19. Alexiou writes of Richards as a forgotten man: “Not even an obituary exists for this elusive innovator, so he likely died in relative obscurity sometime around 1875…. Most details of his personal life are lost” (122).

35.Alexiou, Gowanus,128–30, 134–35.

36.Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870–1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). Teaford’s post–Civil War analysis is relevant to Brooklyn in the immediate pre–Civil War period.

37.The free roaming of pigs in Brooklyn’s streets was a common complaint, and a frequently visited subject over many years in the local press. Referring in 1845 to a new effort to clear the streets of pigs as “an important reform,” the Eagle observed: “During the last week the porkers, as if anticipating a curtailing of their ancient privileges, and snuffing danger in the breeze, have mustered in unusual force, and extended the field of their operations. Not content with perambulating the streets and sidewalks—poking a stray vegetable out of the gutter here and there and reposing listlessly in styes of their own creation—they have penetrated through gateways and fences, examining the collections of yards and open lots, and running riot in unguarded areas.” Conceding that the pigs had been relied upon for years to clear garbage from the streets, the Eagle concluded: “If it should be found necessary, in the end, to restore these valuable scavengers to the exercise of their duties and the enjoyment of their privileges, we shall at least have the satisfaction of knowing that it couldn’t be helped.” Eagle, October 20, 1845.

38.Nearly the entire issue of the Star, April 29, 1859, is devoted to the celebration of the new water supply system. See Star, November 20, 1855, for a typical warning of fraud in one of the early initiatives for building this system.

39.Eagle, June 30, 1854; Stiles, History, 3:571–72.

40.Stiles, History, 2:49–50.

41.Star, August 10, 1844. Dozens of editorials in this vein, as well as letters from readers, could be cited here.

42.Eagle, March 23, 1846. On the origin of the Fort Greene (Washington Park) proposal, see Stiles, History, 3:616–17.

43.Star, May 4, 1847.

44.Star, July 27, 1847, December 4, 1847, January 5, 1848; Eagle, January 5, 1848.

45.Star, January 4, 1848, January 5, 1848; Eagle, January 4, 1848, January 5, 1848.

46.Star, January 14, 1848; Eagle, January 14, 1848.

47.Star, January 24, 1848, March 1, 1848, March 27, 1848, April 11, 1848. Spooner would never see that park on Prospect Hill. Three weeks after he wrote that April editorial, he retired from the Star, and six months after that, he was dead at age sixty-five. The Star’s new editor, Alden’s son Edwin B. Spooner, described what he claimed was the largest funeral ever held in Brooklyn for a private citizen, noting that among the pallbearers for this Whig newspaperman was John Greenwood, whose contributions to the Democratic party included suggesting the name for the Brooklyn Eagle. Some articles on Greenwood in the Star, in addition to Greenwood’s gesture at Spooner’s funeral, attest to the mutual respect of these two devoted Brooklynites. Star, November 25, 1848, November 28, 1848. On Greenwood’s role in naming the Eagle, see Raymond A. Schroth, The Eagle and Brooklyn: A Community Newspaper, 1841–1955 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974), 28.

48.Stiles, History, 3:622–30; Thomas J. Campanella, Brooklyn: The Once and Future City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 75–78; Star, August 13, 1838, May 28, 1845, Eagle, April 13, 1848 (which suggest that at an early date tickets were required for visitors in carriages and on horseback); Eagle, September 20, 1844. Green-Wood was for some time a popular subject in parlor magazines, some of which dwelt on the fact that this had been the site of the Battle of Brooklyn during the American Revolution. See, for example, “Greenwood Cemetery,” The New World; a Weekly Family Journal of Popular Literature, Science, Art and News, May 11, 1844, 593–94; “Greenwood Cemetery,” The Ladies’ Repository; a Monthly Periodical Devoted to Literature, Art and Religion, August 1854, 344–47; “Greenwood Cemetery,” Hours at Home: A Popular Monthly of Instruction and Recreation, August 1868, 359–64.

49.Ladies’ Repository, 344. It was, at first, a Protestant god. According to a recent article on Green-Wood in the journal Irish America, the first Catholic burials did not occur for some years, as “it was generally considered a Christian burial place for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of the better classes.” Michael Burke, “The Irish of Green-Wood Cemetery,” Irish America (February/March 2013).

50.The Brooklyn and Kings County Record: A Budget of General Information; with a Map of the City, an Almanac, and an Appendix, Containing the New City Charter (Brooklyn: William H. Smith, 1855), 13; Population of the United States in 1860.

51.In Barron v. Baltimore Chief Justice John Marshall wrote of the Bill of Rights: “These amendments demanded security against the apprehended encroachment of the general government—not against those of local governments.” The Supreme Court did not apply the First Amendment to states and localities until well into the twentieth century.

52.Eagle, February 18, 1845, February 2, 1848, June 12, 1851.

53.Brooklyn and Kings County Record, 104–41. There were a small number of Roman Catholic organizations as well. We turn to these in the next chapter.

54.Eagle, November 26, 1856. Elizabeth Howe was “1st Directress” of this organization.

55.Stuart M. Blumin, ed., New York by Gas-Light: And Other Urban Sketches by George G. Foster (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 154. On the “third tier” and New York prostitution more generally, see Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex (New York: Norton, 1992).

56.Eagle, May 5, 1857. Interestingly, this piece was published at a time when support for the theater in Brooklyn was beginning to grow.

57.These themes of suburban retreat and renewal were commonplace in the Brooklyn press. E.g., “If the business doers of New York will make Brooklyn the place of their homes and their churches—if after the stir and fever of business they will come to their residences to sleep, and calm their minds, and renew them for exertion, by the tranquil and contemplative observance of the Sabbath, we shall be content.” Star, September 21, 1853.

58.James H. Callender, Yesterdays on Brooklyn Heights (New York: Dorland Press, 1927), 187.

59.Star, January 9, 1837, November 9, 1841, November 17, 1841.

60.Star, November 16, 1842.

61.Eagle, November 22, 1853.

62.Eagle, April 4, 1857.

63.Star, February 4, 1839, February 11, 1839, June 10, 1839. These concerts were performed at the First Dutch Reformed Church and the First and Second Presbyterian churches. Maurice Edwards, in How Music Grew in Brooklyn: A Biography of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006), reports three concerts by a Sacred Music Society at St. Ann’s Episcopal Church in 1829.

64.Edwards, How Music Grew in Brooklyn, 3–5; Callender, Yesterdays, 198; Eagle, November 28, 1848, May 20, 1858; Star, November 20, 1841, November 22, 1841, December 1, 1841, for a sampling from a brief period of late autumn concerts in Brooklyn.

65.Stiles, History, 3:911.

66.Star, February 10, 1851, March 27, 1851.

67.Stiles, History, 3:912; Star, August 21, 1852.

68.Star, December 1, 1841.

69.Star, October 6, 1855.

70.Quoted in Eagle, November 5, 1858.

71.Stiles, History, 3:913.

72.Robert Furman, Brooklyn Heights: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of America’s First Suburb (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2015), 107–71; Star, October 13, 1859, January 16, 1861; Eagle, January 16, 1861.

73.Star, January 16, 1861; Eagle, January 16, 1861.

74.Horatio Gray, Memoirs of Benjamin C. Cutler, D.D.: Late Rector of St. Ann’s Church, Brooklyn, N. Y. (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1865), 400–401.

75.Eagle, January 23, 1861.

76.Eagle, December 14, 1861. The Eagle refers here to the ongoing controversy over theater at the academy, not to the specific plays, which were announced the following week. See Eagle, December 20, 1861; Star, December 20, 1861.

77.Star, January 11, 1862. The Star’s article includes the letter, written by John Greenwood on behalf of the academy board, urging the rejected impresario to propose more “sterling” plays.

78.Star, August 3, 1852, August 9, 1852, August 13, 1852, October 6, 1852, February 14, 1853, July 3, 1854, February 12, 1855; Eagle, February 26, 1855. German beer gardens were generally ignored by the enforcers of the Sunday closing laws, partly because beer was not yet thought to be a dangerously intoxicating beverage. And because the gardens were understood to be vital institutions within the German immigrant community, there was little political will to interfere with their Sunday operations. We return to this subject in the next chapter.

79.Star, October 20, 1854. Whitman had already submitted a more plainly written appeal to the Brooklyn Common Council to allow the horse cars to run on Sunday. Star, July 6, 1854.

80.Eagle, February 7, 1856.

81.Star, March 13, 1857.

82.Eagle, March 14, 1857.

83.Eagle, March 14, 1857.

84.Eagle, April 8, 1857; Star, April 9, 1857, May 13, 1857.

85.Eagle, May 18, 1857.

86.Star, February 25, 1858.

87.Star, February 25, 1861; Eagle, December 13, 1861.

88.Star, June 19, 1837, May 25, 1841. Some later historical sketches refer to parades beginning in 1829, and newspaper accounts of celebrations of the 1850s seem to date the anniversary from this first parade rather than to the founding of the Sunday School Union Society itself. We were unable to find any mention of a celebration in the Star in 1829. This might only mean that the celebration began as a small affair, not worthy of editorial notice, and only gradually grew into the very large event we are about to describe.

89.Star, May 22, 1850.

90.Eagle, May 21, 1856.

91.Star, May 13, 1841. Cutler’s Episcopal Church later withdrew to hold its own anniversary celebration. Eventually, Brooklyn’s Anniversary Day (later Brooklyn Day, then Brooklyn-Queens Day) became a purely secular public school holiday, and in 2005 was expanded to the entire city. Countless New York City parents today, no doubt including many in Brooklyn, wonder why they have their children underfoot for a holiday so close to the end of the school year.

92.Star, March 3, 1856.

93.For numerous examples of ridiculing combat between rival political papers in every American region during this era, see Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

94.Eagle, September 13, 1844.

95.Eagle, January 16, 1861.

96.Stiles, History, 3:785–87.

97.David McCullough, The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), 520, 535.

98.Eagle, November 21, 1881.

99.Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Doubleday, 2006), esp. 193–95; Stiles, History, 3:787–78. Stiles describes Storrs’ theological conservatism in a rather odd way: “As a theologian he is a Calvinist (though not a fatalist) and a Puritan throughout” (787). No one would describe Beecher as “a Puritan throughout.”

100.Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America, 372.

101.The Old School doctrines of New England Calvinism conformed to five principles established by the Synod of Dort (Dordrecht) of 1618–19, which are nicely recalled by the very Dutch acronym TULIP: Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistible grace, and the Perseverance of saints. What these odd phrases conveyed was the idea that only a limited number of people were predestined to go to heaven through the gift of God’s saving grace. Attempts at salvation by anyone not endowed with this grace are futile, as would be any attempts by the elect (those saved through grace) to avoid salvation. This set of doctrines was difficult to maintain in the real world, and modifications appeared over time, most notably in the early nineteenth-century “New Haven Theology” attributed mainly to Nathaniel William Taylor of the Yale Divinity School. Taylor argued that people had a “power to the contrary,” which really meant an ability to affect their own salvation, and which meant also accepting responsibility for their own sins, a profoundly non-predestinarian doctrine that can be traced back to the theologian Jacobus Arminius, whose heresies gave rise to the Synod of Dort in the first place. Taylor’s ideas helped justify the new wave of revivalism known as the Second Great Awakening and were serious enough to cause a formal schism in the Presbyterian Church and less formal divisions among Congregationalists. After some hesitation, Lyman Beecher embraced this New School of thought and maintained that in doing so he remained a true Calvinist and no Arminian.

102.Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America, 171, 214–15, 462.

103.Star, December 20, 1844.

104.Star, December 20, 1844; Stiles, History, 3:856–57. Bushnell’s lecture provoked an angry response from one Yankee Brooklynite, who pointed out that most of Brooklyn’s Episcopalians, clergy and laity alike, were New Englanders. Star, January 3, 1845.

105.Eagle, December 23, 1853.

106.Eagle, December 7, 1852. Greenwood’s last gesture shocked the editor of the New York Advertiser, who reminded his readers that the president of an Irish benevolent association in Brooklyn, at a dinner of the New England Society of New York eight years earlier, toasted Plymouth Rock as “the Blarney Stone of New England.” That this good-natured toast was greeted with laughter by the audience hardly seemed to matter. Ethnic tensions were real, and the dinners of these societies did not do a great deal to overcome them. See Eagle, December 27, 1844, December 11, 1852.

107.Callender, Yesterdays, 117–18. Callender does not date this story, but it occurs just after a specific reference to the Heights in the 1850s.

108.Star, February 13, 1851. See Eagle, April 29, 1850, for a sterner rebuke.

109.Star, July 17, 1834, July 3, 1834.

110.Star, September 4, 1833.

111.Star, September 4, 1837.

112.Star, September 12, 1839.

Chapter 3. On the Waterfront

1.Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Leaves of Grass (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860–61), 380–81.

2.Herman Melville, Moby-Dick: or, the Whale (New York: Penguin Books, [1851] 2003), 3–4.

3.Brooklyn Evening Star, January 19, 1857. The earlier ice bridge was reported on January 20, 1852.

4.Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 289.

5.E.g., Star, March 2, 1834, May 12, 1845, May 20, 1852, April 8, 1856, January 22, 1857, February 8, 1859, February 24, 1859. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle of May 5, 1853, includes an amusing letter describing a large sign placed outside a Montague Street retail store urging shoppers “Don’t Go To New York.” The signmaker’s imprint was that of Messrs. Oliver & Brothers, New York.

6.Star, April 20, 1846, April 22, 1846, April 24, 1846.

7.Star, January 8, 1859.

8.Star, May 20, 1852, January 12, 1854, February 7, 1854.

9.The Brooklyn and Kings County Record: A Budget of General Information; with a Map of the City, and Almanac, and an Appendix, Containing the New City Charter (Brooklyn: William H. Smith, 1855), contains a list of only sixteen industrial firms (74–83). This is the same publication that lists 142 churches (see chapter 2). The New York State Register for 1842 … (New York: J. Disturnell, 1842) (as reported in the Star, May 13, 1842) was certainly more accurate in listing forty firms. Note that this was not a local publication and had no stake in privileging the religious and suburban character of mid-nineteenth-century Brooklyn.

10.Census of the State of New York for 1855 … (Albany, 1857).

11.Edward G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 660–61; Craig Steven Wilder, A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 56–58.

12.US Bureau of the Census, Statistics of the United States … in 1860 (Washington, 1866), xviii.

13.Ralph Foster Weld, Brooklyn Village, 1816–1834 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), 81.

14.Star, August 1, 1822, October 9, 1823.

15.Star, July 8, 1824, March 23, 1826, March 29, 1827, February 19, 1829, May 26, 1829.

16.Star, May 29, 1828.

17.Star, September 8, 1836.

18.Not yet a national holiday, Thanksgiving was proclaimed each year as a day of prayer by the governor of New York. The date varied but was always late in the year. Johnson’s sermon was delivered on December 10, 1835.

19.The Christian Witness, published in Boston, defended Johnson’s sermon, while Philadelphia’s Episcopal Recorder attacked it. See Star, February 4, 1836, February 8, 1836.

20.Star, December 21, 1835.

21.Star, June 19, 1834, October 3, 1832, April 2, 1835.

22.Star, February 15, 1836.

23.Star, August 27, 1835.

24.Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 544–45. Contrary to Burrows and Wallace, the Eagle claimed that the Native American Democrats did enjoy a brief success in Brooklyn before merging with the Whig Party: Eagle, November 2, 1849.

25.The Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present (Stamford, CT: Fairfield Publishing, 1965), 57. The only tabulations of Brooklyn’s immigrants before the US census of 1860 are on various state censuses, and before 1855 these report only “Aliens not naturalized,” which obviously undercounts the total immigrant population by unknown amounts. For what it’s worth, the number of “Aliens not naturalized” in Brooklyn rose from 782 (7.2 percent of the total population) in 1825 to 12,196 (20.5 percent) in 1845. See Census of the State of New York, 1825 (Albany, 1826); Census of the State of New York, for 1845 (Albany, 1846).

26.Census … for 1855. A small number of immigrants born in Great Britain were children of Irish couples who had fled first to England, Scotland, or Wales before migrating again to the United States.

27.Statistics of the United States … in 1860.

28.Eagle, November 2, 1849. This long article looks back at the forming of the Native American Democrats fourteen years earlier and lists its founding members.

29.Star, December 1, 1846, December 12, 1846, December 22, 1846.

30.Star, February 6, 1847, February 17, 1847, February 19, 1847, February 26, 1847, February 27, 1847, March 1, 1847. Several public meetings held in June of that and the following year focused on Irish liberation rather than famine relief and appear to have consisted entirely of Irish participants: Star, June 21, 1847, June 22, 1847, June 27, 1848. The brief movement for Irish famine relief was over by this time in Brooklyn.

31.Star, February 8, 1847.

32.Star, January 10, 1848.

33.Brooklyn and Kings County Record.

34.For reports on new Catholic churches, see, e.g., Star, February 4, 1856, September 3, 1859, June 19, 1860; Eagle, December 10, 1852, September 9, 1861. In this last piece the Eagle includes the new St. Ann’s Roman Catholic Church under the City of Churches umbrella.

35.Star, May 18, 1855.

36.Star, July 24, 1855.

37.Star, May 15, 1854, May 22, 1854, May 29, 1854; Eagle, May 29, 1854.

38.Star, June 5, 1854; Eagle, June 5, 1854.

39.Star, June 8, 1854, June 9, 1854, June 13, 1854.

40.Star, June 13, 1854, June 19, 1854.

41.Eagle, July 10, 1854.

42.Eagle, November 10, 1854, November 11, 1854, November 16, 1854, November 18, 1854.

43.Eagle, June 18, 1853. See also Star, March 25, 1854.

44.Star, October 9, 1854. A Brooklyn police report for September of 1853 lists 694 cases of drunkenness and disorderly conduct and another 726 cases of assault and battery out of 2,057 recorded crimes. Seventy-six arrests were made that month for fighting in the streets. Star, October 20, 1853.

45.Star, January 9, 1841, March 6, 1844, August 28, 1841. See also February 13, 1837, June 21, 1838, May 18, 1840, June 8, 1848, August 26, 1852, September 7, 1852, December 2, 1852, March 7, 1853, April 25, 1853, May 15, 1854, October 3, 1854, September 19, 1855, May 9, 1859.

46.Eagle, esp. October 18, 1903. For correspondents’ claims that Irish Catholic firemen were fomenting violence, see Star, June 9, 1854; Eagle, December 15, 1856. In response to the latter, “Constitution” replied that “religion has nothing to do with the Fire Department,” and that the Irish Catholic companies “perform three quarters of the hard labor that is done at fires.” Eagle, December 16, 1856. There is no mention of ethnic or sectarian conflict between Brooklyn’s fire companies or their runners in a massive survey of firefighting in nineteenth-century New York and Brooklyn: J. Frank Kernan, Reminiscences of the Old Fire Laddies and Volunteer Fire Departments of New York and Brooklyn … (New York: M. Crane, 1885). See esp. 651, where runners are described as “the bane of the Volunteer Department of Brooklyn for many years.”

47.Star, June 13, 1854, June 15, 1854.

48.Eagle, May 14, 1848.

49.Eagle, August 16, 1847, September 26, 1849; Francis Morrone, Fort Greene [and] Clinton Hill: Neighborhood & Architectural History Guide (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Historical Society, 2010), 5–6.

50.Eagle, March 28, 1856.

51.T. O. Mabbett, ed., Jacob E. Spannuth, comp., Doings of Gotham: Poe’s Contributions to The Columbia Spy (Pottsville, PA: Jacob E. Spannuth, Publisher, 1929), 59–60.

52.Star, March 19, 1855.

53.Eagle, January 28, 1894.

54.Star, July 6, 1841, July 5, 1860.

55.Eagle, January 28, 1894; Hearnes’ Brooklyn City Directory, for 1850–51 … (Brooklyn: Henry R. & William J. Hearne, 1850).

56.Star, December 20, 1844.

57.It also misses the vast number of Irish girls and young women who worked and lived in middle- and upper-class homes as domestic servants—the “girls at service” ogled and insulted by young men on the streets of Brooklyn Heights. These serving women accounted for a good deal of the spread of the Irish population away from the waterfront and through the suburban districts of Brooklyn.

58.Eagle, January 3, 1855, January 5, 1855, January 6, 1855, January 8, 1855, April 17, 1855. For evidence that Irish policemen were re-appointed when the Democrats resumed control of the Common Council, see Eagle, January 10, 1857, January 20, 1857. In the latter article the Eagle noted that two years earlier, in the wards controlled by Know Nothing aldermen, “every man who had a Celtic or Teutonic name, though his ancestors had lived here for generations, was ruthlessly guillotined.”

59.Eagle, May 31, 1848.

60.Eagle, September 21, 1857.

61.Eagle, September 21, 1857.

62.Hearnes’ Brooklyn Directory … for 1851–52 … (Brooklyn: Henry R. & William J. Hearne, 1851); Reynolds’ Williamsburgh Directory … for 1851–52 (Williamsburgh: Samuel & T. F. Reynolds, 1851); Reynolds’ City Directory … for 1852 (Williamsburgh: Samuel & T. F. Reynolds, 1852).

63.Eagle, April 24, 1857.

64.Star, January 14, 1847; Eagle, May 31, 1855.

65.Eagle, August 14, 1852.

66.Star, September 21, 1853.

67.Eagle, April 20, 1855, June 1, 1857.

68.Eagle, August 17, 1857.

69.Eagle, August 17, 1857.

70.Wilder, A Covenant with Color, 37; Census for 1820 (Washington, 1821), 21; Compendium of the Enumeration of the Inhabitants and Statistics of the United States … (Washington: Thomas Allen, 1841), 21; Statistics of the United States … in 1860, 335.

71.Wilder, in A Covenant with Color, is forceful in claiming this connection between Brooklyn’s Southern business and white attitudes toward the local African American population (45–58).

72.Henry R. Stiles, A History of the City of Brooklyn (Brooklyn: np, 1870), 3: 702, 707.

73.Brooklyn and Kings County Record.

74.Star, January 15, 1824, October 4, 1827, April 29, 1830, May 26, 1830, June 2, 1830, April 3, 1833.

75.Star, December 11, 1841.

76.Judith Wellman, Brooklyn’s Promised Land: The Free Black Community of Weeksville, New York (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 13–14.

77.Star, March 9, 1852.

78.Star, February 12, 1859.

79.Wellman, Brooklyn’s Promised Land, 47, 52.

80.Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America, 284.

81.Eagle, March 29, 1860.

82.Eagle, April 16, 1861, April 22, 1861. See also: Star, April 16, 1861; Raymond A Schroth, S. J., The Eagle and Brooklyn: A Community Newspaper, 1841–1955 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974), 59–69.

83.Eagle, February 22, 1864. On Marianne Fitch Stranahan and her leadership, see L. P. Brockett, M. D., and Mrs. Mary C. Vaughan, Woman’s Work in the Civil War: A Record of Heroism, Patriotism and Patience (Philadelphia: Seigler, McCurdy & Co., 1867), 65–68.

84.Eagle, February 23, 1864.

85.Eagle, February 23, 1864.

86.Eagle, March 7, 1864, March 8, 1864.

87.Star, August 6, 1862.

88.Eagle, August 5, 1862. See also August 8, 1862, and August 10, 1862, for the Eagle’s coverage of court proceedings generated by the assault on the factories. A serious question that arose at these proceedings was whether the mostly Irish police had acted quickly and effectively enough to stop the assault.

89.Eagle, February 18, 1863.

90.For the most detailed descriptions of these events, see Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Barnet Schecter, The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America (New York: Walker & Co., 2007). For an excellent, briefer description, see Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 887–99.

91.Eagle, June 14, 1863.

92.Eagle, July 15, 1863.

93.Eagle, July 16, 1863.

94.Eagle, July 16, 1863.

Chapter 4. Toward a New Brooklyn

1.The story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge is compellingly told in David McCullough, The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972). McCullough recounts the story of the meeting between Kingsley and Murphy and declares: “Possibly the story is true” (113). The story is repeated in William R. Everdell and Malcolm MacKay, Rowboats to Rapid Transit: A History of Brooklyn Heights (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Heights Association, 1973), 24, and in Francis Morrone, Fort Greene [and] Clinton Hill: Neighborhood & Architectural History Guide (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Historical Society, 2010), 32.

2.McCullough, Great Bridge, 519.

3.McCullough, Great Bridge, 519–20.

4.Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 24, 1883, May 25, 1883. The Eagle’s version of William Kingsley’s campaign for the bridge, which describes meetings with James Stranahan, Eagle editor Thomas Kinsella, and other influential Brooklynites as well as Henry Murphy, makes no mention of a meeting with Murphy on December 21, 1866. But immediately following the statement that Kingsley’s urgings finally succeeded in turning “speculation” into “practical effort,” it notes that Murphy, who was then a powerful member of the New York State Senate, introduced and pushed through the bill that authorized the building of the bridge. The story of the December evening by Henry Murphy’s fireplace is not disproved by the Eagle’s report. It is neither confirmed nor disproved by the account of Kingsley’s approach to Murphy in Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 934–35.

5.Eagle, December 10, 1888; McCullough, Great Bridge, 545.

6.Julian Ralph, “The City of Brooklyn,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine,” 86 (April 1893), 652.

7.For a good compendium of the relevant census data, see Blake McKelvey, American Urbanization: A Comparative History (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1973), 73. Brooklyn’s population increased by 105 percent between 1880 and 1900, while Manhattan’s increased by 59 percent. The equivalent figures for Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore are 53 percent, 55 percent, and 53 percent, respectively. A small amount of the growth in two or three of these cities, including Brooklyn, is attributable to the annexation of new territory rather than to population increase within their 1880 boundaries.

8.There was also a severe economic depression during five years or so of the mid-1870s, but whether Brooklyn’s growth slowed or accelerated during these years is difficult to determine. Recall that the depression of 1837–43 had increased migration from New York City to Brooklyn. Between 1880 and 1900 there were no wars and a brief if severe economic downturn during the mid-1890s.

9.Ralph, “City of Brooklyn,” 652.

10.Ralph, “City of Brooklyn,” 652.

11.Eagle, March 25, 1868.

12.The steam dummy was a locomotive consisting of a steam engine encased within a small rail car designed to give it the appearance of a streetcar. Its job was to haul one or two streetcars over city rail lines, replacing the horses that had moved these cars since the rails had been put down on the city’s streets. The hope that disguising the engine in this way would be less offensive to people’s eyes and ears and less frightening to the horses that remained on the streets was not always realized. But the people who rode the new steam cars did appreciate their speed, which was generally two to three times that of the horse cars. The opinion of the horses has not been recorded.

13.Long-Island Star, August 21, 1837.

14.Eagle, September 29, 1879, July 24, 1886, March 25, 1894.

15.Eagle, January 17, 1868.

16.Eagle, July 27, 1878, February 7, 1879, July 9, 1880, June 13, 1885, July 24, 1886; The Statistics of the Population of the United States … (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872), 211; The Eleventh Census: 1890. Part I.—Population (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1892), 470; Census Reports: Volume I: Twelfth Census of the United States, Taken in the Year 1900 … (Washington: United States Census Office, 1901), 279.

17.Marc Linder and Laurence S. Zacharias, Of Cabbages and Kings County: Agriculture and the Formation of Modern Brooklyn (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 202–44.

18.Linder and Zacharias, Of Cabbages and Kings County, 131–33.

19.Linder and Zacharias, Of Cabbages and Kings County, 240–42; Adina Back and Francis Morrone, The Flatbush Neighborhood History Guide (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Historical Society, 2008), 30–43; Eagle, October 5, 1869, October 7, 1869, September 16, 1883, October 12, 1897.

20.Eagle, November 21, 1867.

21.Eagle, September 29, 1883, September 21, 1884.

22.Linder and Zacharias, Of Cabbages and Kings County, 229.

23.Eagle, June 29, 1890, April 19, 1896, October 12, 1897.

24.Eagle, December 29, 1895.

25.Eagle, October 12, 1897.

26.“To Coney Island,” Scribner’s Monthly, 20 (July 1880); John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978); Oliver Pilat and Jo Ranson, Sodom by the Sea: An Affectionate History of Coney Island (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing Co., Inc., 1943).

27.Kasson, Amusing the Million, 29.

28.Kasson, Amusing the Million, 30–33.

29.For a typical complaint, see “Wicked Coney Island,” Eagle, August 14, 1897.

30.Eagle, August 31, 1868.

31.Eagle, May 31, 1881.

32.For an evocative history of McKane’s rule in Coney Island and the role of Brooklyn’s political leaders in bringing him down, see Pilat and Ranson, Sodom by the Sea, 25–49.

33.Eagle, April 24, 1895.

34.Eagle, August 10, 1897.

35.Kasson, Amusing the Million, 34–50.

36.Eagle, September 29, 1879; June 29, 1890.

37.Henry R. Stiles, A History of the City of Brooklyn … (Brooklyn: n. p., 1870), 2:483, 491; 3:578ff; Joseph Alexiou, Gowanus: Brooklyn’s Curious Canal (New York: New York University Press, 2015).

38.Eagle, October 17, 1886.

39.Eagle, March 27, 1887.

40.Eagle, October 17, 1887.

41.Eleanora W. Schoenebaum, “Emerging Neighborhoods: The Development of Brooklyn’s Fringe Areas, 1850–1930” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1976), 30.

42.Ralph, “City of Brooklyn,” 652.

43.Eagle, August 15, 1871.

44.Census of the State of New York for 1875 … (Albany, 1877), 234–44; Twelfth Census, 279. Before Bedford began its rapid post–Civil War development it was occupied mainly by Irish immigrants who sought cheap housing beyond the city’s built-up areas. Some working-class immigrants remained as Bedford increasingly became a middle-class suburb, although there was a pronounced shift in the local immigrant population from Irish to Germans. Historical overlays of this sort are common as cities expand. See Schoenebaum, “Emerging Neighborhoods,” 43–44.

45.Eagle, January 19, 1890.

46.Eagle, April 19, 1896. Lucas J. Rubin, Brooklyn’s Sportsmen’s Row: Politics, Society and the Sporting Life on Northern Eighth Avenue (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2012).

47.Eagle, March 23, 1890.

48.Jennie N. Child Manuscript, “Early Memories of Brooklyn, 1890s–1900s,” Brooklyn Historical Society archive. See also Francis Morrone, Park Slope: Neighborhood & Architectural History Guide (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Historical Society, 2012).

49.Morrone, Fort Greene [and] Clinton Hill, 30–31.

50.Morrone, Fort Greene [and] Clinton Hill, see the photograph on 31. The west side of Washington Park faced a hospital, a jail, and very few homes, and on the north side, along Myrtle Avenue, there was a small collection of workers’ homes. These were no longer the shanties we described earlier, but they were not commonly considered part of the Fort Greene neighborhood.

51.Eagle, February 10, 1878, February 17, 1878. The Eagle’s survey was neither scientific nor complete, and it should be noted that it included twice as many residents of Brooklyn Heights as of Clinton Hill. Two notable omissions from the “golden guild” were Fort Greene’s William C. Kingsley and Abner C. Keeney, both of whom were extremely wealthy. Both were also powerful voices in Brooklyn’s Democratic Party, and both were highly influential in the offices of the Eagle (Kingsley was a part owner of the paper). If they had asked not to be included in these articles they certainly would not have been. On Charles Pratt and Clinton Hill see Morrone, Fort Greene [and] Clinton Hill, 65–71. John B. Manbeck, consulting ed., The Neighborhoods of Brooklyn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 59, notes the slightly later arrival in Clinton Hill of Pfizers (Charles, and also Charles Eberhart) of the Pfizer drug company, Bristols (probably William McLaren) of Bristol-Myers (but Edward Robinson Squibb lived in Brooklyn Heights), Underwoods (John Thomas) of the typewriter manufacturing company, and Liebmanns (Joseph, Henry, or Charles, sons of Samuel), who brewed Rheingold Beer.

52.Eagle, May 7, 1891.

53.Eagle, February 17, 1878.

54.Eagle, August 29, 1878.

55.Eagle, September 17, 1893. An Eagle article in 1885 was somewhat less sanguine about Brooklyn’ tenements, which were increasing rapidly in number and in quality “getting down to that of the New York slums.” But even this piece noted improvements in some buildings, the problem then becoming that the very poor were forced out by rising rents. Eagle, May 9, 1885. The 1878 commissioners’ report suggests that about one-fifth of Brooklyn’s population lived in dwellings of three or more families. Edward Richards, ed., A Historical and Descriptive Review of the City of Brooklyn … (New York: Historical Publishing Company, 1883), 64, claims that it was one-fourth, but that New York’s tenement population was two-thirds of that city’s total.

56.Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890); Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (New York: D. Appleton, 1896).

57.Stiles, History, 3:618–22. To follow evolving editorial opinion regarding Prospect Park, its cost, and other issues, see Eagle, December 6, 1858, September 30, 1859, January 28, 1860, May 29, 1860, January 25, 1864, July 22, 1864, February 5, 1866, March 19, 1866, June 20, 1867, February 3, 1868, June 6, 1868, February 19, 1870, February 21, 1870, March 10, 1870, June 24, 1871, March 11, 1872, October 8, 1872. For a discussion of the planning of the park, see Thomas J. Campanella, Brooklyn: The Once and Future City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 79–94.

58.For an excellent analysis of Olmsted’s writings about the moral and behavioral benefits of city parks, see Laura Wood Roper, FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).

59.Eagle, January 29, 1868, April 17, 1875, November 18, 1876. As early as 1868 Olmsted wrote that the land through which these parkways ran was destined for suburban development. See Linder and Zacharias, Of Cabbages and Kings County, 137. James Stranahan thought the same of the land around the park. See Elizabeth Macdonald, Pleasure Drives and Promenades: The History of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Brooklyn Parkways (Chicago: Center for American Places at Columbia College, 2012), 63–64, and Campanella, Brooklyn, 94–105. On the effects of Eastern Parkway on Weeksville and Carrsville as independent communities see Macdonald, Pleasure Drives and Promenades, 183, and Judith Wellman, Brooklyn’s Promised Land: The Free Black Community of Weeksville, New York (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 211–25.

60.For a comprehensive list of antebellum Brooklyn’s cultural institutions, see Melissa Meriam Bullard, Brooklyn’s Renaissance: Commerce, Culture and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 17–18.

61.Ralph, “City of Brooklyn,” 654.

62.Eagle, December 12, 1888.

63.Eagle, April 20, 1872.

64.Eagle, November 29, 1865.

65.Eagle, April 20, 1872.

66.Eagle, April 15, 1877, December 8, 1888.

67.Eagle, April 20, 1872, December 16, 1876, March 27, 1881, February 9, 1882, May 14, 1882, December 18, 1883, February 17, 1885, February 22, 1886, January 9, 1889, January 29, 1889, March 9, 1890, April 6, 1990, December 28, 1890, January 19, 1891.

68.Eagle, December 24, 1893.

69.Eagle, April 15, 1877, March 17, 1884.

70.Eagle, December 28, 1890.

71.Eagle, January 18, 1891.

72.Eagle, February 19, 1889. On privacy and the Brooklyn clubs, see Bullard, Brooklyn’s Renaissance, 336ff.

73.Eagle, January 17, 1889. See also Robert Furman, Brooklyn Heights: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of America’s First Suburb (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2015), 226.

74.Eagle, November 21, 1897. In his insider’s reminiscence of life on the Heights James H. Callender notes, “It was not until after the Civil War that Society, with a big S, began to lift its head.” James H. Callender, Yesterdays on Brooklyn Heights (New York: Dorland Press, 1927), 244.

75.Brooklyn Life: A Journal of Society Literature Drama and the Clubs, vol. 1, no. 1 (March 8, 1890).

76.Journeay and Burnham was originally on Atlantic Street. Its movement to Fulton (actually Flatbush Avenue near Fulton) was important to the solidification of Brooklyn’s downtown on and near the upper part of Fulton Street, beyond the approaches to the bridge.

77.Eagle, April 4, 1857.

78.Eagle, August 5, 1894.

79.Eagle, October 24, 1867, June 18, 1873, September 1, 1878; Stiles, History, 3:914–17.

80.Eagle, May 27, 1877.

81.Eagle, May 28, 1869.

82.Eagle, September 4, 1871.

83.Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Doubleday, 2006), recounts these themes. Beecher’s “Amusements” lecture and its aftermath are discussed on 215–18. On Beecher’s endorsement of Pears’ Soap see Burton Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: Norton, 1976), 52.

84.At least two other Brooklyn clergymen, though, did join Beecher in endorsing commercial products. The Rev. W. W. Hicks promoted Drake’s Plantation Bitters, while some years later the Rev. Thomas DeWitt Talmage endorsed Dr. Tucker’s No. 59, both products falsely promising to cure many ailments—in common parlance, “snake oil.” See Eagle, May 23, 1866, December 22, 1895.

85.Brooklyn Evening Star, July 26, 1855, June 18, 1858, October 8, 1858; Eagle, September 1, 1858, September 2, 1858, September 4, 1858, September 7, 1858.

86.Eagle, July 21, 1858, August 18, 1858; Star, September 11, 1858.

87.Eagle, June 2, 1890.

88.Eagle, June 30, 1890.

89.Remarkably, an editorial protesting the exclusion of non-evangelical groups from the 1885 celebration referred to Rev. Evan Johnson’s controversial sermon, “Toleration,” fifty years after he delivered it to his Brooklyn parishioners on Thanksgiving Day in 1835. Eagle, May 3, 1885.

90.Eagle, May 28, 1897.

91.On one occasion the Eagle suggested that Anniversary Day might best be celebrated privately rather than with a public parade, but this was offered on behalf of exhausted children rather than the preservation of other people’s access to the city’s streets. Eagle, May 29, 1873. In nearly every other year the paper expressed enthusiasm for the parade.

92.Eagle, December 16, 1871.

93.Eagle, July 11, 1868, June 11, 1869, June 12, 1869.

94.Eagle, July 2, 1872.

95.Eagle, July 3, 1880.

96.Eagle, January 27, 1869.

97.Eagle, September 4, 1875.

98.Illustrated Annual New York & Brooklyn Churches: 1874 (New York: Nelson & Phillips, 1874), 39–61; Census of the State of New York for 1875 … (Albany, 1877), 19.

99.Census … for 1875, 275.

100.Eagle, March 17, 1869.

101.Eagle, October 24, 1881.

102.In 1892 Brooklyn Life wrote of the sale of an old Methodist Church in Dutchtown, “it having been found that ‘the population of the neighborhood had become so largely composed of foreigners,’ it was impossible to maintain it.” Brooklyn Life, July 30, 1892.

103.Eagle, May 12, 1882, May 22, 1882. Four years later the Eagle pointed out several church buildings in the older wards that were themselves converted to businesses: a bookbindery, a chair factory, a carpet store, even a theater. Eagle, April 4, 1886

104.Eagle, August 4, 1889.

105.Eagle, December 11, 1888, August 4, 1889.

106.Eagle, May 23, 1883.

107.Eagle, April 4, 1886.

108.Eagle, November 2, 1875, November 5, 1875, November 10, 1875, November 16, 1875, November 20, 1875. In this last article the Eagle offered the opinion that Moody and Sankey did have these effects: “They have given the philosophical a new study, and the devout a new inspiration, and the resulting effect of their campaign on the church economies of the City of Churches will, we think, be vast and vital.”

109.New York Times, April 13, 1902.

110.Eagle, April 13, 1902.

111.Eagle, July 2, 1882.

112.Eagle, August 25, 1878.

113.For a good retrospective look at Comstock’s career, including an interview with Comstock himself, see Eagle, January 18, 1914. This long article is titled “Anthony Comstock Won Fame in Brooklyn.”

114.Eagle, August 21, 1884.

115.Eagle, July 2, 1882.

Chapter 5. Newcomers

1.Julian Ralph, “The City of Brooklyn,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 86 (April 1893), 664–66.

2.1900 Census: Volume VIII. Manufactures, Part 2. States and Territories (Washington: United States Census Office, 1902), 592, 628–35.

3.Brooklyn was overtaken by Chicago, America’s quintessential boomtown, early in the 1880s.

4.1900 Census: Volume VIII. Manufactures, Part 2, 629; 1900 Census: Volume I. Population, Part 1 (Washington: United States Census Office, 1902), 631; U. S. Bureau of the Census, Statistics of the United States, … in 1860 (Washington, 1866), xviii.

5.The phrase was coined by W. W. Rostow in The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1961).

6.The Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present (Stamford, CT: Fairfield Publishers, [1965]), 56–57. Jewish immigrants made up an indeterminate but surely significant portion of the German total during the last two decades of this era. They formed an even larger portion of the migrants from Eastern Europe, then and in the decades to come. The United States Immigration Service did not record immigrants’ religious affiliations or identities, so we can only estimate the number of Jewish immigrants to this country.

7.1900 Census: Volume I. Population, Part 1, 631, 669. The native-born with native-born parents amounted to 27 percent of Brooklyn’s population in 1900.

8.The Diocese of Brooklyn’s “Chronological List of Brooklyn Parishes, 1822–2008” is available at http://dioceseofbrooklyn.org.

9.Eleanora W. Schoenebaum, “Emerging Neighborhoods: The Development of Brooklyn’s Fringe Areas, 1850–1930” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1976), 84.

10.Department of the Interior, Census Office, Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Tenth Census … (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1882), 865.

11.Raymond A. Schroth, S. J., The Eagle and Brooklyn: A Community Newspaper, 1841–1955 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974), 65, 70–72; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 11, 1884, February 12, 1884.

12.Harold Coffin Syrett, The City of Brooklyn, 1865–1898: A Political History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 66–69, 88–89; Eagle, December 1, 1899.

13.Henry R. Stiles, A History of the City of Brooklyn … (Brooklyn: n. p., 1869), 2:492–94; Eagle, February 12, 1873. Kalbfleisch was the second of Brooklyn’s seven foreign-born mayors (out of twenty-four men who served before the consolidation with New York City in 1898), the first having been Jonathan Trotter, who was elected Brooklyn’s second mayor in 1835. But as an English immigrant Trotter fell within the Anglo-Protestant tradition. Two other Englishmen and two Germans besides Frederick Schroeder, served as Brooklyn mayors. Jeremiah Johnson, who was elected mayor in 1837, was an Anglo-Dutch New Yorker.

14.That chronicle forms an important part of Steven H. Jaffe and Rebecca Amato, Envisioning Brooklyn: Family, Philanthropy, and the Growth of an American City (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Historical Society, [2016]), 82–149.

15.William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America; Monograph of an Immigrant Group (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1920), 5:x–xi.

16.Eagle, March 18, 1870.

17.Eagle, February 27, 1874.

18.Eagle, March 17, 1874.

19.Eagle, March 17, 1876, March 19, 1878, March 17, 1879.

20.Eagle, March 17, 1884, March 7, 1885, March 17, 1888.

21.Eagle, March 17, 1894.

22.This issue is discussed, especially in relation to the appeal of Irish nationalism to immigrants of differing circumstances, in Timothy Meagher, The Columbia Guide to Irish American History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 198–213. Meagher examines standard works such as Thomas N. Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 1870–1890 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966), and Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) and finds no resolution there of the issue of working-class participation.

23.Eagle, January 25, 1880, May 30, 1882.

24.Eagle, May 20, 1876.

25.The American Protective Association, founded in 1887 in Clinton, Iowa, was an anti-Catholic organization active mainly in the Midwest. It appears to have had little presence in Brooklyn.

26.Eagle, July 2, 1882. Father Malone’s death in 1899 was front-page news in the Eagle, which also printed a very long obituary and an appreciation of this Catholic priest by Richard Storrs and other Protestant ministers. Eagle, December 29, 1899.

27.Jaffe and Amato, Envisioning Brooklyn, 16–43. Shortly before Father Fransioli died he was feted at the Academy of Music on the golden anniversary of his ordination. Attending the banquet were Seth Low, J. S. T. Stranahan, and other leading Brooklyn Protestants. Eagle, October 18, 1890.

28.Eagle, February 15, 1871.

29.The most detailed description of Pfingsmontag in Brooklyn is in the Eagle, May 21, 1874.

30.Eagle, January 16, 1881.

31.The notable exception was Austria, which was excluded largely because of the continuing presence of the ruling Hapsburgs. This was the “Little German” rather than the “Big German” unification plan that would have included Hapsburgs (whose empire included many non-German-speaking peoples) and Hohenzollerns in the same polity, and this only five years after Prussia defeated Austria in a brief but decisive war.

32.Eagle, April 4, 1876

33.Eagle, May 2, 1876.

34.Eagle, May 13, 1876.

35.Eagle, May 6, 1881.

36.Eagle, March 21, 1890.

37.Eagle, September 27, 1891.

38.Samuel P. Abelow, History of Brooklyn Jewry (Brooklyn: Scheba Publishing Company, 1937), 6–8, 14–15; Brooklyn Evening Star, March 18, 1856, June 14, 1860, January 10, 1862, August 30, 1862; Eagle, June 13, 1886, September 27, 1891. Some of these reports and recollections treat Baith Israel as the first formally organized Jewish congregation in Kings County, and Beth Elohim as the second.

39.Eagle, September 30, 1875, September 8, 1877.

40.Eagle, June 13, 1886, September 27, 1891, The American Hebrew and Jewish Messenger, August 20, 1897.

41.Abelow, History of Brooklyn Jewry, 310–27; Eagle, March 10, 1876, January 8, 1878, November 29, 1882, March 4, 1885, February 14, 1887, April 4, 1892, July 23, 1897; American Hebrew, October 27, 1883, February 18, 1887, April 18, 1890, May 13, 1892.

42.Eagle, April 26, 1883, December 29, 1892; American Hebrew, November 10, 1882, November 24, 1882, June 29, 1883, May 6, 1892.

43.Eagle, May 27, 1884, September 27, 1891.

44.Eagle, June 13, 1886. For examples of the Eagle’s philo-Semitism, see January 22, 1870, December 30, 1870, March 3, 1876, August 7, 1876, March 4, 1885, February 13, 1886, December 29, 1992.

45.Eagle, April 25, 1895.

46.American Hebrew, May 6, 1892.

47.Eagle, February 24, 1905. This is a reprint from the Christian Union, which published a version of the sermon from Beecher’s extensive notes. Beecher, we should note, was also criticized for encouraging religious diversity. An 1879 cartoon in Puck, America’s foremost humor magazine, titled “The Religious Vanity Fair,” depicted a self-satisfied Beecher, sitting on a couch, while a Catholic bishop, a Jewish mohel (“The Original Jacob”), a Mormon, a Baptist, an Episcopalian, and a Methodist hawk their wares. Cited in Jon Butler, God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 28.

48.American Hebrew, April 1, 1887.

49.Eagle, September 27, 1891.

50.American Hebrew, April 14, 1899.

51.Eagle, January 31, 1896.

52.The Herald interview was reprinted in the Eagle., July 22, 1879. Corbin’s anti-Semitism went beyond his hotel management. He was also the founder of the remarkably named American Society for the Suppression of the Jews. See Thomas J. Campanella, Brooklyn: The Once and Future City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 109.

53.Eagle, July 23, 1879.

54.The Statistics of the Population of the United States … (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872), 386.

55.Eagle, September 1, 1876.

56.1900 Census: Volume I. Population, Part 1, 631.

57.Eagle, June 18, 1881.

58.Eagle, March 16, 1882.

59.Eagle, September 22, 1883.

60.Eagle, December 14, 1891.

61.Eagle, May 30, 1886.

62.Eagle, August 17, 1892, May 28, 1893.

63.Eagle, January 2, 1863, January 3, 1863, January 31, 1863, June 10, 1863, June 2, 1865, April 27, 1875, December 12, 1886, May 16, 1889, July 13, 1890, April 11, 1891.

64.Eagle, October 23, 1865.

65.Eagle, November 14, 1865.

66.Eagle, May 16, 1863, January 30, 1866. See also Theodore Hamm, ed., Frederick Douglass in Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Akashic Books, 2017), 19–31; Hamm, “Frederick Douglass at BAM,” BAMblog (January 11, 2017). Hamm points out that Douglass delivered several speeches in Brooklyn, including two more at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

67.Phyllis F. Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 187–219; Eagle, October 28, 1869.

68.Eagle, June 2, 1875, June 16, 1875, September 7, 1875, September 13, 1875, September 27, 1875, December 24, 1881, January 8, 1882, March 24, 1882, March 26, 1882, June 11, 1883, December 1, 1883.

69.Eagle, March 3, 1869. These episodes are reviewed in Judith Wellman, Brooklyn’s Promised Land: The Free Black Community of Weeksville, New York (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 148–53.

70.Eagle, June 6, 1880.

71.Eagle, July 11, 1882.

72.Eagle, December 12, 1883.

73.Wellman, Brooklyn’s Promised Land, 154–61. The key meeting of the board of education is reported in detail in Eagle, March 8, 1893.

74.Population of the United States, 1872 [1870 US census], 211, 439.

75.Tenth Census, 670; Eagle, January 8, 1882.

76.1900 Census … Population, 631. The more precise proportion was 1.6 percent, almost exactly what it was in 1860.

77.Eagle, February 3, 1878, January 14, 1883.

78.Craig Steven Wilder, A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 138, 142.

79.Syrett, City of Brooklyn, 70–86.

80.Eagle, March 8, 1891, March 14, 1892.

81.Eagle, January 14, 1883.

82.Eagle, December 18, 1892.

83.Eagle, April 23, 1893.

84.Eagle, August 28, 1865, December 23, 1892.

85.Eagle, October 18, 1870; Wellman, Brooklyn’s Promised Land, 3, 176.

86.Eagle, August 6, 1868; Wellman, Brooklyn’s Promised Land, 100, 125–26. The claim that the society operated in nine southern states is from the Eagle. Wellman describes schools in six states and the District of Columbia.

87.Eagle, February 23, 1866.

88.Eagle, April 6, 1868, March 17, 1871; Wellman, Brooklyn’s Promised Land, 127.

89.Wilder, A Covenant with Color, 140–41.

90.Eagle, May 23, 1891.

91.Eagle, August 2, 1884. See also the Eagle reports on August 2 of each year up to 1877.

92.An interesting aspect of this conflict was the way it reflected differences in Brooklyn’s social and economic—and beer drinking—geography. An agent for one of the companies, the F. & M. Schaeffer Brewing Company, explained to a reporter why he wasn’t concerned about the boycott: “Most of our beer … is sold on the principal streets of the Western District. The bulk of the trade unions of the city are in the Eastern District [mainly Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Bushwick], and over there the consumption of beer is almost entirely confined to that manufactured in the Eastern District breweries.” Eagle, March 21, 1881.

93.Eagle, March 26, 1873, October 14, 1874, March 21, 1881, March 15, 1891.

94.Eagle, May 5, 1882.

95.Eagle, April 22–May 11, 1886, May 17, 1886.

96.Eagle, January 14–February 14, 1895.

97.Eagle, September 5, 1887, September 1, 1888, September 4, 1888, September 8, 1891, September 5, 1892, September 2, 1893. These and articles describing other years’ parades capture the character of the event.

98.Eagle, March 14, 1886. The Eagle’s article puts quotation marks around these statements by Mrs. Barnard, but whether these are her words or the reporter’s may be questioned.

99.Butler, God in Gotham, 22–3.

100.Brooklyn Life, June 1, 1915; Gertrude Lefferts Vanderbilt, The Social History of Flatbush, and Manners and Customs of the Dutch Settlers of Kings County (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1881), 9; Ralph Foster Weld, Brooklyn Is America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), 9.

101.Eagle, November 15, 1885; New York Times, November 15, 1885.

Chapter 6. Transformation

1.Harold Coffin Syrett, The City of Brooklyn, 1865–1898: A Political History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 270.

2.Syrett, The City of Brooklyn, 272. For Syrett’s complete discussion of consolidation, see 245–73. See also Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1,219–36. The most complete analysis is David C. Hammack, Power and Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1982), 185–229.

3.Hammack, Power and Society, 209–10.

4.Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 1,227.

5.Hammack, Power and Society, 211.

6.Hammack, Power and Society, 211

7.The Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present (Stamford, CT: Fairfield Publishers, [1965]), 56–57.

8.Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910: Volume III: Population: 1910 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1913), 189. The East Side (soon to be more widely known as the Lower East Side) has no formal boundaries, and informal understandings of its limits have shifted over time. In the early twentieth century it was generally known as the area on the East River bounded on the north by 14th Street, on the south (roughly) by Canal Street, and the west by the Bowery and Fourth Avenue; Manhattan wards 7, 10, 11, 13, and 17.

9.Manhattan’s East Side, however defined, lost about half of its population during these years. See, for example, Kenneth T Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 185.

10.Department of Commerce, Bureaus of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930: Population, vol. 3, part 2 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1932), 279. The American-born children of the New Immigrants outnumbered their parents (and foreign-born siblings) in 1930, as most of the latter arrived in the United States before World War I and the postwar immigration restriction laws of 1921 and 1924, giving them plenty of time to expand their families in this country. The four immigrant grandparents of one of this book’s authors, for example, raised eleven children, nine of whom were born in the United States.

11.Department of Commerce, Fifteenth Census of the United States 300–303, 382.

12.This estimate of the Jewish proportion of Brooklyn’s Eastern European population reflects local patterns of settlement and should not be extrapolated to the nation as a whole. Large numbers of Polish Catholics, for example, settled more thickly in other places such as Chicago. The Jewish proportion of Chicago’s Eastern European population was undoubtedly significantly lower than Brooklyn’s and the nation’s was surely lower as well. Our estimate of 85 percent for Brooklyn is perhaps too conservative, given the likelihood that some Jewish immigrants in the borough did report Russian, Polish, or some other language besides Yiddish as their mother tongue.

13.For a comprehensive history, see Deborah Dash Moore, gen. ed., City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, 3 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

14.American Hebrew and Jewish Messenger, October 14, 1910; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 26, 1916. See also Alter F. Landesman, Brownsville: The Birth, Development and Passing of a Jewish Community in New York (New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1969), 96.

15.Eagle, November 18, 1900.

16.Eagle, April 6, 1904; American Hebrew, September 15, 1905. It may seem strange that East Side landlords raised rents just as the Williamsburg Bridge made it easier for their tenants to move away. But even apart from new laws that made tenement operation more expensive, we should note that these were peak years of Eastern and Southern European immigration into the United States, and the pressure on East Side real estate was greater than the release of pressure from outmigration to Brooklyn and other places. Several years later the East Side began to lose population.

17.Eagle, October 16, 1908.

18.See, for example, the article on “The Brooklyn Jewish Community,” Eagle, May 24, 1907, where this outward spread of Brooklyn’s Jews is featured.

19.Jewish Daily Bulletin, March 14, 1928. This interesting study by the Bureau of Jewish Social Research includes an estimated Jewish population of 787,000 in Brooklyn in 1925, which accords well with our estimate of 750,000–850,000 in 1930.

20.Michael Gold, Jews without Money (New York: Horace Liveright, 1930; Avon Books, 1965), 152–59.

21.Gold’s portrayals were prefigured by nonfictional reports of Jewish immigrants who were reluctant to leave the East Side even in the face of crippling rent increases. See, for example, Eagle, April 6, 1904.

22.Eagle, March 26, 1916.

23.American Hebrew, October 14, 1910, September 18, 1914.

24.An incisive and richly detailed telling of this and other aspects of the Jewish migration to America is Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made There (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976). Another important source is Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962).

25.Gerald Sorin, “Mutual Contempt, Mutual Benefit: The Strained Encounter between German and Eastern European Jews in America, 1880–1920,” American Jewish History 81 (Autumn, 1993): 34–59.

26.Landesman, Brownsville, 173–84. The Hebrew Educational Society of Brooklyn was modeled on an existing Educational Alliance on Manhattan’s East Side. Landesman was for a time the executive director of the HES.

27.Daniel Soyer, “Brownstones and Brownsville: Elite Philanthropists and Immigrant Constituents at the Hebrew Educational Society of Brooklyn, 1899–1929,” American Jewish History 88 (June 2000): 181–207. The report in 1916 of the retiring president of the HES lists the organization’s goals. The first two on the list are “to Americanize the immigrant,” and “to keep alive in the community Jewish ideals and Jewish thought.” American Hebrew, January 21, 1916.

28.For examples of this ongoing protest, see Eagle, February 3, 1906, December 23, 1906, February 1, 1907, December 2, 1907, December 20, 1910, January 14, 1914, October 4, 1915.

29.Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City (New York: Grove Press, 1951), 11–12. A similar memoir of growing up in Brownsville, which emphasizes the impact of an ethnically homogeneous neighborhood, is William Poster, “From the American Scene: ’Twas a Dark Night in Brownsville,” Commentary (May 1950): “To a child,” Poster writes, “Brownsville was a kind of grimy Eretz Yisrael without Arabs. Living in a world all Jewish, where no alien group imposed its standards, he was secure in his own nature.” Until about age twelve, Poster writes, “a Brownsville child scarcely saw any members of other ethnic groups except for teachers and policemen, and never really felt that the Jews were anything but an overpowering majority of the human race…. What social shame he did feel was simply for his own lack of shame when, outside the boundaries of Brownsville, he ran up against those for whom a nervous consciousness of the opinions of the world had become a badge of superiority…. The amazing thing, then, was not that Brownsville produced some criminals, freaks, and barbarians, but that so many did manage somehow to obey the laws, attend school, and go on to become proper or even distinguished citizens.”

30.Eagle, September 14, 1902.

31.Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States … Volume III: Population: 1920 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1922), 710; Fifteenth Census, 3:301, 303.

32.Eagle, September 14, 1902. By 1908 these nine or ten Italian settlements had expanded to fifteen: Eagle, August 16, 1908. See also Marianna Randazzo, Italians of Brooklyn (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2018); Raymond Guarini, New York City’s Italian Neighborhoods (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2019).

33.Eagle, November 12, 1905.

34.Eagle, April 12, 1904.

35.Eagle, December 8, 1904. Six months after this settlement house opened, as reported in the Italian-American press, the treasurer complained that the American benefactors were doing all the work and asked for more Italians to participate: Il Progresso, June 8, 1905.

36.Il Progresso, June 29, 1905, October 7, 1905, January 20, 1910, January 9, 1900.

37.Eagle, May 9, 1902.

38.Eagle, August 15, 1899.

39.Interestingly, most of the Italian immigrants who celebrated Italian national holidays in Brooklyn were from areas of Italy (Sicily, Calabria, Naples, and others) that most vigorously resisted unification. Parochial identities did remain alive, as we have just seen, but removal from the inter-regional squabbles of the new Italy, and no doubt the failure of native Americans to recognize regional differences among the Italians in their midst—Italians were Italians, not Sicilians or Neapolitans—helped build a broader Italian identity within the Italian-American community. To this day, descendants of Sicilian immigrants fiercely defend the reputation of the Genoese sailor, Christopher Columbus.

40.Il Progresso, October 13, 1900, October 12, 1910, September 20, 1905, August 21, 1900, July 4, 1905.

41.Eagle, November 5, 1918.

42.Eagle, November 3, 1901, May 9, 1902, April 22, 1906, May 14, 1911, February 20, 1916.

43.Eagle, July 18, 1902, October 6, 1903, November 27, 1908; Il Progresso, March 7, 1900.

44.Eagle, May 20, 1900.

45.Il Progresso, July 11, 1905; Paul Moses, An Unlikely Union: The Love-Hate Story of New York’s Irish and Italians (New York: New York University Press, 2015).

46.Eagle, July 27, 1902, September 29, 1904, October 8, 1904, January 1, 1905, February 20, 1907, March 11, 1907, September 1, 1907, November 17, 1907, July 27, 1908, May 9, 1910, August 30, 1911.

47.Il Progresso, June 22, 1905, July 11, 1905, September 29, 1905, October 14, 1905, October 15, 1905, December 10, 1905, July 14, 1910.

48.The Eagle printed cartoon images of Italian criminals doing the work of the Black Hand, and, on at least two occasions, police photographs of Black Hand suspects: March 21, 1909, September 7, 1911, March 10, 1907, May 24, 1907.

49.Eagle, October 23, 1904, February 3, 1916,

50.“Chronological List of Brooklyn Parishes, 1822–2008,” https://dioceseofbrooklyn.org.

51.Fifteenth Census, 3:300–303. One national group that did not increase significantly in size during this period was the Chinese. There were just over one thousand Chinese immigrants in Brooklyn in 1930, about two hundred fewer than in 1900. The Chinese Exclusion Act had been in force for nearly half a century, and the only surprise is that the number of Chinese-born residents in 1930 was not even smaller. Second-generation Chinese, who were not identified on the census, contributed to the size of this ethnic community, but the overall growth of the latter could not have been significant.

52.Eagle, January 30, 1910, February 6, 1910, February 27, 1910, March 27, 1910, October 20, 1913, March 12, 1916, July 5, 1918.

53.Eagle, November 26, 1917, December 11, 1917, May 30, 1918, May 10, 1918, July 8, 1918, September 26, 1918.

54.Eagle, November 16, 1918, November 30, 1918, March 30, 1919, April 28, 1919, May 7, 1919, July 14, 1919.

55.Eagle, August 27, 1914.

56.Eagle, October 24, 1915.

57.Eagle, April 3, 1916.

58.Eagle, December 13, 1917.

59.Eagle, January 20, 1919.

60.Eagle, February 12, 1919.

61.Eagle, April 20, 1919.

62.Eagle, October 29, 1919.

63.Eagle, November 9, 1919.

64.Eagle, November 14, 1919.

65.For a general history of US immigration policy, including the 1921 and 1924 acts, see Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Another study of the twentieth-century laws is Katherine Benton-Cohen, Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and its Legacy (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 2018).

66.Eagle, May 28, 1916, March 1, 1925.

67.Eagle, December 9, 1920.

68.Eagle, March 4, 1923, April 5, 1923.

69.Eagle, October 5, 1923.

70.Eagle, February 6, 1929, August 19, 1929. Interracial marriage, however, remained unacceptable, as in the case of a white woman who wished to marry a Chinese man. Eagle, August 3, 1927.

71.Eagle, October 12, 1919, December 17, 1925, May 7, 1929.

72.Eagle, March 31, 1920.

73.Eagle, March 3, 1924.

74.Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017). An older but still valuable study is Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).

75.Eagle, December 18, 1922.

76.Eagle, January 26, 1922, January 29, 1922, February 2, 1923.

77.Fourteenth Census, 2:1,353; Fifteenth Census, 3:279.

78.Eagle, July 27, 1915, March 30, 1918, April 23, 1921, May 7, 1924.

79.Eagle, December 4, 1922, May 4, 1923, May 31, 1923. Hillis had earlier been drawn to the eugenics movement, but this energetic and outspoken clergyman also spoke out passionately for the rights of African Americans and was an important advocate for city planning in Brooklyn. See Thomas J. Campanella, Brooklyn: The Once and Future City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 220–37.

80.Eagle, December 11, 1922, December 16, 1922.

81.Eagle, March 3, 1924.

82.Eagle, September 24, 1923, November 18, 1923, November 19, 1923.

83.Eagle, June 27, 1927.

84.Horace Meyer Kallen, Cultural Pluralism and the American Idea: An Essay in Social Philosophy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956); Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” The Nation (February 18, 25, 1915); Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America,” in Randolph Bourne, Selected Writings, 1911–1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (New York: Urizen Books, 1977). We return to the concept of cultural pluralism in the epilogue.

85.Eagle, March 9, 1930.

Chapter 7. Acceptance, Resistance, Flight

1.Joseph Kesselring, Arsenic and Old Lace (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1941). In the play’s film version, which was subject to a strict code regarding all things sexual, Mortimer and Elaine are married. We are grateful to our friend Ralph Janis for bringing to our attention the Brooklyn setting of this classic American comedy.

2.Maude White Hardie papers, 1909–47, Brooklyn Historical Society archive.

3.Marc Linder and Lawrence S. Zacharias, Of Cabbages and Kings County: Agriculture and the Formation of Modern Brooklyn (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 301.

4.James H. Callender, Yesterdays on Brooklyn Heights (New York: Dorland Press, 1927), 43, 101–2, 106–7, 131–32.

5.Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 4, 1906.

6.Eagle, April 9, 1924.

7.Eagle, March 2, 1930.

8.Eagle, April 30, 1908, September 5, 1909.

9.Eagle, February 14, 1911, September 1, 1912, August 19, 1914, May 9, 1915.

10.Eagle, April 12, 1900, June 12, 1904, April 15, 1909, March 22, 1912, February 5, 1922, April 2, 1922, April 6, 1922, November 26, 1922, October 28, 1927, January 13, 1929, November 11, 1929. This is a sampling of a larger array of such items.

11.Eagle, March 31, 1930, April 3, 1930, May 8, 1930, May 12, 1930, June 10, 1930, December 26, 1930, December 31, 1930.

12.Brooklyn Life, June 1, 1915, 35–77, 81–86.

13.Eagle, May 20, 1916, May 29, 1916. Zone E did not prohibit apartment house construction, but by mandating that a residential structure be surrounded by an open area of a certain ratio to the size of the structure, the commission ensured that apartment houses would generally require lots too large for profitable rental operations.

14.Brooklyn neighborhood associations and civic organizations publications, Brooklyn Historical Society archive.

15.Flatbush Taxpayers’ Association records, 1896–1914, Brooklyn Historical Society archive.

16.Flatbush Taxpayers’ Association records.

17.Independent Civic Association of Sheepshead Bay, Inc. records, 1922–75, Brooklyn Historical Society archive.

18.Gates Avenue Association records, 1922–44, Brooklyn Historical Society archive.

19.Eagle, January 16, 1927.

20.Eagle, April 21, 1907.

21.These strategies met with mixed success. Helen Worth, the Eagle’s advice columnist, addressed on several occasions the decline of churches and church-related social clubs, noting at one point the latter were “languishing, perhaps because of lack of interest among the young people.” Eagle, February 28, 1923.

22.Eagle, February 1, 1932.

23.Eagle, November 29, 1907.

24.Eagle, May 4, 1899.

25.Eagle, May 24, 1902, May 26, 1902, May 29, 1902, June 6, 1905.

26.Eagle, June 11, 1910, June 14, 1910, June 8, 1911.

27.Steven A. Reiss, The Sport of Kings and the Kings of Crime: Horse Racing, Politics, and Organized Crime in New York, 1865–1913 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011), 303.

28.Thomas J. Campanella, Brooklyn: The Once and Future City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 120–23; Reiss, Sport of Kings, 302–35. These two excellent accounts differ on a small number of minor details.

29.Eagle, March 23, 1908, May 17, 1908.

30.Eagle, August 2, 1910.

31.Eagle, July 15, 1901, May 20, 1905, June 11, 1905, April 29, 1906, May 27, 1906, April 20, 1909.

32.Eagle, May 27, 1912, May 29, 1912, June 1, 1912, June 3, 1912, May 25, 1914.

33.Eagle, June 16, 1905.

34.Eagle, June 25, 1905.

35.Eagle, January 16, 1907, January 9, 1908, February 13, 1908, May 3, 1910, May 9, 1910, February 10, 1911, February 16, 1911. See also Charles DeMotte, Bat, Ball and Bible: Baseball and Sunday Observance in New York (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2013), esp. 108–9.

36.Eagle, April 16, 1904, April 14, 1906, June 19, 1906, June 30, 1917, July 2, 1917.

37.Eagle, July 7, 1917, July 17, 1917.

38.Eagle, October 24, 1917, November 23, 1917, November 24, 1917.

39.Eagle, March 20, 1918, March 26, 1918, April 5, 1918.

40.Eagle, April 6, 1919, April 19, 1919, April 22, 1919, April 29, 1919, May 2, 1919, May 4, 1919. May 5, 1919. The establishment of major league Sunday baseball in New York City may have had an indirect effect on the building of Yankee Stadium. The Yankees had been subletting the Polo Grounds from the Giants for their home games, an arrangement that limited the Giants to only thirteen Sunday home games for the 1920 season, while Brooklyn scheduled nineteen, the difference in revenue amounting to more than the proceeds of the Yankee sublease for the entire year. The Eagle speculated in February that the Giants would not renew the sublease for that reason, forcing the Yankees to find a new home. Eagle, February 14, 1920. After some hesitation the sublease was renewed, but, for whatever reasons, the relationship between the Giants and Yankees did not last. Construction of Yankee Stadium began in 1922.

41.W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

42.Constitution, By-Laws, and Order of Business of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union: 1876 (Toronto: n.p., 1876).

43.Eagle, January 13, 1912.

44.Eagle, May 24, 1919.

45.Eagle, February 11, 1919.

46.Eagle, November 3, 1919, January 11, 1920.

47.Eagle, April 26, 1926, October 27, 1927.

48.For full accounts, old and new, of Margaret Sanger’s career, see David M. Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970); Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992); R. Marie Griffith, Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2017).

49.Eagle, October 22, 1916, October 24, 1916, October 26, 1916.

50.Eagle, November 15, 1916, November 16, 1915.

51.Eagle, January 29, 1917, January 30, 1917, February 2, 1917, February 5, 1917, January 8, 1918; “One Hundreth Anniversary of the Brownsville Clinic—A Media Opportunity,” Margaret Sanger Papers Project, https://sangerpapers.wordpress.com.

52.Eagle, October 22, 1916, October 24, 1916.

53.Eagle, November 13, 1921, November 14, 1921, November 15, 1921. The Eagle was one of many newspapers to cover the Town Hall meeting and its aftermath.

54.“Looking Back at the Town Hall Raid,” Sanger Papers Project.

55.Birth Control: Hearings Before the Committee on Ways and Means, House of Representatives, Seventy-Second Congress, First Session, on H. R. 11082 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1932), 88–97.

56.Birth Control: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Seventy-Third Congress, Second Session, on S. 1842 … (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1934), 126–30.

57.Birth Control: Hearings … on H. R. 11082, p. 89; Birth Control: Hearings … S. 1842, 130.

58.Eagle, December 20, 1911.

59.National Board of Review of Motion Pictures records, 1907–71, New York Public Library archives.

60.Nancy J. Rosenbloom, “From Regulation to Censorship: Film and Political Culture in New York in the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 3, no. 4 (October 2004), 374, 386.

61.Eagle, January 28, 1917. On Stevenson’s memberships, see the obituary in the New York Times, August 5, 1938.

62.Eagle, February 13, 1921, February 22, 1921.

63.Rosenbloom, “From Regulation to Censorship,” 396–400.

64.Eagle, January 13, 1927.

65.On the Catholic role in the creation of a movie censorship system, see Frank Walsh, Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

66.Eagle, June 10, 1930.

67.Eagle, January 1, 1922.

68.Callender, Yesterdays on Brooklyn Heights, 20, 221

69.Eagle, December 9, 1922.

70.Eagle, January 31, 1929, February 7, 1929, March 7, 1929, March 8, 1929. Plymouth Church and Church of the Pilgrims would merge in 1934.

71.Eagle, June 10, 1930.

72.Eagle, April 30, 1922.

73.Eagle, April 3, 1927.

74.Eagle, September 1, 1925.

75.Eagle, October 24, 1929.

Epilogue: Brooklyn’s America

1.Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (New York: HarperPerennial, [1943] 1992), 148–49. Both of our fathers had similar real-world experiences. Stuart’s father was asked on his first day of school to stand and announce his name to the class. When he said “Paysha” the teacher insisted that he state his American name. Greatly flustered, the little immigrant boy could think only of the name his father Herschel had adopted when he set up his tailoring shop. “Harry,” he announced. And so Harry he became in the American schoolroom that day, and Harry he remained for the next eighty years. When Glenn’s father arrived in the United States from Russia (by way of China), an immigration official asked him his name. “Grisha,” he said. “That’s not an American name,” the official declared. The seven-year-old boy managed, in broken English, to indicate that his Hebrew name was Tzvi Hersh. “Let’s give him Harry,” the official said to his colleague. “We have already given out a lot of Harrys,” the other man said. “Let’s call him Herb.” And so it was.

2.Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 914–16.

3.Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race: The Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916).

4.Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920).

5.The American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger, January 19, 1917. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle turned the stereotyping of New Immigrants in a different direction: “We have no colony of Calabrians among whom the indifference to human life is so great as it is among the mountaineers of Kentucky; we have no such drunkenness among any of our imported populations as we have among the makers of moonshine whisky and among the New Englanders who pass laws to prohibit liquor and refuse to abide by them; and if it is charged that the Jews are over fond of money and will cheat, when was the Yankee ineffective as a money getter, and how long is it since our drugs and our food products ceased to be adulterated?” Eagle, May 25, 1903.

6.Eagle, February 11, 1921.

7.Kallen, the son of a rabbi, was born in what is now Poland, and was brought to the United States when he was five. Educated at Harvard, he was reputedly denied an appointment there because he did not speak discretely; dismissed from the Princeton faculty in 1905 because he was an atheist; and forced to resign from the University of Wisconsin faculty in 1918 because he defended the rights of pacifists during U. S. participation in World War I. Kallen became a founder of the far more tolerant New School for Social Research in New York City in 1919 and served on its faculty for the remainder of his career. New York Times, February 17, 1974.

8.Horace M. Kallen, “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot: A Study of American Nationality,” The Nation 100 (February 18, 25, 1915): 190–94, 267–70. See also Sidney Ratner, “Horace M. Kallen and Cultural Pluralism,” Modern Judaism 4, no. 2 (May 1984): 185–200; Wallace, Greater Gotham, 920–22.

9.Horace M. Kallen, “Culture and the Ku Klux Klan,” in Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States: Studies in the Group Psychology of the American Peoples (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924); John Higham, Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America (New York: Atheneum, 1975). See also Werner Sollors, “A Critique of Pure Pluralism,” in Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan Berkovitch (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).

10.Hansen Lasch, The Radical Will: Selected Writing of Randolph Bourne (New York: Urizen Books, 1977); Ratner, “Horace M. Kallen and Cultural Pluralism,” 187–88; Wallace, Greater Gotham, 922–24.

Annotate

Next Chapter
Index
PreviousNext
Copyright © 2022 by Cornell University, All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.
Powered by Manifold Scholarship. Learn more at
Opens in new tab or windowmanifoldapp.org